As night follows day: organisational reform follows disruption

To complicate matters, organisational reform operates at different scales, time frames and speeds inside the same organisation. So, understanding the interactive nature of reform outcomes requires understanding the organisational scale.

Scale effects in reform are often overlooked as we respond to the immediacy of a disruptive event.

Disruption is a word so liberally sprinkled through management writing that it is difficult to avoid daily exposure. The focus is often on the sources and causes of disruption, with less attention paid to the necessary organisational reform that will inevitably follow disruption.

But neither the outcomes nor path of reform are given from the disruption's origin (or source). Organisational reform is an inherently uncertain activity—some facts are known, but many are not. Implementation is unpredictable and only slightly controllable; consequently, the outcomes of organisational reform are forged and understood through the act or process of engaging with reform. The medium may well be the message when it comes to reform.

The disruptive starting conditions may be the same in principle, but the process of implementation, the character of the organisation, and the response of the leadership to obstacles all determine the path reform takes and, ultimately, its success. This runs counter to a modern management culture that seeks a safe, incremental, planned and known path to the future.

To complicate matters, organisational reform operates at different scales, time frames and speeds inside the same organisation. So, understanding the interactive nature of reform outcomes also requires an understanding of organisational scale. Some aspects of reform will be local, tactical and fast-moving, while others will be gradual, deliberate and authorising. Scale effects in reform are often overlooked as we respond to the immediacy of a disruptive event.

Only some organisations are well-placed to monitor the antecedents of disruption. Consequently, they are fearful of disruption or surprised by ‘disruptive’ events and thus are not well placed to lead reform.

To lead reform, there is a need for a good understanding of the organisational forces that determine and drive the reform process.

There is a need for a good evidence-based understanding of the current state of the enterprise that goes beyond anecdote and opinion.

There is a need for an approach to monitoring reform progress as it weaves its way across organisational scales, functions, processes and capabilities.

There is a need to get beyond the endless present of management. As leaders and managers, our behaviour is constantly shaped to discount the future in favour of the present.

How can we better anticipate the need for organisational reform that follows disruption?

A partial analogy might be for organisational leaders and managers to see themselves in the same light as geologists monitoring earthquakes and tsunamis.

They should position to see the fault lines. The places where organisational ‘trouble’ is most likely to emerge or erupt. 

1. They should position to sense the tremors that indicate the potential for eruption.

2. They should understand that tremors can have multiple meanings. It can be a sign of releasing tension before a new phase of stability or the sign of an eruption. The manager/geologist always has partial information and will have difficulty separating the two possible outcomes—new stability or impending eruption. 

3. Continuous monitoring is required because it is difficult to tell in advance the direction and impact of disruption. Steadily building situational awareness from a variety of sources is critical. 

4. Additionally, there is a need to understand the general mechanisms of disruption and the local conditions in the fault line area. There is a need to understand the texture of disruption—the specific conditions against the background of the general and the potential changes to the general conditions in light of the specific. 

5. Our leader/geologist must watch and observe the boundary conditions and reflect what they see against ‘normal’ organisational behaviour and operations. Then they make probability judgements about causation and consequence. These are compared against experience, and the mental models that come to be reflected in planning and decision-making are updated. 

6. Concurrently, others in the enterprise maintain an evacuation plan for the threatened communities. How can the available organisational resources be quickly integrated and galvanised into action? 

If we are in a period of profound political, economic, social and technological disruption in the way we work and organise, then there is a need for:

1. A more sophisticated understanding of our organisations,

2. Improved monitoring of local and general conditions, and

3. A more forensic focus on understanding the antecedents and consequences of an inherently uncertain event. 

It requires better quality data collection, improved analytics, focused modelling and forecasting to enable informed pre-planning, adaptive organisational responses and informed communication.

Our conversations imply that disruption will always be a surprise—they imply our response will always be reactive. I prefer Louis Pasteur’s outlook: ‘Chance favours the prepared mind’.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post.

Photo Credit: Photo by poptech - Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License  https://www.flickr.com/photos/40287103@N07

[The views expressed here are the author’s and are not necessarily representative of those employing him, his family, or even those loosely acquainted with him.]