Eight bosses, one cover sheet, and change that could not survive the building
The structural force that pulls behavior back, rendered as a memo about a cover sheet.
Every organization has a structural force pulling behavior back toward existing patterns. Change that ignores it reverts, regardless of what leaders intend.
The company spent an enormous amount of effort communicating a change that mattered to nobody. That is a measurement of what would have happened to a change that mattered.
What happens
A software company introduces a small process change. A report now requires a cover sheet.
The change is communicated by eight different managers to the same person, individually, each unaware the others have done it.
The reading
The cover sheet is a perfect specimen because it is trivial. The organization can absorb an enormous amount of effort communicating a change that matters to nobody, which tells you what would happen to a change that mattered.
Every symptom the condition names is present and played for comedy. Initiatives stall. Antibodies form. The best people disengage, and the disengagement is invisible because attendance is unchanged.
The consultants arrive to fix it and interview people about what they do all day. That is a measurement of activity, and activity is exactly what the organization is best at producing in place of outcomes.
Side by side
| Where to look | What the company did | What adaptability would have required |
|---|---|---|
| The change | Announced eight times by eight managers, none aware of the others | Announced once, by whoever owns the work |
| The old process | Still running underneath, unexamined | Named, and what it protected understood before it was removed |
| The diagnosis bought in | Interviews about what people do all day | A reading of who holds partial authority over the same work |
What would have changed it
Adaptability is not enthusiasm for change. It is whether a change survives contact with the structure, and this structure would revert anything.
Nothing in the film addresses the actual pattern, which is that eight people have partial authority over the same work and none has enough to change how it is done.
Where you have seen this
The new process has been announced, and announced again, by people who did not know the others had. Nobody has asked what the old one was protecting, so it is still running underneath.
What to do about it
A reading that ends in understanding is entertainment. This is filed under Training, so it ends in things a team can actually do.
Before removing a process, ask what it was protecting. Anything that survived this long is load-bearing for somebody.
Count how many people hold partial authority over the work you are trying to change. If it is more than two and none of them has enough, the structure will revert whatever you announce.
Stop measuring activity. Activity is exactly what an organization produces best in place of outcomes.
What the reading rests on
Structural inertia, and the difference between resource and routine rigidity
Inertia here is not reluctance. It is the accumulated weight of routines and approval structures that were adaptive when they were adopted, and it separates into two kinds that behave differently: resource rigidity, the failure to shift investment, and routine rigidity, the failure to change the processes that use it. A strong sense of threat eases the first and makes the second worse, which is why urgency alone does not produce adaptation.
- Hannan, M. T., & Freeman, J. (1984). Structural inertia and organizational change. American Sociological Review, 49(2), 149-164. doi:10.2307/2095567
- Gilbert, C. G. (2005). Unbundling the structure of inertia: Resource versus routine rigidity. Academy of Management Journal, 48(5), 741-763. doi:10.5465/amj.2005.18803920
What this is not
These are readings, not evidence. A film is written to be satisfying rather than to be true, so no screening is a finding about any real organization and none is offered as one. What a screening does is name a mechanism that organizational research has actually studied, cite that research so you can go and check it, and then show the mechanism operating in footage you have already seen. The citation stands behind the mechanism; it never stands behind the film, and pairing the two is our reading rather than a result. Argue with the reading. That is the point of using material you already hold.
You have seen it here
Now read your own organization
A screening is practice. Nothing here measures your organization and nothing here commits it. The diagnostics do the measuring, on your conditions rather than somebody else's.