Ten Tasks of Change: Demystifying Changing Organizations

Chapter Zero

To some people "Chapter Zero" may sound a little odd. We have given that title to this opening chapter for two reasons. First, the first step in your organization change work is in Chapter One, the next chapter. Chapter Zero picks you up at "ground zero," what you need to understand about the material in this book before you address that first step. Chapter Zero gives you the overall framework around which this book is formed and the critical beliefs about people and organizations facing change that underpin all of what you will read here. Second, it is titled Chapter Zero simply so that the following chapter titles can match the numbers of the change tasks they address, Chapter One addresses Task I, Chapter Five addresses Task V, and so forth.

About Changing Organizations

Changing is what organizations do, not what you do to them. Changing is the continuous process of an organization attempting to align itself with shifts in its marketplace and with the realities of its external financial, physical, social, political, and technological environment. It is the organization's drive to synchronize purpose, process, structures, people, information, rewards, and management systems within itself and within an integrated outside world.

Organization change can be complex because organizations are complex. Guiding successful intentional change can be puzzling and difficult because the organization is held in place by networks of established interrelationships among its environment, its processes, its structure, and its people. Whether an imperative for change comes from business needs, technological opportunities, mismatches in structural alignment, or the nature of the organization's people, for the change to be lasting, all aspects and interrelationships of the affected networks will have to change. We'll talk more about this "work system" view of organizations in the next chapter and throughout the book.

In yesterday's world, major organization change was often experienced as a cataclysmic eruption one hoped would only happen every millennium or two. In today's more complex, dynamic world, organization change is ongoing work, not just a one-time "catch up" event. Being an agile change artist is as critical for success as being a reliable producer. Successful change is required for survival. Changing more responsively and effectively than one's competitors is required to prosper.

About the People in a Change Situation

Changing organizations are complex because people are complex. People tend to objectify their work. They experience it as separate from themselves, something "out there" that they examine and "work on." They may engage their work with passion, but they still tend to see it as something apart from themselves, something they "do" rather than who they are. A change situation replaces the microscope with a mirror. The prospect of change confronts people with the reality that they are not separate from their work, that in a deeper sense they are what they do and they are defined by how they do it. The task of self-reflection is more complex than the task of objective problem solving. The work of changing organizations is not only about finding a way to apply a logical process to a non linear reality, but it is also about setting the conditions within which people are willing to do research on themselves.

The Work of Changing Organizations

Conventional wisdom tells us that changing our organizations is very difficult. That's because we built them in a complex way, not because change is mysterious and unfathomable. Changing an organization is hard work because organizations, and the people who inhabit them, are designed to provide stability. When we put our organizations together, we are looking for predictability. We know we may have to be nimble in a fast-moving marketplace, but at the same time we want to be sure that promises made will be promises met. Our work systems are designed to "ingest" variance without losing control of the process. We pay our people to pursue the objectives tenaciously in spite of the odds. We struggle with change, not because our organizations aren't agile, but because they are so agile in order to stay on course and avoid the rocks in the roadway. Organizations are hard to change because the organization designers before us and the managers who followed them have done their jobs so well.

Changing organization may be hard work, but it doesn't have to be mysterious. In this book, the work involved in changing organization is modeled as "The Ten Tasks of Changing Organization," illustrated by the ten activity bars in Figure 0.1.

The overlapping bars in the model signify that, although the tasks flow sequentially in concept, the work addressing any one task will continue concurrently with the work associated with previous and subsequent tasks as the process unfolds. Picture the overall Ten Tasks as a cascade of activity, like a step-down waterfall, where each level feeds the next and each builds on the flow from before. As a change unfolds, you must cycle over and over through the essence of all of the tasks as you drill down into the details at different levels of the work system or open up change in different parts of the organization. This is what we mean by saying the process of change may be approached logically, but it is not linear.

The Ten Tasks is not a "methodology" and not a step-by-step process for managing change activities. It is more useful when seen as an overarching checklist of what to pay attention to as you apply your own logical thinking to accomplish the change. An analogy is the early computer game called Dungeons and Dragons. I never got the hang of it, but my son was pretty intense about it. As I understand, you are given a general idea about a journey and a bundle of weapons and tools that you can apply as you run into the unexpected beasts of the passageway, the bottomless pit, the unseeable door, the unclimbable wall, and so forth. If what you try doesn't work, you adjust your tactics and try again. As you learn and succeed, you progress and are given more tools and weapons and more insight about how to apply them to the next unexpected challenge, and the challenges just keep coming and coming. Stewardship in changing organization is a little like playing Dungeons and Dragons. The Ten Tasks gives you an overview of the path and some good ideas (your weapons and tools) to work with. The bad news is that only you can figure out how to apply them, using your own and your colleagues' best judgments, as the adventure unfolds and the specific challenges come up.

The chapters in this book address each of the ten tasks in order. Chapter Eleven provides a checklist of the work to be undertaken during each task. It can serve as a memory jogger, helping you as you work your way through your change effort. Or you can hand it to another person as a quick outline to guide discussion about where you have been, what has and has not been accomplished so far, and where to go next...