Note from the Editor
This week Dr Andy Bass, who has been with Interchange Research since 2011, contrasts popular views about how to make change happen with our notion of releasing change, and introduces seven of the cybernetic principles behind this notion in a nuanced way that makes these concepts accessible to those who are unfamiliar.
I enjoy this article more each time I read it.
—Ellen
Releasing Change
During one of the many 19th-century riots in Paris the commander of an army detachment received notice to clear a city square by firing on the canaille (rabble). He commanded his soldiers to take up firing positions, their rifles levelled at the crowd, and as a ghastly silence descended he drew his sword and shouted at the top of his lungs: “Mesdames, m'sieurs. I have orders to fire at the canaille. But as I see a great number of honest respectable citizens before me, I request they leave so that I can safety shoot the canaille.” The Square was empty in a few minutes.1
This memorable anecdote offers a striking example of how a couple of judicious sentences, uttered at the right time, and in the right way, can have a dramatic and transformative effect on a high-stakes and apparently intractable situation. Change is usually thought of as difficult and requiring enormous effort, and examples such as this are treated as amusing outliers, as exceptions far from the norm.
But what if the kind of change produced by the soldier’s intervention is actually more generally available? And what if the impression of change as hard and ponderous is actually just a result of looking at things the wrong way?
The Small Fish Test
Although I dislike personality tests, I am going to assert that there are two types of people and that they can be sorted neatly by their response to the following idea. The foundational document of the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism has the following to say about managing organizations:
Governing a large country
is like frying a small fish.
You spoil it with too much poking.2
You have to imagine cooking a small fish in a wok. If you poke at it too much, it will fall apart. You might give it a judicious nudge every now and again, just to avoid it getting stuck – if you are a real master you might want it to catch a little bit just to add some subtle caramelization and colour – but you don’t stir it too much. If you do, it will either fall apart or may not actually get enough heat to cook properly. And you definitely don’t then overheat the wok to try and get the fish cooked faster.
So, what of the two kinds of people? The one sort will tend to nod approvingly at this Taoist wisdom. These people will tend to intuitively get the idea that governing, managing, precipitating change are best done judiciously, and with elegance as a design criterion for an intervention. The basic view here is of a natural process unfolding which at most requires a bit of steering.
The other group will tend to respond with rolled eyes and an exasperated ‘WTF?’ Their idea of cooking small fish is programming a microwave to hurl electromagnetic radiation at square plastic packs of compressed frozen cod.
And by the way, if the Tao te Ching all seems far-out, left-field or philosophical, consider that no less a man of action than Napoleon once said:
There is a moment in every battle at which the least manoeuvre is decisive and gives superiority, as one drop of water causes overflow.
So What?
My colleagues and I at Interchange do organizational change work, typically to accelerate progress on clients’ strategic objectives. And we believe the best way to do that, with the odd exception I’ll mention later on, is to approach it like frying small fish, or maybe, finding where one additional drop of water will cause the desired overflow.
How might that look?
Some of my Interchange colleagues were asked to improve the safety of a large petrol distribution centre that had experienced a catastrophic event... again. This was something that happened from time to time and the company’s standard response each time was to add to the rule book, hoping to plug the loopholes and compel safer behaviour with more regulations. The main effect however was to undermine management-workforce relations. The union saw the thicker rule book as a message from management that accidents were solely the fault of the workers. Yet, the union complained: management expected more and faster performance in its schedules and incentives, which makes the safety demands of the rule book impossible to achieve in practice.
Clearly, a heavy-handed approach to rule enforcement was becoming counterproductive. Recognising the conflicts of beliefs, a standard organizational development (OD) approach might have been to try to negotiate better relationships on the basis of shared interests and values.
But at this point, trust was so low that the idea of values workshops and posters was about as credible as having managers and operators sitting in a circle, holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’.
