Chapter 1. Change and Its Repercussions
Last updated
Last updated
Change has no precedents.
— Niccolo Machiavelli
It might not be news to you if I were to say that we all experience change, which is a phenomenon that exists for as long as we can perceive anything.
Change gives rise to events that can be opportunities or problems. When we encounter changes, we must make decisions and do something different because we face a different phenomenon. Think of walking down a street. When we come to an intersection- a change from what we have been experiencing-we confront a problem or an opportunity: Should we turn right, turn left, turn around, or continue straight ahead? We need to decide and act, and whatever we decide to do is a change that leads to new problems.
Every problem or opportunity introduced by change generates a solution, which causes more change, and we face a new reality and a new set of problems or opportunities.
Figure 1-1: Change-Problems Cycle
Thus, as long as there is change, there will be problems and opportunities.
Nothing endures but change.
Heraclitus
And the corollary is:
I was surprised when I reached that conclusion. After all, book- stores are full of books promising that if only we follow this or that recipe for success, our organizational problems will disappear. Many political ideologies and religions make the same promises: Follow these rules and you will inherit salvation or earn a place in heaven.
I suggest that those promises cannot be realized because change is life, and as long as we are alive, we will have problems. Change and Its Repercussions 5 Consider the saying, "Life's a bitch; then you die." What's more, the "livelier" we are, the more problems we will have.
Take, for instance, a software company with which I consulted. The managers complained about the magnitude of the company's problems. The company had taken less than two years to grow from zero to $180 million in annual revenues. "What do you expect?" I asked. "When will you have no problems? Only when there is no change. And that will happen only when?" They knew the answer. "When we are dead," they replied.
If change is life and we have no problems only when we are dead, then slowing down the rate of change-one way to reduce problems-is tantamount to committing suicide. The dinosaurs did not adapt to change, nor do many large corporations currently ruling the world. If they want to stay alive, they'd better learn to manage and lead change. There is an old joke about two guys who went on a walking safari. They saw a lion approaching them. One of them started putting on his running shoes. "You can't outrun the lion," his companion said. "I'm not trying to outrun the lion," the first guy responded. "All I need to do is outrun you!"
As change accelerates, the challenge to survive becomes more complex. Who survives? Those who make the right decisions the fastest and implement them the fastest.
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
—Charles Darwin
Making wrong decisions quickly and implementing them quickly is a prescription for disaster. You end up with worse problems than those you were trying to solve. Nor will you thrive if your competition can make the right decisions faster than you can, or if despite making the right decisions promptly, you take more time to implement them than the competition.
My observations are not comforting, but the truth is that solving one generation of problems does not mean clear sailing forever. Your solutions only give rise to the next generation of problems. I don't know about you, but I admit that I still catch myself in the middle of the night wondering when my problems will all be over. And I know the answer: Never. I will stop having problems only when I stop being alive.
Growing up does not mean getting past all problems. Growing up means being able to handle bigger and more complex problems. Once I sent a New Year's greeting card to my clients that said, "I wish you bigger problems next year." And at the bottom of the card, I added in very small letters, "that you can handle easily."
Each of us is as "big" as the problems we handle and struggle with. "Small" people deal with small problems: the kind of car they own and the quality of their neighbor's kitchen wallpaper. "Big" people struggle with such problems as the quality of their children's education, the environment they will leave behind, and the quality of life in their communities. Having fewer problems is not living. It's dying. Addressing and being able to solve bigger and bigger problems means that our strengths and capacities are improving. We need to emancipate ourselves from small problems to free the energy to deal with bigger problems.
What's new? It's not change itself. Change has existed for billions of years. The news is that the rate of change is accelerating. 5 More and more problems are confronting us faster and faster. We can become "smaller and smaller" people focusing on the more and more trivial, or we can grow to deal with what really counts for life.
I attend many executive committee meetings where people dis- cuss necessary changes, and more often than not, someone will interrupt the proceedings to say, "Slow down. We are running with too many balls in the air." But how can they slow down if the competition is putting on its running shoes?
Change is stressful. We all know that. People are stressed. Organizations are stressed. Societies are stressed. Psychologists have devised a way to measure stress, assigning a certain number of points to each of various life events: divorce, changing jobs, even going on vacation. What is the common denominator in each of those stress- inducing events? Change.
So, should we slow ourselves and our companies?
Yes, if all the companies in our industry agreed to slow down.
