“Institutions usually remain inscrutable to those operating within them—like water to fish.” writes Joseph Henrich, Harvard’s Chair of Human Evolutionary Biology. “Because cultural evolution generally operates subtly and outside conscious awareness, people rarely understand how or why their institutions work or even that they ’do’ anything.”
Organizations are institutions of collective action. They are designed to produce specific, repeatable processes through the creation of specialized roles, norms, rituals and behaviors. This is what creates the culture shock when someone starts out in a new place, and also the social cues they use to start conforming and fitting in.
It’s also why whenever we set out to lead change, we’re sure to encounter resistance. All of those subtle forces built up over time are designed to support existing behaviors and norms. To bring genuine transformation about, we need to shift from a manager’s mindset rooted in the status quo, to a changemaker mindset that can shift it to another direction.
Shift 1: From Consensus Building to Coalition Building
Good managers build consensus. They communicate objectives clearly and make sure everyone knows their role in achieving them. As noted above, they create norms, rituals and expectations for behaviors that make up the formal and informal governance structures which enable complex collective action. Everyone needs to know what to expect and what’s expected of them, or coordination breaks down.
That’s why calls to eliminate hierarchies and, as management guru Gary Hamel has put it, “bust bureaucracy”, have fared so poorly. Hierarchies exist in almost every form of society because they help to coordinate collective action. To wit, Wharton Professor Ronnie Lee’s research into game software developers found that the number of levels of bureaucracy have actually increased significantly over the last 50 years to handle increased complexity.
Yet when we need to switch directions all of those governance structures, many of which we aren’t even aware of, act against us. To create lasting, pervasive change, we need to change not only the incentive structures but the norms, rituals and expectations that underlie them and that support the status quo.
That’s why building consensus around change is unlikely, if not impossible. You need to build a smaller coalition of people who are already enthusiastic about change and can begin to build new norms, rituals and expectations. That’s how you build the traction you need to eventually hit a tipping point that can bring about genuine transformation.
Shift 2: From Working In An Atmosphere Of Predictability To One Of Uncertainty
Good organizations thrive on predictability. They deliver a consistent product to customers and partners, provide a stable workplace for employees and are good citizens in their communities. This is largely the function of middle management, which play an essential role enforcing and maintaining the norms, rituals and behaviors that can deliver predictability in a complex environment.
To understand how, consider what happened when Google Founder Larry Page decided to eliminate layers of middle management. As Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao explain in The Friction Project, it was a disaster. Managers had dozens of direct reports, communication and coordination completely broke down. It became impossible to get things done.
But when you’re trying to do what’s new and different, predictability is a dangerous illusion. If you haven’t done something before, you simply don’t know how things are going to go. You need to learn to embrace uncertainty, expect things to go wrong and make sure you leave yourself room for error. Make no mistake, there will be failures along the way.
The truth is that the next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all because it always arrives out of context. Great innovations not only change the world, the world changes them as well. One thing pundits rarely tell you about innovation, transformation and change is that to do it well you need to learn to get comfortable with a certain amount of confusion.
Shift 3: From A Focus On Execution To A Focus On Exploration
Good managers are like good engineers. They understand the machinery of the organization and they make sure all of the gears are well oiled and in good working order. They fix problems, replace what’s broken, keep everything moving forward and try to improve things incrementally. But they never question the machine or its purpose.
But to create something new and different, you need to explore. As Kevin Ashton, who first came up with the idea for RFID chips, wrote in his book, How to Fly A Horse, “Creation is a long journey, where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead.” You start out with no idea where you will end up. That takes courage even in the best conditions.
But in an organizational context, exploration means that you need to question the norms, rituals and behaviors that support operational excellence. What’s more, because you are working in an atmosphere of uncertainty in which there is no guaranteed payoff, there is no way to substantiate that the benefits will be worth the costs.
In researching my book Mapping Innovation, I found that the one thing that all great innovative organizations had in common was that they had a disciplined process for finding new problems to solve. They were different in almost every other way—and even had different ways of discovering new problems—but all had that same commitment.
It’s a fairly simple equation. If you don’t explore, you won’t discover. If you don’t discover you won’t invent. And if you don’t invent, you will be disrupted.
Shifting Between Mindsets
Most of the time, we operate with a manager mindset and that works fine. We build consensus and execute with predictable outcomes. Our colleagues are motivated, customers are satisfied and everybody is happy. In an era of disruption, however, it’s only a matter of time until we need to adapt and drive transformation. That’s never easy.
To pull it off we need to shift from a manager mindset to a changemaker mindset in which we no longer assume an environment of predictability but explore unknowns in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Not everybody will be willing to make the journey with us, so rather than relying on a consensus, we will need to build a coalition and leave some people behind.
Effective leaders need to master both mindsets and mode shift between them. Clearly, we need to pursue change, but that doesn’t mean we can just abandon day-to-day operations, which require a stable environment to coordinate and execute complex tasks. At the same time, if we try to pursue change with that same manager mindset, we will surely fail.
We need to internalize the fact that these two mindsets are not in conflict with one another. In fact, they support each other to some extent. Change always involves a certain amount of disruption, so benefits from the atmosphere of stability and psychological safety which norms, rituals and existing behaviors can provide. In a similar vein, without change, everyday operations will eventually fail to compete.
Leading transformation isn’t something most leaders do well. If you want to be among the few that can succeed, the first thing you need to change is your mindset.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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