In the fuel depot case, statistically, the more unsafe acts (for example, not earthing a truck before delivering fuel), the more frequent the catastrophe. Our colleague recommended a way to reduce the number and frequency of unsafe acts by working with the existing rules, and with the existing relationship between union and management. He suggested adding this single proviso to the rule book: Every unsafe act that is reported to management indemnifies the worker from disciplinary consequences. So, if you see your union brother do something unsafe, you can keep management off his back by reporting it. But if unreported unsafe acts are discovered, those involved will be disciplined (legitimately in the eyes of all) in order to keep the workforce safe.
In response, union members noticed unsafe acts and chastised one another for putting them all at risk while protecting them from management by reporting the incident. Now, many more eyes were on the problem, and management had reliable data with which to determine safety hotspots and devise permanent fixes. Notice that it was not necessary or even particularly desirable to try to convince the workers to change their beliefs about the bosses.
This is not the conventional approach
The idea that a brief communication can release pervasive change is far from the orthodox view. That orthodox view is often labelled by its detractors as ‘Newtonian’ – but it’s important to recognise that no criticism of Sir Isaac or his towering intellectual achievement is intended. The problem is the inappropriate application of assumptions from his ‘billiard-ball’ mechanics to the world of social interaction.
Let me make the point by adapting an example given by Gregory Bateson. Imagine you set up a snooker table.
Someone with a good knowledge of Newtonian mechanics and some physical facts about the balls, the cue, the table, and the force imparted by the player can calculate where the red ball is going to end up. But exchange the red ball with a frog, and there is no known calculus that will tell you where the creature will go. The frog has its own energy source, its own goals and its own decision-making process. It will certainly be moved by the impact of the cue ball, but that will be only one factor in its trajectory, and probably not the major one unless the impact stuns or kills it.
As powerful as it is when you have a bridge or aeroplane to design, the Newtonian view is pretty useless in thinking about the interactions of living, autonomous agents. But that doesn’t stop people trying to apply it.
Blocks of Ice
You may be familiar with the old unfreeze-change-refreeze metaphor of organizational change – it’s pretty pervasive, even if the exact words vary.
It was originally formulated by Kurt Lewin, who actually meant something rather elegant by it, but because he used a powerful metaphor, his nuanced message has been swamped. Usually when people hear it they make two unfortunate, albeit appealing, assumptions about the nature of change.
Things don’t change unless you add external energy (Newton’s first law, anybody?). A situation is ‘frozen’ and can be unfrozen only by the addition of large amounts of external energy. In organizational terms that means armies of consultants, grand IT projects, “Ra! Ra!” sessions, creating widespread ‘urgency’ – aka Panic – internal communications campaigns, sheep-dipping the entire company through workshops, and so on.
Change follows a set of pre-ordained steps (in this case three, but other numbers are also popular – Kotter’s eight in particular).
Burning Platform
If change requires external energy, then more energy means more change, right? This is the logic of putting people on a ‘Burning Platform’, an idea that I find many leaders currently mesmerised by. The image is one of a burning oil rig, and the idea is that if you were unlucky enough to find yourself on one, you would get over any complacency or laziness preventing you from adapting to reality, and would energetically hurl yourself off into the inky black ocean below, trusting somehow that you would be rescued.
I think this might be an okay metaphor in the context of a pre-existing crisis or a turnaround. But that’s not what the people I hear seem to mean. They want to create a burning platform, and therefore create Urgency. Let’s look more closely at this idiotic idea.
This is a burning platform:
Can you imagine a more dreadful situation to find yourself in? Hell on earth. Why would managers want to create such a situation for their people? And by the way, these same managers then talk about wanting to create employee engagement (now it’s my turn to ask “WTF?”).
In case you think that I am secretly a softy OD practitioner or whatnot who does want people to link hands and sing Kumbaya, here are three pragmatic and hard-nosed reasons why—outside of genuine crises and turnaround situations—efforts to evoke a burning platform are going to go up in smoke.
Denial. It can actually be pretty hard to convince people that things are as serious as you are trying to make out. The Burning Platform metaphor ignores the almost infinite human capacity for ignoring or reframing or otherwise rationalising threats—particularly real and genuinely dangerous ones. Cigarette packets have death written all over them, with good reason, yet plenty of people still buy them. Their rationalisation can be subtle. Indeed I know a smoker who only likes to buy packets which warn that “Cigarettes may harm your unborn child”—because as he is male, he ‘reasons’ that he will be okay.
Lack of direction: if you scare people, they might move. But they likely won’t move in the direction you think they ought to. Instead, they scatter. They try desperately to escape. They certainly stop focusing on customers. And you often lose your best people first, since they are the most mobile, and a vicious spiral results.
Initiative fatigue. Even if you can get the result you want with a burning platform approach, you can only do it once, and the cost is high. You can’t keep creating crises every six months. And woe-betide the manager who keeps starting change initiatives which are abandoned part way through.
I have conducted many focus groups with front-line employees and middle managers in my time, and the level of cynicism about grand change initiatives is truly stunning (and often a complete revelation to the senior executives who genuinely think they have achieved ‘buy in’).
Denial, panic, initiative fatigue – other than that, creating a Burning Platform is a fine idea.
Whirlpools and Eddies
Let me suggest that an organization is not like an ice-cube to be melted and reshaped at all, but is much closer to an eddy or whirlpool. A whirlpool has an identity – you can point and say: “that’s the whirlpool”—but its boundaries are softer than those of an ice-cube, and it is in a constant interchange with the surrounding water (and they can be huge and persistent: mesoscale eddies in the ocean may be hundreds of miles in diameter, and persist for periods of years). This is a much more realistic picture of an organization than the one offered by a block of ice—after all, people, information and energy all flow into and out of your organization on a moment-by-moment basis. A whirlpool is a pattern, not an inert block. You don’t change it by scooping it out of the river in a big bucket, or by heating it up. Instead, you alter the flow, for example by inserting or removing rocks or debris upstream. In other word, you work with the constraints—those factors, which also include the shape of the river bed, the amount of water flowing down the river etc, which determine that the whirlpool is to be this shape and, for the moment, no other.
There’s a whole stream of scientific thinking about people, communication, psychology, behaviour that is in broad tune with this sort of thinking. It goes in and out of fashion and it’s very hard to coin one name, but some of the names are systems thinking, cybernetics, complex systems, interactionism. Actually adherents of any one of these would identify big differences, and to them I apologize for lumping them together. Many have argued that much conventional systems thinking, along with fashionable efforts to apply models derived from complexity theory in physics, for example, are all still dangerously Newtonian, while cybernetics makes a decisive break with such views, with revolutionary implications. Still, those drawn to this whole range of new ways of thinking do seem to share a common outlook, and insight into how things really work. The following seven propositions begin to sketch that out3.
1. Stasis is an active achievement
It takes a lot of work to stand still! What seems like the inert status quo—with all its boundaries and limits—is actually a dynamic, constantly-recreated situation which is being actively maintained (just as it takes a lot of muscle energy and coordination to stand still for any length of time).
Problematic situations are achievements, and very often, it is the very attempts to resolve them that are key factors in maintaining the status quo. For example, the constant tightening of the rulebook at the fuel depot actually created the them-and-us dynamics that undermined compliance with safe working by creating a culture of ‘condoned violations’.
Condoned violations are infractions of the rules which might benefit an individual or group in the short run (as long as they get away with the increased risk) and which therefore become part of ‘the way we do things around here’. They often grow up as ways of resolving tension between production and safety goals.
