The Five Myths of Organizational Change—Myth #3 – Change is organizational
You’ve heard the old tale of the Emperor’s new clothes? The Emperor, who spends lavishly on his clothing, is convinced by swindlers that they make amazing clothes that are invisible to the stupid or incompetent. As they weave, no one sees anything, but no one wants to be seen as stupid, so that all act as if they see amazing clothing being made. Finally, the Emperor gets “dressed” and goes out among the people to show off his new clothes. Everyone oohs and aahs and pretends he is wearing clothing until an innocent child yells out, “But, he’s just naked!” at which point all start to see it and begin laughing and mocking.
Why do I start here with an old Danish folk tale? It is because I want to make this next point very clearly. Organizations don’t exist. They are the Emperor’s new clothes of modern life and, particularly, of change and transformation. Sure, organization is a handy term. And organizations do exist on paper for legal reasons. They also appear solid as great big buildings with logos on them, but remove the people, and do you still have an organization or an empty shell? COVID-has made this abundantly clear. Without the people there is nothing.
And this is not a precious argument or semantics. No, an organization is simply a group of people with (hopefully) a shared goal or purpose and some shared values or ways of working. And if we continue to look at organizations as a singular thing, not approaching people as individuals, we will continue to fail. When we approach change as an organizational problem, we try to solve the problem with new directives, policies, buildings, work environments, logos, whatever. But this is not change, this is the appearance of change—without individual change nothing happens.
Change is person by person, one at a time, until you have a critical mass of people behaving differently until they share different beliefs. In the last piece in this series, I will address how we do this specifically.
As always, I welcome your questions and feedback. Just hit reply and I'll be there.
Michael
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