Something About Change

By Gerrit Van Wyk.

Felix the flying frog.

There is a story about a man named Clarence, who had a pet frog named Felix, and decided he could make some money if he could make Felix fly. Felix pointed out he didn’t look anything like a bird, but Clarence decided that could be overcome with the right training. He sent Felix on an aviation course, and then started implementing change.

Clarence expected Felix to jump from an apartment building, going up one floor at a time, and after each jump, as a trained manager, he analyzed Felix’s progress to find ways for improving efficiency, until flying would become second nature. Felix pleaded with Clarence that this wouldn’t work but Clarence thought Felix’s problem was, like all employees, he just didn’t understand the importance what he was doing, and couldn’t see the big picture.

The first jump didn’t go well, which Clarence interpreted, based on his training, as resistance to innovative change, and told Felix to try again. Felix now started stalling, but Clarence introduced timelines and milestones, and Felix had to jump, then Felix tried visualization, which didn’t help, and then started begging for his life. Clarence blamed Felix’s ongoing failure on his inability to successfully meet his milestones, and with the next jump the inevitable happened.

Clarence blamed the failure of his project on Felix, and performed an after-action review which, based on the data he collected, lead to the conclusion he needed a smarter frog.

I lived through a number failed change initiatives, all of which were foreseen by coal face workers, whose pleas fell on deaf ears, and all the failures were eventually blamed on them, like on Felix. It couldn’t conceivably be the change agent, managers, consultants, leaders, etc. or their grand plans to make frogs fly.

Roughly 85-95% of change initiatives fail, and I searched management books and academic papers for many years, looking for someone asking the obvious question; why is this, and what can be done to improve the odds, and found none. It’s the employees, or frogs’ fault, not the managers and consultants, and what is needed is smarter, or better trained employees, or frogs. John Black called workers not committed to his plans anchor draggers, and advised they should be fired; get rid of Felix’s and the smarter frogs will make things work, except it never does.

Contrary to what managers are taught, organizations are complex and unpredictable, which creates insecurity, and challenges an image of being in control. Into this gap steps guru consultants marketing simple solutions, promising to remove the insecurity and restore certainty and control. When they fail, as simple solutions to complex problems always do, they blame the managers and employees for not following the script. Its the frogs’ fault.

A second problem is plans must be implemented by people on the ground, and if they don’t believe in the plan, they have no incentive to make it work; they quit quietly to use a modern description. To stand any chance, you must engage these people in a meaningful conversation and involve them in the decisions that will influence their lives.

During and after the Industrial Revolution, the idea emerged organizations need appropriately trained managers and leaders to be efficient, initially as outside observers, as in a laboratory experiment, and later, influenced by biology and cybernetics, as the brain of the firm, to use Beer’s term, since a brain is smarter than other organs. With that kind of thinking, workers become inanimate parts or ignorant organs, or, metaphorically frogs, incapable of thinking for themselves. That thinking dominates today. It’s McGregor’s theory-X writ large.

Worker participation only becomes meaningful if they can make decisions affecting them, are provided with the necessary resources, and can implement solutions they designed themselves. Management schools on the other hand teach managers their job is to plan, lead, organize, communicate, and control, which is the opposite to that. Several writers point out management does not work like that at all, but giving up the management fiction challenges an image of leaders and managers being smart and in control, which is difficult. What stops meaningful change is not an absence of workable approaches, but an ego roadblock which is not easy to overcome.

The current rush to replace humans with robotic artificial intelligence illustrates the Felix story better than I can. Unlike humans, robots and computers are simple inanimate objects who will jump without asking, which managers and leaders so desperately want, as opposed to complex humans who argue, beg, and plead. They are cheaper to build and replace, are more “efficient” than humans, they have no feelings, and won’t sue you, no matter how often you abuse them. They help create the fictional world in which you can plan, lead, organize, and control, without having to communicate, for which managers and leaders are trained.

Logically, by extension, the perfect future to aim for is that of a world without human individuality, dominated by corporations and bureaucracies, as depicted in dystopian science fiction films like Rollerball and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-four. Joel Bakan argued in The Corporation, corporations in law are human, and, based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Diseases, sociopaths. It means they have no feelings, or remorse about what they do to their employees. Dispassionate, “logical”, Artificial Intelligence has no feelings either, other than as bots artificially faking it.

There’s a story about a prisoner who was tortured by the Gestapo in World War 2, but divulged nothing. Eventually the Gestapo officer said, I have a glass eye, and if you can tell me which one it is, you can go free. Your left eye, the prisoner replied. You are right, the officer said, but how did you know that, to which the prisoner replied, its your only eye with a glint of humanity in it. It seems management science, scientifically and artificially, is inexorably moving us into Max Weber’s iron domes, filled with faceless, nameless, petty bureaucrats only doing their jobs, in Adolf Eichmann’s words, in which there is not a glint of humanity, just a grinding forward towards organizing and control for efficiency and profit for a few. In the process, we lose what makes us human and our humanity.

Narcotics Anonymous says repeating the same thing over again and expecting a different outcome is insane. I would say making frogs jump from buildings when you already know how that ends is stupid. As the evidence about outcomes shows, most change initiatives are stupid, yet we keep on repeating the same mistakes expecting a different outcome.

Carlo Cipolla wrote smart people do things benefiting themselves and everyone else, helpless people do things benefiting others at their own expense, bandits do things benefiting themselves at others’ expense, and stupid people do things at their own and others’ expense. His 5th Law of Stupidity states stupidity has dangerous consequences. Making frogs or robots repeatedly jump from buildings despite knowing the outcome in advance, is either banditry out of self-interest, or stupid, and both leave casualties in its wake. What we need is more human intelligence in bringing about change. What trips that up isn’t bad planning or lack of ideas, but the complexity of human nature and messiness of human interrelationships and interactions, which, as things stand, we don’t teach and therefore ignore. Instead, we stubbornly and stupidly plod along with planning, leading, organizing, and control.