Change versus Improvement

In the media, I often read or hear about tax 'reform', education 'reform' or health care 'reform' etc. And whenever I see this I think that whoever is pushing this latest reform is confusing their intention or desired outcome with the process. Whatever they are doing isn't a reform unless it results in an improvement by some measure. Until then it is simply a change, no more, no less. And change in itself is not intrinsically valuable. Change always involves costs, so unless there is a counter-balancing benefit, it is actually bad.

This is equally true in business and in the public sector. Managers often think that  there is something praiseworthy just in doing 'something'. A new manager commences and thinks they have to prove themselves so they make a lot of changes and then congratulate themselves on how 'proactive' and 'innovative' they are, regardless of the costs to the business or the paucity of benefits.

Somehow organisations always manage to fill their strategic plans with dozens if not hundreds of different actions (i.e. changes) regardless of the need for them. Activity replaces improvement as a measure of value-added.

However, I contend that the best manager is the one who achieves the best results with the minimum of change and whose major changes are the elimination of unnecessary activity. But such a manager would be unlikely to be rewarded by the organisation for which they work. No-one is likely to be impressed if there is no actual activity they can point to which as led to the results they are  getting.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that there is often no measurement of the baseline costs and benefits, so if a manager makes a change there is nothing to compare it with to determine whether the change was beneficial or damaging. This means that managers with a propensity for changing things can often point to lots and lots of changes they have made, but would be hard put to demonstrate any actual benefits from those changes. But at least their own bosses are impressed by the flurry of activity.

I have said elsewhere that a prerequisite for excellence in any activity is stability.It is difficult to become a master of anything that is constantly changing, where part of the effort that you could be putting into doing is diverted into learning the latest changes. This doesn't rule out change completely. However what it does highlight is that change needs to be judicious, it needs to be well thought out, it needs to be properly implemented and finally if it doesn't yield the expected results it needs to be scrapped.

It is only when changes are made in this way that they are likely to result in improvements rather than just pointless activity.

Manager or Cosmetician?

Sometimes being a manager appears to be a matter of making it look like something has been achieved, even when it hasn't. And that is one of the reasons why organisations  may appear to achieve their strategic plans and yet never actually improve in any meaningful way.

To begin with, there is cosmetic change rather than actual change. Where a change would disrupt the status quo that managers are happy with, they may massage the details of the change, water it down and put their own controls in place in such a way as to make it appear that they have embraced the change when in fact they have sabotaged it. And as a result, it may appear that a change has been ineffective when in fact it has been poorly implemented if at all. If a person has a skin cancer then you can treat it medically or you can conceal it with makeup. Sadly, in many cases, managers will take the latter course rather than deal with the reality of a situation that requires serious attention, giving the appearance that something has changed when things have remained fundamentally the same.

Paradoxically some of the most enthusiastic adopters of the change may do the most (unintentionally) to ensure it is ineffective. Like Procrustes with his bed, they stretch or amputate aspects of the change to suit their particular view of how things should be and in the process eliminate critical factors required for its success. Even this may be an application of the cosmetic art: their enthusiastic support of the change may be more about being seen to support it than about truly being committed to implementing it (in fact they may not even understand what the change entails.)

Cosmetic skills also come into play in evaluating whether efforts towards a particular goal have been effective. The goal posts may be shifted so that what was actually achieved is now within an acceptable range. Or what the result is compared to may be changed to present the best outcome: comparison with the last quarters figures, last years figures, segmenting results so that it can be claimed that failure only occurred in one area...there are any number of tools in a managers toolbox to make a bad result look good.

When it comes to the final evaluation of a project, the skills of a mortician may come into play: giving something that is actually dead the appearance of life. When there are a number of dimensions on which a program or project could be evaluated, even if it is a failure then there may have been success after a fashion on a couple of dimensions so those are elevated to being the important ones and publicized while the important dimensions on which failure occurred are downplayed.

Such tactics create dangers for the business and the only way to protect against them is to clearly define up front and unambiguously which outcomes are important and how they are going to be measured, and how comparisons will be made. And where changes are going to be made, to require managers to document how they have implemented those changes, why they have implemented them in that way and to justify their 'modifications' in terms of the intent of the change. It might even be the case that you need to ensure up front that managers really do understand what the intent of the change is and that satisfying that intent must take precedence over anything else (protecting turf, preserving pet ideas etc) and that in the end they will be judged by whether that intent has been met not by how much 'activity' they have put into it.

Cosmetics may be about concealing flaws, about making the ugly appear beautiful, or about making what is merely pretty appear beautiful. But it is always about making something appear to be other than it is, to hide reality.

And when you hide from reality, the risk is that sooner or later reality will sneak up on you and stab you in the back.

Planning with Intent - the Mindful, Reflective Approach

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong

~ H.L. Mencken

A good deal of the corporate planning I have observed is like a ritual rain dance; it has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does. Moreover, it seems to me that much of the advice and instruction related to corporate planning is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather.
~ James B. Quinn Strategies for Change

Sometimes when managers do strategic plans, what they end up with is a list of planned actions, categorised into areas such as Customer Services, Systems etc. However, very rarely to they state explicitly and in detail what is the Intent of the planned action - what is it expected to achieve. Unless we know why we are doing something we cannot tell whether or not it has achieved the desired objective since there isn't one. All we can say is that it was we intended to do X and we did X. But whether this was a good thing to do remains open to question. We need first to identify what it is we are trying to change.

For example, we may want to change some metric of staff satisfaction. We may want the average score to increase. However, this isn't really what we want. A metric is simply a measurement. What we want to change is what the measurement purports to measure. So let's suppose that we actually want to change staff satisfaction. Then we need to be sure what we understand by 'staff satisfaction' - are we looking for fewer complaints? greater engagement? less turnover? Are we trying to engender an emotional state that will see positive changes in such areas?

Whatever it is we are looking for, we may first need to understand what it is that causes the behavior we want to either increase or diminish. We need to have a 'theory of causality': that these causes result in these outcomes. Based on our 'theory of causality' we can then develop strategies that we think will cause the outcomes we want.

This is important for two reasons.

Firstly, by identifying the desired outcome rather than just an activity, we have a better chance of seeing whether or not that activity achieved anything of value.

And secondly, if the desired outcome isn't achieved but we did the planned activity then it may lead to us having to revise our theory-of-causality. Note that I say 'may'. It may be that the planned activity was implemented poorly, that it was transparently manipulative, that other factors intervened to derail it. But if none of these occurred and the planned activity went off, well, went off as planned, but the desired outcome wasn't achieved then we need seriously to look at whether we have truly understood the causal mechanisms involved.

Maybe our understanding of human nature  doesn't match the reality of how people really behave, what they want and how they respond to various changes in the work environment. Maybe there is a delayed reaction: maybe the change that has been put in place will take longer to have an effect than we anticipated and we haven't failed so much as haven't succeeded as quickly as we thought we would.

The point of all this is that we can take a simple mindless approach:

-  Let's do X.

-  We did X.

-  Good job!

versus a mindful, reflective approach:

- What do we want to achieve?

- Based on what we believe to be true (theory-of-causality) what would we have to do to achieve that?

- Did the desired outcome occur?

- If not, why not? Did we implement poorly? Was our time frame too optimistic? Was our theory-of-causality wrong?

- What do we do now?

The mindless approach may give us a false sense of achievement: "we did it!". But with the mindful, reflective approach we gain a more nuanced understanding of the situation, we gain a clearer understanding of what works and what doesn't and we make genuine changes that matter, rather than cosmetic changes that don't.