Change as Medicine….or Poison?
Two ways of thinking that have been popular for a while really bug me.
The first is a general notion that if something is good, more of it is better. I’ve seen this kind of thinking in so many things from individual choices, to organizational and management practice and at the national level.
The second is the idea often expressed as change is good, embrace change, or sometime, move fast and break things and many other variations like that.
These two ways of thinking are related and frankly, dangerous. I will quote Paracelsus, a 16th century medical practitioner, and considered the father of toxicology:
“All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.”
The modern reader friendly way of expressing the above is: the difference between medicine and poison is dose. I honestly can not come up with very practical examples of excessive quantities of something good not eventually becoming toxic. I’m going to leave it at that for now.
Change is what I really wanted to focus on today, and the big question of how much change is too much change? Asking this question led me down an interesting line of exploration to the work of W. Ross Ashby, a psychiatrist and pioneering practitioner of cybernetics who has a law named after him:
“Only variety can absorb (or destroy) variety”
There is something quintessentially human in this as we are one of the most adaptable creatures around.
Ashby was a close friend of Stafford Beer. Beer’s career was focussed on answering the question “What structure allows an organization to remain viable in a changing environment?”, and developed the Viable System Model. Beer’s work incorporated Ashby’s and he was convinced that top down hierarchical models of organization would be less able to adapt to change and sought to provide a framework organizations could use to create structures that would promote adaptability.
An important take away from the work of Beer and Ashby is that organization do not become adaptable because they “embrace change”. Only adaptable organizations are able to actually successfully pursue change initiatives. Ideally these changes help the organization to accomplish two things:
Adapt to their changing environment.
Retain or enhance future adaptability.
Leaders are confronted with practical decisions around change on a more frequent basis than at any I can remember, specifically about what changes they will pursue within their organization. I think there are a number of questions these leaders should be asking themselves. Many of the answers are not quantifiable, and need answers nonetheless; based on the judgement of the leader in the absence of complete data or metrics. Some of these questions are:
How much variety (in Ashby’s sense) exists in my organization?
How can I increase adaptability without causing chaos?
How much change is too much for my organization to absorb?
How structurally arrogant is my organization?
The last question alludes to the last newsletter. How is data distilled into information and knowledge in the organization? How accurately does this information and knowledge actually reflect the reality on the ground? Are leaders actually making decisions based on reality or some distortion of it? How distorted? How is dissent handled?
This last question about dissent is a really big one and I think one of a few things that positively differentiate good leadership. If dissent is suppressed organizations lose the ability to detect reality mismatch. Healthy organizations require a paradoxical ability: dissent without dissension.
Metrics are important, but metrics are not reality. Good judgment requires leaders to remain connected to reality and not mistake metric-based abstractions for reality itself. Changes need to promote structural humility that empowers people at the periphery to take adaptive action.
To sum things up, Change is not inherently good or bad any more than one could say vitamin C is good or bad. Excess and deficiency are both harmful, and there is a range of change quantity that lies within the golden mean.
Depending on what ails the organization the right changes in the right amount and in the right order must be selected. These changes need to result in an organization that is more adaptable. Long term reductions in adaptability in service of short term results compromise the very ability of the organization to survive future environmental changes.
Change is not the goal. Adaptability is not the goal. Both are necessary. The point is that in order for the organization to continue to fulfill it’s higher purpose in a constantly changing environment it needs to be sufficiently adaptable to respond to external changes and opportunities with its own changes to maintain viability.
As always I’m grateful for your readership and thoughts,
Nik