Visionjuice - ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE

Organisations don’t change, people do.

If traditional approaches to organisational change work it’s by accident rather than design. They often make the mistake of focussing on the organisation as an entity rather than as a creation of its people. A company is a legal entity and does exist independent of the employees but that legal entity is not what you’re trying to change. You’re trying to change “how we do things around here”. If you were to sack all of the employees in a company and start again you would still have the same legal entity but you wouldn’t have the same organisation because the construct of the new employees would be different to that of the old ones. Organisations are created by the expectations of employees and yet they often don't change when you bring in new people. Often the culture, that notion of “how we do things around here” is stronger than the people you bring in. Jung talked about collective consciousness. Any group of individuals creates a collective consciousness. It is a sense of their identity as a group but it is far more than that. It is an understanding of how the world works, what you can expect to give and what you can expect to get. This notion of collective consciousness exists in small groups of people and in large. It exists for small companies and for entire societies. Your awareness of the world is partly your own unique self and partly the amalgamation of the collective consciousness of the groups to which you belong. Since work takes up such a significant part of your life, your participation in your employer’s organisation takes up a significant part of the collective consciousness in which you share. When you start in a new organisation an aspect of your views and your expectations alters to accommodate the collective consciousness you have now joined. When you want to change an organisation there are a number of things at play. These can be expressed in the following formula. People x Power x Passion x Persistence => Potential for change If you have a small number of people in an organisation who wield a large amount of power, who express this with passion and who stick at it, they will create change. Similarly a larger group which is relatively less powerful could have an effect. The passion is required whatever the driver to change because it is this that captures the hearts and minds and works on the collective consciousness. The persistence is required because of organisational inertia. In general groups of people make large changes only for two reasons; to leap away from something or to leap towards something. So you either need a massive threat inherent in the status quo or something that is absolutely enticing and appealing in the desired future. This threat or enticement is what acts upon the individuals and causes them to change their view of the organisation or their role within it. It is this threat or enticement that causes the individual to accept or embrace change. The organisation never does. The organisation only changes because of the sum of the changes made by these individuals. Paradoxically people will resist change even if it is obviously for the better. There is a large societal buy in to the expression, “Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don’t”. For this reason the threat or the enticement mentioned above often needs to be disproportionate to the level of change. A side effect of this is that often changes that ought to be radical actually become incremental. This is why persistence in the formula above is so key. Resistance is worn down by persistence. There is a time lag between individual changes of perception or attitude and the changes in collective consciousness. You often have the bizarre paradox of an entire group of individuals who feel ready for change but individually feel held back by the group. It is almost as if the collective consciousness of a group exists beyond the group and that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. This is why the passion element of the formula above is so key. Nothing cuts through directly to the collective consciousness so directly as passion. But the power element must not be forgotten. By far the easiest way to change an organisation is to have a leader who is a passionate advocate for change. If this isn't true for your organisation then you need to increase the level of the other factors to compensate. When you want to change an organisation remember that it’s about people, it’s about power, it’s about passion and it’s about persistence. To talk to us contact us by clicking here.