Where such cultures exist, more rules create more problems: managers and operators get caught in a ‘game-without-end’. Research I conducted with Sharon Clarke on railway safety found that the more rules were introduced the more condoned violations became accepted in the culture. This was a major factor in the Clapham Junction disaster, where, for months without incident, condoned violations of signal maintenance procedures reduced the pressure on technicians to hurry up so trains could run, but left the system in a fragile state, so that a genuine error one day caused two signals to show green at the same time.
2. How you ‘punctuate’ a game-without-end affects what you think is going on
Lynne Truss’s book on the punctuation of English “Eats shoots and leaves” (or was it “Eats, shoots and leaves”?) illustrated how the presence or absence of a comma can dramatically change the meaning of a sentence (is the statement about the diet of Panda Bears, or is it about a Mafia hitman who finishes the cannoli, carries out the hit and then makes good his escape?).
Similarly our often unconscious choices as to how to ‘punctuate’ our experience of interactional complexity affects what we think is going on, who we think is to blame, what we think the ‘cause’ might be, and therefore what we think will work by way of an intervention.
Have a look at two alternatives punctuations of the Fuel Depot game:
Looked at this way, the management action of tightening the rule-book looks perfectly sensible and indeed justified. But how does it look from the operator’s standpoint?
Certainly if you can save some time, keep management off your back, and avoid being their lackey by keeping quiet about a few shortcuts that never seem to lead to problems anyway, you will be tempted, especially if everyone else is doing so too.
In the end, however, such games without end are self defeating for all players.
3. Changing the frame changes the meaning
The value of looking at problems as achievements is that if you can understand the pattern that recreates a situation, you may then be able to redirect it, producing—in fact releasing—change quickly and without applying the huge external energy often called for by conventional approaches.
A powerful way to redirect such a pattern is by reframing one or more of the meanings which keep it in place. For example, operators in the Fuel Depot acted on the basis of the following meaning:
Reporting unsafe acts = Being a grass
When, at the suggestion of the Interchange team, managers and the union agreed the rule: Every unsafe act that is reported to management indemnifies the worker from disciplinary consequences, the meaning of reporting unsafe acts changed. Now:
Reporting unsafe acts = Protecting union brother against management
The intervention actually worked in two ways: first, it stopped the ‘more-of-the-same’ effect created by the progressive tightening of the rulebook, and second, it reduced the goal conflict experienced by operators.
The intervention by the French Army officer can also be thought of as an example of reframing. In this case, before the intervention:
Gathering noisily in a square = member of mob,
But once he had made his announcement:
Gathering noisily in a square = concerned citizen
4. Stimulus-Response is just how things appear given one punctuation
There is an old joke in psychology circles about a laboratory rat who won a Nobel Prize for his discovery that he could condition humans to give him food by reinforcing this desired action by tapping a lever.
Nowhere has the issue of selective punctuation of experience created more confusion than in the study of behaviour, and here we owe a huge debt to the work of Bill Powers. The appearance of ‘operant conditioning’ – essentially a sophisticated version of carrots-and-sticks—is the result of one particular selective punctuation of the relationship between a pair of communicating autonomous agents (and usually the one who looks like they are getting trained is being kept on the back foot by force, or, more amusingly, by their lack of awareness).
Revealingly, dog trainers who use the Clicker training approach, (in which it appears that dogs are reinforced for desired behaviours using a clicking device, the sound of which has been associated with a dog treat), will tell you a couple of interesting secrets if you can get them to talk. Firstly, that the dogs usually end up conditioning the owners, and secondly that dog training is really owner training anyway.4
5. You can’t ‘motivate’ autonomous agents
A very practical upshot of these considerations is that you can’t motivate people. In essence, they are already motivated. This goes for employees, peers, customers, and in fact for all human beings (and other living creatures).
Think of the laziest person you know. From one perspective they are solid blocks of inertia. But from another – more useful – one, they are highly motivated.
By what? By the desire to avoid hassle and discomfort, and to seek comfort and ease.
