Have we got it wrong?

Apologies for the clickbait headline!

Before working in the tech financial sector I worked for compliance and before that I worked in sport science and psychology.

The budgeting, planning was under my responsibility when I was in compliance. I was deeply involved in every aspect of the process, from risk assessments to regulatory reporting, but what struck me most was how much time was spent strategising compared to implementing change. This was especially evident when it came to change management initiatives.

The time spent strategising often come at the expense of organisations wanting to move from where they are to where they want to be. The path, however, is often crooked and almost never straight.

Organisations are innately humans and when we are considering moving humans from one point to another, we are talking about culture. And, culture is innately…

…fluid
…emergent, and
…malleable

It’s shifting and moving in different ways at different time and different circumstance.

It’s complex.

This is why change programmes can’t be linear and it’s why they fail. Changing a culture requires an inordinate amount of persistence, grit and working together than paying a third party to implement the strategy you planned (or they planned it for you!)

It’s long been understood that organisations, in fact, all social systems, are complex systems.

If this is the case, then why do we continue to seek linear cause effect relationships within our organisations in order to enhance the performance of those organisations?

Complexity science is giving us huge insight into how all groups of humans create intricate social systems, and these social systems may, in fact, at their root be founded on simplistic patterns.

Perhaps, therefore, if we want to truly understand the performance levers within our organisations, we need to seek to find and understand these foundational simple patterns.

Because if we do then our interventions around change management, and acquisitions, transformational, change, and simple growth would all be approached differently and would be much more effective and cost-efficient.