But even that wouldn't work unless society as a whole also slowed down. But that would work only if the entire world slowed down. That is too much to ask. The solution cannot be to slow change. The dinosaurs tried that. The purpose of this book is not to show you how to slow change or how to survive it. Rather, my purpose is to show you how to accelerate finding and implementing the right solutions with minimal stress.
That which can be foreseen can be prevented.
—Charles H. Mayo
For a blind person, every obstacle is a sudden surprise.
—Anonymous
I learned from my two young sons how to speed up solutions. When they were small, they would make me take them to an electronic arcade. Once there, they spent most of their time with their favorite game: racing cars. I realized to my surprise that although neither of them had ever driven a car in his life, they were always able to beat me in the race. The secret was that they had played the game so many times they knew the computer program by heart. They knew when a car would pass and where the turns were. They could drive proactively. Because I didn't know what was coming next, every turn presented a crisis. I crashed. I tumbled. Not knowing the road ahead, I drove reactively, slower than their proactive driving. The game reminded me that when I drive in a foreign city I drive much slower than the locals who beep at me and make rude gestures. It's not that they can drive better. They simply know the road ahead. They can afford to drive faster than someone for whom each and every intersection is a crisis that demands a new decision.
When we know the road ahead, we can drive faster because we drive proactively. Likewise, if we can predict change, we will know what is ahead for a corporation, and the problems will not surprise8 What Is Going On? us. We will deal with them promptly because rather than being unex- pected crises, they will be events for which we have planned and pre- pared ourselves.
I have discovered that I can predict change. I can predict future problems. It's a lot like raising children. With the first child, every problem is a crisis. The fifth one grows almost by himself. Having seen the problems before, one is less likely to panic. Grandparents, because they've seen so much, often are more lenient than parents.
"Leave the kid alone; he'll grow out of it," they advise. Like a grand- parent who has experienced many children, I have worked with hun- dreds of companies. I concur with others who have studied dynamic systems. Problems appear in predictable patterns and have common causes.
First, let us identify the common patterns and later we will identify the causes and discuss what to do about them.
Let's think about predictable patterns. What happens when a car gets old? It falls apart. How about an old house? It also falls apart. An old person? Falling apart.
What are the common denominators here? First, let us realize that a system does not need to "breathe" to be alive. Everything has a lifecycle; people, plants-even stones. 9 A geologist will tell you that one stone is young while another is old. And astronomers refer to stars as young and old. Granted, lifecycles differ in terms of length: A butterfly's lifecycle is one day long. A star's lifecycle may last millions of years. Organizations, too, have lifecycles: They are born and grow, and, unless management knows what to do, they age and die.
The second common denominator is that when systems change, they fall apart. They disintegrate. And to fall apart and disintegrate, they do not need to get older. Young people commit suicide; young systems disintegrate, too. Whether a system is young or old, what causes its disintegration is change, and the faster the change, the faster the disintegration, which is manifested in what we call problems.
I challenge you to consider this: Each and every problem-your car runs badly, the bathroom plumbing is backing up, your boss and you don't get along, your neighbors are difficult, or you and your spouse argue continuously-! suggest, stems from something that is falling apart. The successful diagnosis of every problem is the correct identification of what is falling apart, and a successful treatment or therapy is the integration of those parts into a new whole. That new whole, if it is healthy, is, by itself, capable of keeping itself together, and able to create a new self when it experiences new change.
None of this should be news to anyone. When we are worried about someone, we say, "This person is falling apart! He is coming unglued!" And on a larger scale, we say, "This family, community, or country is falling apart." By the same token, when we are impressed, we say, "This person, family, or country has it all together."
The role of leadership is to lead the necessary change that creates new problems, reintegrate the organization to solve those problems, prepare it to be changed again, and have new problems.
The false assumption is that the way to prevent a system from falling apart is to prevent change. That is tantamount to committing suicide. It is the ultimate "falling apart." In other words, if you do not assume responsibility for breaking the system the way you want it broken and then integrating it to a better plateau, it will break by itself to a worse plateau. So inaction does not save you; it gives the power of your demise to outside forces. The way to remain healthy is to take charge of your destiny by changing that which needs to be changed.
The best way to cope with change is to help create it.
—Bob Dole
The role of leadership is not to prevent the system from falling apart. On the contrary, it is to lead change that causes the system to fall apart and then to reintegrate it into a new whole.
When leadership can neither cause the necessary change nor bring the system together, it's time to call in those whose profession it is to provide this service. It's easier to perform that leadership function if one knows the road ahead: what to expect, which problems are normal, which are abnormal or pathological, what causes those problems, what to do about them, and when to do nothing about them.
The lifecycle theory of organizations presented in this book gives such tools to those who take responsibility for leading change.
I have suggested above that every system-breathing or not-has a lifecycle. We know that living organisms-plants, animals, and peo- ple-are born, grow, age, and die. So do organizations. As they change, progressing along their lifecycle, systems follow predictable patterns of behavior. At each stage, systems manifest certain struggles-certain difficulties or transitional problems-they must overcome. Sometimes a system doesn't succeed in resolving its problems on its own. It requires external intervention, the importation of external energy with different qualifications to emancipate it from its predicament.
For several thousand years, the medical sciences have been developing diagnostic and therapeutic tools for treating physiological systems. The tools for diagnosing and treating an individual's psyche have a more recent history, and the tools for diagnosing and treating organizational behavior-to change organizational culture and consciousness are in their infancy. This book is my contribution to this emerging field.
Whenever an organization makes the transition from one lifecycle stage to the next, difficulties arise. In order to learn new patterns of behavior, organizations must abandon their old patterns. When an organization expends energy to make effective transitions from old to new patterns of behavior, I consider its problems normal. If, however, an organization expends energy inward in futile attempts to remove blockages to change, it is experiencing abnormal problems which usually require external therapeutic intervention. If the abnormality is prolonged and threatens the organization's existence, its problems are pathological, requiring a different intervention- not therapeutic, but "surgical" in nature. Such intervention is beyond the scope of this book.
An organization can solve its normal problems with its own internal energy, setting processes in motion and making decisions that will overcome the problems. An organization cannot avoid those normal problems because it needs to learn and develop its capabilities. Like a baby, it has to fall to learn to walk. An organization has to learn how to budget resources, how to set discipline, and how and when to make decisions. It has to develop an organizational memory of experiences in order to advance to the next stage of its life.
Managers of many young companies complain about how difficult it is for them to make and live within a budget. I tell them they are lucky to have those problems to solve while they are small and young. They have the opportunity to learn while the cost of making a mistake is not so critical as it would be if the organization were much bigger and the stakes were higher. One executive compared the process to tracing a trajectory to a point in space. In the beginning a small deviation is inconsequential. If, however, you allow that deviation to continue, later, when you are far from the starting point, the costs of correction will be enormous. If one allows the normal problems of childhood to go untreated, in adulthood they can become abnormal or even pathological.
Normal problems are transitional in nature: You encounter them, solve them, learn from them, and readily move on. Abnormal problems are cul-de-sac problems. You "drive around in circles," see- ing your problems repeat themselves over and over again. You keep encountering problems you thought you'd solved, but they continually reappear in a new version or in a new manifestation. Management's attempts to resolve them only produce other undesirable side effects. Abnormal problems cause unnecessary pain and slow organizational progress, retarding an organization's ability to develop. They frustrate and entrap it in a particular stage of the life- cycle. The organization, like a middle-aged person with unresolved problems of adolescence, is "stuck." In abnormal situations, management feels incapable and helpless to resolve the issues by itself. Soon the organization loses trust in its leadership.
Organizations with normal problems don't require external intervention. Solving normal problems is the task of their leaders. Organizations with abnormal problems, however, require periodic external interventions that can lead them to Prime and keep them there. Organizations with abnormal problems need interventions from extensively trained organizational therapists who can help them overcome the cycle of repetitious problems that block their progress.
Pathological problems are distinguishable from abnormal problems by their gravity and their chronic nature. Those are problems that, because they were not treated in time, now threaten the organization's ability to survive. The most obvious examples of pathological problems are: uncontrollable negative cash flow, continuous emigration of key human resources away from the organization, unresolved quality problems, rapidly declining market share, tremendous drops in the company's capacity to raise financial resources, and so forth. Organizations with those problems can't afford therapy because therapy takes time, and time is a resource those organizations do not have. Instead of an organizational therapist, the board should hire an organizational turnaround specialist who can temporarily take on the chief executive officer's role, and perform whatever "surgery" is necessary. As I said before, treatment of pathological problems is outside the scope of this book.
To be successful leaders, to focus our energies and diagnose organizational ills, we must learn to distinguish normal problems- those transitions an organization should experience in order to move to the next stage of the lifecycle-from abnormal problems it need not experience.
Most organizations follow a typical path. On that path, they encounter problems that exist because the organizations have yet to develop certain capabilities. By solving those problems, they develop the capabilities they need to advance along the lifecycle. On the usual, or typical, path, organizations develop capabilities one at a time. We will talk about those capabilities-how they develop, the sequence in which they develop, and how they help solve predictable organizational problems-in Part Two of this book.
