How do you change an institution set in motion long before your time?
Yesterday, the president of an old university asked me a critical question for someone in his position.
“How do you go about changing an institution that is set in its ways?”
Clearing my head with a throwaway too academic even for an academic—that the stubborn refusal to change is the very definition of an institution—I pivot to a line of inquiry I’ve elusively pursued since grad school:
“Institutions resist change because the individuals who created them are long gone. There’s no one left to negotiate the assault.”
Because it remains in our grasp (at least for a moment), transforming a creation of our own making seems child’s play compared to an inheritance we’ve fallen into from a great height. Because its creators are by now effectively ghosts, who will broker the terms of their withdrawal?
“Then what can you do with an institution you inherit from a ghost?”
“The only thing to do,” I tell him: “Blow it up and begin again.”
Let me clarify that when this pithy bit tripped off my tongue, it might have sounded more like the following:
“The surest way to break the intractable bonds of any institution—or individual for that tmatter—is to set in motion a disorienting dilemma designed to rattle its foundation. Imagine a crisis so explosive it forces all in its wake to question the uncritically assimilated allegiance they’ve been paying to sacrosanct ways of working as long as anyone can remember.”
In other words, and for those unfamiliar with Transformative Learning Theory, taking something apart is an apt place to start when softening up hardened institutions—not to mention people—on the way to remaking them.
Yesterday’s conversation brought to mind my first meeting with the CEO of a Swiss industrial I met when working in Europe. My mind has chosen to remember the dialog as some semblance of the following:
“Scott, I was hired to bring together for the first time in 180 years a dozen or so business units that have indepedently operated almost as long,” he begins. “But now that I have taken the measure of my division heads, I consider my task a fool’s errand. They are too wedded to their own objectives to make room for mine. Their incentives have locked them into distant orbits around me. As a collective they are so self-absorbed that if you ask them what they want from me, they’ll tell you it’s best I just keep out of their way.”
As would be yours, my antennae are standing straight up at this point. Here is the CEO of a multi-billion dollar concern confessing he can’t control the organization he’s inherited.
“You, on the other hand, are perfectly positioned to succeed where I have failed.”
So begins the old rope where Tonto tells his partner they don’t call him The Lone Ranger for nothing. But even newer to the rodeo than the CEO, I can only purse my brow in faux consent as he reveals the silver lining of his conspiracy:
“When the company began automating its operations, each division designed its own technology footprint. It made perfect sense as we were de-centralized in those days. But now that we’re consolidating, the local systems that made the divisions successful only reinforce the autonomy I’ve been hired to break up. I’m asking you to dismantle the systems and reconstitue them as a single organization.
“You want me to blow up your company,” I did not say.
“In a manner of speaking, I do,” he did not reply.
Here’s my question to you:
In your life, or thus far in your career, might you have built up uncritically assimilated points of view, imperceptible postures, invisible habits, ways of working, ways of thinking you cannot easily point to?
“Oh yeah,” you might be thinking. “I know that about me; I own that; I became that; and I embrace it”
Asked another way, have you, without realizing it, made yourself into an institution of one? And if so, as the maker of your institute, do you still have your hands on the potter’s wheel? Or has that remnant of clay, like so much in work and life that eludes us through indifference—coming in and out of focus, moving on or out as we do the same but in another direction—gone the way of all creations and fled the battlements?
If, as the survey asks, you have answered ‘Yes’ to any of the above questions, please consider this one:
Isn’t it time you created a disorienting dilemma (or two) of your own?
This post is from a LinkedIn Newsletter called Human Changing. You can access the entire series here.
