Why do we talk about organisational change when stability rules?

Do our organisations have the capacity and capability to learn and adapt at a systemic level?

Most of the time, our working lives are broadly predictable. Work would be intolerable and impossible without some degree of stability. Yet, we invest considerable time in attempting to ‘manage change’. How is managing change different from day-to-day management? Reading the prescriptions offered in business magazines and journals, I struggle to see why this requires a unique bag of tools and skills. So, I wonder whether we are having the wrong conversation at the wrong level.

Stephen Jay Gould once wrote,

The history of life as I read it, is a series of stable states, punctuated at rare intervals by major events that occur with great rapidity and help to establish the next stable era’

With Niles Eldredge, Gould had previously published a paper on ‘punctuated equilibria’. They highlighted that stability was the norm in evolution as opposed to the idea of slow and steady change over time. They proposed that real change was restricted to rare and rapid events that had a transforming effect on species evolution. In some ways, Eldredge and Gould drew attention to the obvious. Most of the time, in the broad, life is predictable.

The theory of punctuated equilibrium has been used as a framework in different fields (ecology, economics, sociology, history, and industrial psychology) to understand change through time. In particular, periods of abrupt and rapid change are followed by relative calm and stability.

There is plenty of advice and tips on managing change for managers. Most of this advice is on the tactics of change, the ‘how to’ sort of advice that is the staple of magazines. The advice often takes the form of a sequence of deliberate management steps that, if followed correctly, will ensure successful change. The management focus is on overcoming the inevitable resistance to change that is assumed to be an inherent weakness of all employees and organisations. When managers are asked to 'manage change', they are asked to manage the transition from one form of stability to another. And, for all sorts of good reasons, all organisations have a vested interest in stability.

Stability is essential for consistency of outcome, predictability, efficiency, and productivity. For those in organisations, the stability of conventions and rules about authority, responsibility, expertise, and communication provides us with a way of working.

Stability provides a sense of predictability and certainty that can be used to inform confident action. These conventions of stable relationships determine who interacts with whom and under what circumstances. They allow people to predict the behaviour of others with a degree of accuracy. Stability is vital for accessing, controlling, and deploying information to preserve institutional coherence.

In change management, this functional and valuable stability is often called bureaucracy. The idea is that bureaucracy or stability is always ‘bad’ and flux or change is always ‘good’. There is an assumption within this view that change is always for the better. Our collective experience in ‘managing change’ would not support that view. Yet, we continue to advocate for change management as if it is a silver bullet for uncertainty.

So, how might stability and change be looked at differently?

The importance of stability is not new in the philosophy of change in organisations and society. In 1971, philosopher Donald Schön argued that society had lost the ‘stable state’. He defined belief in the stable state as ‘the unchangeability, the constancy of central aspects of our lives, or belief that we can attain such a constancy’. Such a belief provides a bulwark against uncertainty.

Schön identified ‘dynamic conservatism’ as a persistent characteristic of most institutions—‘a tendency to fight to remain the same’. But he argued that the pervasiveness and frequency of technical change is ‘uniquely threatening to the stable state’. He believed that change was a fundamental feature of modern life and that developing social systems that can learn and adapt is necessary.

However, rather than arguing for complete surrender to the momentum of change, Schön argued that social systems must learn to transform themselves without ‘intolerable threat’. He used the term ‘dynamic conservatism’ to understand that the capacity of institutions to change is constrained by the function the organisation serves as part of a broader societal system and its role in providing a social framework for individuals. In Schön’s words:

A learning system … must be one in which dynamic conservatism operates at such a level and in such a way as to permit change of state without intolerable threat to the essential functions the system fulfils for the self. Our systems must maintain their identity and ability to support the self-identity of those who belong to them. Still, they must, at the same time, be capable of transforming themselves.

It might also be helpful to talk about change at the correct scale. Undoubtedly, we are in a period of substantial social change that will continue to impact our institutions, organisations and work directly. It has been going on for some time, and we are currently transitioning between two forms of stability. However, our response should be at the scale of institutions and organisations, not individuals. Change should be understood and addressed at the right level. Change management is a problem of organisational design.

So, if we talk sensibly about change, change management and stability, then it might be helpful to understand better why institutions, organisations and people behave the way they do.

This might start with the understanding that stability (not change) is the norm. This might lead us to conclude that ‘change management’ is a special case (or even an abnormal event) for most managers and that ‘stability management’ might be an appropriate investment in managerial skill development.

Do our organisations have the capacity and capability to learn and adapt at a systemic level?

The answer to this question is unlikely to be the stuff of rational planning or, at the other extreme, wild scenarios with no basis in reality. Instead, it is of necessity, as Schön puts it, ‘a groping and inductive process for which there is no adequate theoretical basis’.

It is messy, incomplete, and difficult. It does not lend itself to easy step-by-step solutions. It relies on allowing, observing and learning from the incremental adaptation that occurs at the organisation's boundaries—where day-to-day managers operate to ensure stability while also managing the need to adapt without threatening stability. Stability is essential if the business is to stay in business.

Real organisational change is a succession of alternating phases of inertia and action. Consequently, the management of change is not a tactical affair. It is a strategy conducted over time with an eye to incremental adaptation. It is not a place where ‘data’ leads decisions. It is a place for observation, judgement, experience and risk assessment.

Sometimes, abrupt changes will occur. These will be apparent and require something closer to crisis management than change management. But in the main, thoughtful, theory-driven, probing induction is most likely the norm.

I recognise this is not a satisfactory answer for most managers raised on a diet of heroic action where every problem has a solution. That’s life.

The tension between the need for stability and the demand for change is common. Indeed, this is a constant tension. Our challenge is to understand more intimately the drive for organisational adaptation and the mechanisms that affect change—from the institutional level to the individual. The confidence that arises from stability should be preserved while concurrently we feel our way forward.