The Concept of Change
Change in the context of the science of justified intervention
Over the past four issues of Change, we have been setting out, in stages, a new way to think about organizational culture that reveals just how quick and easy it is to change. But to go any further in our inquiry, we must first understand something about the concept of change—what change actually is.
The concept of change is that of a difference over time. If we describe a particular situation at time T1, taking care to verify that our description is accurate, and if that description is no longer true at time T2, then we would say that change has occurred. However, the change in question may simply be a first-order change, in so far as the new behaviour at T2 may simply be another variation on the theme of the original behaviour at T1.
From the point of view of the end-result we are after, the two types of behaviour are functionally equivalent, the one of no more use to us than the other. This is the familiar story of “more of the same” or, again, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
A first-order change is a change from one type of behaviour to another within the same class; a second-order change or “transformation” is a change in way of behaving—a change of class. To put it another way, second-order change is a change in change-seeking behaviour, a change in the manner or process in which change is being attempted; in short, a change of change itself.
This is closely linked with the concepts of pattern and constraint that we have been exploring, for example in “Organizational Culture: the Distribution of Cultural Constraints.” A pattern of organizational behaviour does not involve simply an ordered tableau or regular sequence of specific items of behaviour. The elements of a behavioural pattern are not items of behaviour but classes of items of behaviour, where any behaviour from within a given class will serve to maintain the pattern as still being this pattern.
The limits of each class are among the constraints within which the behaviour varies, and it is the totality of such constraints that defines the pattern. First order change is from certain items of behaviour to new (perhaps even unprecedented) items of behaviour nevertheless falling within the existing classes and so maintaining the overall pattern unchanged.
Transformation or second-order change occurs when behaviour falling outside those classes replaces behaviour falling within those classes. In the change-seeking process, correspondingly, a shift to a second-order change is said to occur when solutions are now to be sought from amongst a different class of solutions.
For example, an organization might move from centralized operations to decentralized operations, and this change might at first appear to be significant. Certainly it may have required a great deal of time, work, money, and political manoeuvring to achieve. But if this change forms part of a broader, recurring pattern of centralizing, decentralizing, centralizing, decentralizing . . ., then the decentralization as a solution to the problems of centralization is but an instance of “more-of-the-same,” and is only a first-order change.1
Even if the particular forms of the new development are novel—even unprecedented—they are, for all that, members of the existing class of options called “decentralization.” For a second-order change to occur, what would be required would be a shift to a pattern of organization that was neither centralized nor decentralized.2
The marvellous thing about pattern change is that you cannot ‘slightly change’ a pattern any more than you can be slightly pregnant. To genuinely break the mould, to deviate significantly (second-order change) from an existing pattern is to transform that pattern beyond recognition—as anyone knows who has ever tried to arrange the seating pattern at a wedding, getting it almost right, and then having to move just a single place-card to keep Cousin Alice away from Auntie Jane . . . only to find, within minutes, that no one ends up being seated where they were before.
One of the first things to notice, because it is staring us in the face, is that the whole way of looking at organizational culture over the past several articles here in Change, reflects and gives rise to a radically different epistemology from the prevailing one. An epistemology is the particular set of presuppositions on which all our knowledge rests, such that having an inadequate or ill-fitting epistemology enables us to “know” (and to rigorously prove) all kinds of things that just ain’t so.
The new epistemology that I have called “E2,” and that is reflected in the present discussion, gives rise to radically different approaches to change. E2 is a cybernetic epistemology centred on the notions of form and pattern, information and communication, context and constraint, as distinct from a lineal epistemology (E1) of substance and forces, power and energy, cause and effect. A cybernetic epistemology gives rise to a radically different, rather minimalist way of looking at change and correspondingly minimalist approaches to bringing change about.
This is the epistemology that formed, and forms, the conceptual basis of cybernetics, the branch of science concerned with constructing a rigorous, scientific framework for managing, governing, and purposive activity of any kind, wherever it occurs in nature or in human enterprise.
Understandably, Beer defined cybernetics over six decades ago as “the science of effective organization” (see our About page for some historical reflections on the term “cybernetics”). However, modern cybernetics, considerably matured and mellowed and grown more conceptually sophisticated since Beer wrote, might perhaps better be described as “the science of justified intervention”.3 The science of cybernetics, on the ‘applied science’ side, consists, then, of a sophisticated and complex body of practical methodologies for selecting how to intervene most effectively in the “free fall” of any phenomenon, to get it to go the way you want it to go.
The main developments of cybernetic science (pure and applied) centre particularly on the notion of intervention.4 One is Ternality Theory and the associated methodologies of Ternary Analysis developed by Dr D. J. Stewart over the past half century and more. The other is the pure and applied General Theory of Intervention that continues to occupy centre stage in our own work, and which was developed in parallel over that same period of time, and was certainly influenced by Stewart's work.5
Ternality Theory effectively integrates cybernetics with both the natural sciences on the one hand, and ethics on the other, forming a vital bridge from which to steer the organizational craft, for it provides a scientific, humanistic basis for work that is not value-free, of which management is perhaps the most important example.
The latter, the General Theory of Intervention, has given rise to a new field of natural science, metamorphology, about which we shall have much to say in the pages of Change. It yields, on the applied side, a comprehensive cybernetic technology for transforming patterns and contexts through the judicious manipulation of key context-markers, and through the identification and gentle disarming of limiting presuppositions. This technology constitutes a rigorous scientific framework for intervening minimally with maximum effectiveness in any phenomenon—not only in management.
Both metamorphology (including the General Theory of Intervention) and Dr Stewart’s Ternality Theory generate highly minimalist approaches to organizational transformation which have for nearly four decades been at the heart of our work in the C-suite. The name of the game, from our rather peculiar point of view, is to bring about the maximum desired transformation through the minimum possible intervention.
We have found consistently over those four decades that even major, longstanding intractable corporate problems can be dissolved, audacious organizational ambitions achieved, and dramatic across-the-board corporate transformations catalyzed overnight through very minimal, unobtrusive, often trivial or insignificant-seeming interventions. This has probably always happened by accident anyway, and our own interest is simply in making it happen reliably, not by chance, but by deliberate design.
Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland, and Richard Fisch, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution, New York: Norton, 1974
On this point, see Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom, London: Wiley, 1974
I am not certain that Dr Stewart would agree with this definition, but I am drawing on an early (1982) unpublished draft of what would be published in a much expanded and altered form as “A Ternary Domanial Structure as a Basis for Cybernetics and its Place in Knowledge,” in Kybernetes 18/4 (2007), pp. 19-28. It is thanks in part to Dr Stewart that we can understand cybernetics as the science concerned principally with intervention, and he has done much important work on work itself as intervention. As he shows in the 2007 version in Kybernetes, cybernetics alone of all the natural sciences can deal scientifically with the tertiary domain of values (imparities on the move) and so only cybernetics can provide a scientific answer to questions of where and whether intervention is justified. Since these words were written, I have come to prefer a definition of cybernetics as the science that deals with the phenomena of directiveness in nature (including human affairs).
Again, see footnote 3 above.
A third, equally important development over this period of time has been the development of Perceptual Control Theory by W. T. Powers and his colleagues,
This post has been adapted from “How Change has Changed: Organizational Culture and Justified Intervention,” by James Wilk.
© Copyright 1987, 2022 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted