When is it wise to resist the constant call for change in companies?

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Veteran HR executive Ashley Goodall calls it the cult of disruption, and it has overtaken our world. We all subscribe to the need for constant change in organizations – or pretend to – because it’s heresy to say otherwise.
In The Problem with Change, he sums up the commandments of the constant change mindset this way: “Large-scale change is necessary, always; instigating change is the way to win; and if you are not disrupting every element of your operations, you are losing.”
He believes the effect on humans has been dire. We live our work lives in a blender. It’s the rare organization that goes for long “without at least a quick blitz there and a little pureeing there.”
As a senior HR executive at Deloitte and Cisco, he saw the chaos this mindset spawns and the chasm created in organizations, with “the leaders, impatient and frustrated at the inability of those in the trenches to get with the program; the people on the ground, exhausted by the latest initiative or innovation, and frustrated at how hard it was simply to get on with their daily work. I emerged from these experiences skeptical of change. Not always, but certainly when it struck me that change was making things worse rather than better, or that the change was making things murkier rather than clearer.”
Many change initiatives fail, he says. Yet nobody suggests maybe the cult of change is wrong or needs to be curtailed or targeted more carefully. Businesses worship disruption and Mr. Goodall believes its prophet was Clayton Christensen, whose 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma led to the widespread belief that companies must disrupt themselves before a competitor did.
Of course, even before that, in 1942, economist Joseph Schumpeter argued the essential mechanism of capitalism was creative destruction and many people point to Charles Darwin’s observations about how species that are not adaptable fall to those that are. Early in the 1990s, before Mr. Christensen’s pronouncements, the concept of paradigm shift was being hyped and businessman Michael Hammer was declaring corporations must be re-engineered.
Add in what Mr. Goodall calls the financification of business – boosting the bottom line is the basic goal and incentives the motivator – and how could managers resist? “It’s easier to inflict the harm we have seen – uncertainty, unbelonging, displacement and so forth – if you imagine that your job is solely to serve investors, and if you imagine that all change is good change, and if you imagine that people are essentially coin-operated anyway and will cheer up when their bonus cheques arrive,” Mr. Goodall writes in his book.
Although top executives want to know how things are going, they are defeated by the sheer scale of many gargantuan organizations. Mr. Goodall calls it altitude sickness.
Psychologist Dacher Keltner has found as executives rise in the ranks, they become more impulsive, less understanding of others, and worse at listening; in one telling study, they grabbed an unfair share of the cookies on a plate.
Their model of work, Mr. Goodall says, is that people can be thought of as just another set of widgets and people management is mainly a question of incentives. Change follows easily from that frame of mind.
“We don’t think of humans at work as, well, human. If we did, we would be much less likely to treat the things that make us human – our idiosyncrasies and individuality – as distracting irritants, and we would instead be much more curious about what makes people tick, what makes things difficult for them, and how to help people do their best work. We would, in other words, design our organizations from the people up, not from the executive suite down,” he says.
Each whir of the blender displaces people, setting them adrift from routines and colleagues. Workers need to figure out how to operate in a new scenario that initially and perhaps for the longer haul will not make sense. Down the road it will probably be changed again, adding to the angst.
Mr. Goodall highlights the importance of teams in the workplace, offering individuals the chance to bond in small groups where they can gossip and share and help each other. But he says teams are essentially invisible to senior leaders, who don’t realize how they connect the dots for their members in the collective effort to be more productive.
“Perhaps because of this – perhaps because their essential function is invisible – the company breaks up teams without much of a thought. Many of the tales that I heard about the sorry experience of living through top-down change are, at root, tales of teams torn apart,” he notes. People grieve those losses. They also have to expend effort to learn the skills, loves and loathings of their new teammates, creating a shared language and a pathway to deal, together, with what’s ahead.
His solution: Less change. Yes, change is necessary at times, but not constantly, and only after hesitation and thought. Be skeptical. If change is vitally needed – when everything is at stake – consider going slowly, so you understand the evolving situation better. As you proceed, think of the impact on teams – and the humans within them.
Cannonballs
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.