Since I published the first edition ten years ago, I have learned that organizations may take a shorter path to Prime, the state in the lifecycle in which function and form, flexibility, and self-control are all synchronized. An organization in Prime can change in a controllable way, achieving optimal results and sustaining that performance over time. Taking that path, an organization can and should develop all the capabilities simultaneously.
In this edition, I describe both paths. First, I present the typical path, analyzing why problems occur at each stage of the lifecycle. Next, I discuss the optimal path and its repercussions.
For the purpose of illustration, let us consider examples of three different organizational problems.
It's perfectly normal for start-up businesses to find themselves short of cash. They see it coming and predict it. In its earliest stages, a company's need for cash to finance growth far exceeds its ability to generate it. That is a normal problem on the typical path. But this normal problem can be avoided if a company follows the optimal path. A well-managed company should be able to overcome that problem with good financial planning. If its business plan makes sense, and its leadership and its industry are trusted and respected, money will come pouring in. Thus, while shortage of cash on the typical path is a normal problem, on the optimal path it will be considered abnormal because it did not have to happen.
What if a company suddenly found itself short of cash because management, not knowing how to project cash flows, hadn't predict- ed the problem? That is an abnormal problem on the typical path. Management should have known. A cash crunch is deemed patho- logical if, even after instituting cost controls and cash-flow planning, the company cannot survive. In such a case, therapeutic intervention could be too little too late. A cash shortage also becomes a pathological problem when management refuses to recognize cash shortage as a problem.
Take, for instance, a company I knew whose founder lived in a fantasy land, dreaming of what should happen. People, he believed, should have been excited about his innovative ideas. He was always selling everyone his belief that the cash problem would soon be solved by an infusion of capital from willing-but nevertheless14 What Is Going On? unknown-sources. That pathology is not all that rare. Its tragedy is that the founders honestly believe in what they say, and even at the last moment, they don't know what happened or why their companies failed. Some readers may find this difficult to believe, but I have witnessed such folly more than a few times.
An autocratic management style can also turn from a normal problem into pathology. 16 I've often seen this syndrome in fledgling organizations during the early stages of growth. As I asserted in my book Pursuit of Prime, autocratic management is desirable in the start-up stage of development. Parents need to tell their child what to do, and founders need to be in control in order to sustain interest in their creations. The need to control becomes abnormal if that style doesn't change to keep pace with the company's development and maturation. The problem intensifies when the autocratic leader has only two choices: to change his style or to yield the leadership position. The problem reaches pathological proportions when no forces can persuade him either to change his style or to step aside. I have treated several companies where the autocratic, self-centered, ego-driven leaders could not be changed because they owned everything, lock, stock, and barrel. They were either unwilling or unable to change their style even though it meant the demise of their companies.
In a fledgling business, the founder is the biggest asset. If, however, the founder's style is destructive, he or she is the company's biggest liability. Frequently, when such a person dies, the company dies, or the family that owns it loses control within three generations.
Now, let's consider organizational aging. Many of you will find the following surprising. I myself was surprised because, like every- one else, I had considered aging to be a normal predicament. After all, who expects to remain young forever? We wish for everlasting youth, and generations have searched vain for a vitalizing potion. But having applied my methodologies to organizations worldwide, I have discovered that I can retard organizational aging. That led me to wonder whether it is possible for humans also to retard aging. Yogis look ageless, and they do not die from diseases of aging. They die healthy. They recognize when the time has come to go to sleep and not wake up. Who wouldn't like to die healthy rather than suffer from the debilitating diseases of old age? People can retard the aging process. So can organizations. What is the secret?
Rather than steal my own thunder, I'll keep that secret for another chapter.
Organizations can have normal and/or abnormal problems of growing. The problems of aging should all be considered abnormal because organizational aging can be averted with appropriate treatment. To reverse pathological aging requires major sacrifices such as downsizing, which I consider a radical solution to a pathological problem.
Curative treatment at any stage of the lifecycle calls for removing abnormal problems so that the organization can progress to the next stage of the lifecycle and experience a new set of normal problems.
Preventive treatment involves the development of capabilities that enhance the company's advance to Prime and sustain it there. Prime is the most desirable state, and it is not necessary to depart from it.
Now that we have defined terms and outlined the purpose and structure of this book, let us proceed with descriptions of the various stages in the development and aging of organizations on the typical path.