The proof? Try to get them to do something they don’t want to do, and you will be met with energetic counter-manoeuvres! Once their desired conditions are restored, of course, they will return to their inactivity (until you next disturb them).
It’s like a thermostat. If the room is the right temperature, a thermostat doesn’t do anything. But if the temperature goes above the required setting, it will turn on the air conditioning straightaway. If you want a higher temperature, it’s no use turning on a separate heater, because the thermostat will cancel it out. You need to reset the thermostat itself.
This view makes sense of so much of the endless debates about whether money is a motivator or not. To seek a general answer is to ask the wrong question. Some people are seeking money, others are not. If someone has insufficient funds according to the setting of their ‘money-thermostat’, the offer of more will appear to motivate them. But once they have enough, they will back off, and providing more money will just make your business poorer.
This is also the mechanism underpinning so much ‘resistance’ to change. If you want to get someone to go along with your initiative, then if you try to force them, pump them up, energise them or cajole them, you will essentially be trying to disturb them into it. That’s where the pushback comes from. Instead, figure out their desired conditions and arrange for them to get what they want by doing what you want.
Incidentally, perhaps you can further see the futility of bribing or threatening or training or nagging someone to grass on their mate for violating a safety regulation.
6. The system is what the system does.
Let me now suggest something which may at first strike you as highly counter-intuitive—but it actually follows from everything I’ve been saying, and is crucial to really getting a feel for this ‘fish-frying’ view of change.
On the view I’m putting forward, systems don’t fail. Ever. Every result produced by a system is a feature of that system: part of its repertoire of possibilities. The system works perfectly—it just may be that you don’t like the result (bear with this if it makes you squeamish, because the insights can be incredibly practical). If you take this point of view, you come to see:
The Hindenberg as a system for transporting around ninety people across the Atlantic ocean and then producing a spectacular conflagration.
BlackBerry, alas because I was a very satisfied user of their products at one time, as a system for the destruction of shareholder value.
The railways as a system for transporting large numbers of people around the country while occasionally and unpredictably killing a small proportion of them.
Too many organizations as systems for creating excitement among new recruits, disappointing them and finally creating endless days of boredom and cynicism punctuated by the fear of loss of livelihood (it’s fun to say to executives who are complaining about low morale or high disengagement: “Were they like that when you hired them?”....).
In each case, the positive and negative effects are both systematically generated. It’s more fruitful to understand how the system works to produce the undesired results, than it is to regard those results as aberrations.
This is an apparently perverse view to some. But it has great advantages when it comes to intervention: rather than ‘fixing’ the system, or rebuild it from the ground up, we instead have to figure out how to adjust it.
Think back to the fuel depot example. Notice how the solution actually utilises the antipathy that the union members have in order to change the result.
7. The best regulation is self-regulation
When you take the sort of view put forward here, you see a persistent problem as being the result of a system or mechanism which is working perfectly to achieve and maintain a particular, undesirable, status quo. And that immediately suggests the possibility of thinking differently about resolutions. In a way, they are no different to problems. A resolution is just a system or mechanism which works perfectly to achieve and maintain a particular, desirable, status quo. The sort of thing which counts as a mechanism will be the same in both sorts of case.
How might such mechanisms underpin desirable situations? Here are some ideas:
In the 1920s, Henry Ford suggested an elegant way to avoid water pollution by proposing that factories could use water as they wanted so long as they put their “out-pipe upstream from their in-pipe.” You can’t motivate people to comply with environmental regulations—you can force them, sure, but that’s different. However, they are already motivated to ensure they have a clear water supply.
Yves Moriex gives a great example from the car industry. The manager responsible for ensuring that the car was designed to be easy to repair was informed that once the car went into production he would take charge of the warranty budget.
The Russian spacecraft Voskhod-1 was so cramped that the cosmonauts could not wear spacesuits. The story goes that one of the engineers warned the chief designer, Sergei Korolev, that the slightest leak of air would kill those on board. Korolev’s solution was to appoint the engineer as one of the cosmonauts, figuring that this would help encourage him to make the capsule as safe as possible.
Summary of the Whirlpool View
Organization from Simple Rules
The fact that simple rules can generate coherent and complex behaviour is well known—a beautiful example is provided by Craig Reynold’s Boids computer program. Boids is an artificial life program which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds. (A ‘boid’ being a bird, but in a New York accent). The complexity of Boids arises from the interaction of individual agents adhering to a set of simple rules.
The rules applied in the simplest case are:
Separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates
Alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates
Cohesion: steer to move toward the average position (centre of mass) of local flockmates
Examples of the amazingly lifelike patterns these rules generate are easy to find on the internet, and are worth seeking out as useful complements to the whirlpool metaphor in gaining an overall grasp of this unconventional approach to stasis and change. However, it is critical to recognise that this is only a metaphor, and probably does something of a disservice to the very intelligent birds whose behaviour we are trying to understand in these admittedly simplistic terms. We understand human beings better than we understand birds: we would do well to apply that understanding rather than using borrowed models from the world of physics.
Summing up
I started with that quote about small fish from the[1] Tao te Ching. My intention was to put forward the view that change is best thought of as judicious processes of nudging along, and working with natural dynamics and natural inclinations as much as possible. The Tao te Ching is 2500 years old, and many other philosopher-actors have written in a similar vein. What is more recent is that rather than rely on pure intuitive flashes, the modern sciences of complex human interaction offer us ways to understand and so to find these interventions systematically.
A practical upshot is a very different view of resistance to change—the drag that slows down progress on strategic objectives. The new view is that drag is an active achievement. Managers are generally active contributors to it. And that means that they can change it.
And if you think about it commercially, if you can do judicious change, elegant change, the return on investment is going to be much higher than bringing in the microwaves to melt the ice with brute energy.
About the Author: Dr Andy Bass
Dr Andy Bass joined Interchange Research as a Research Associate in 2011 and he has been a Research Fellow at Interchange Research since 2019. He is also Visiting Professor of Managerial Cybernetics and Consulting Practice at Birmingham City University in the United Kingdom.
Andy began his work at Interchange to study with Dr James Wilk because he saw in James’s work a revolutionary new perspective on many themes he had been fascinated with since his days as a doctoral student, a number of which he introduces in the present article.
Outside his work with Interchange, Andy is an independent consultant, speaker and author on leadership and innovation management. In his consulting practice he employs his own background and approach to help business leaders solve problems and innovate by using resources they have already.
A former MacKay CEO Forums Chair, Andy has advised leaders in more than 30 industries, including professional services, technology, manufacturing, health, media, education, and the arts, and has worked in the UK, North America, Mexico, Scandinavia, India and China. He has worked with leaders in a wide range of organizations, from mid-sized businesses, owner-managed SMB/SMEs, and not-for-profits to large multinationals.
A seasoned executive educator, Andy has taught leaders at Oxford Saïd Business School and Warwick Business School. He was also on the ‘Big Thinkers’ panel of experts for #ogilvychange, the behavioural change practice of Ogilvy.
Andy is the author of Start with What Works: A Faster Way to Grow Your Business, published by Pearson Business in 2021.
Change: principles of problem formation and problem resolution, by Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch. P81.
Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, trans. Stephen Mitchell. Chapter 60
This list is by no means exhaustive – and I’m certainly not claim it is the ‘right’ or ‘complete’ list—but I have found these seven to be helpful to people starting to approach this way of thinking.
I once spent a fascinating afternoon with a charming dog trainer who also confided that her methods worked as well with husbands as with dogs. Uncannily as she said this, her husband appeared and set a cup of tea down on the table next to me. He then glanced over to his wife, who gave him an approving nod, which sent him trotting happily back into the kitchen.
© Copyright 2022 Dr Andy Bass
All Rights Reserved
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