5. lastly, the outsourcing phenomena that encompass the four above characteristics and render them possible by placing the cost – and not only in financial terms – on the “environment”, that is, in more concrete terms on the customer.
To conclude, let us once again emphasize that these characteristics are found in all types of organization, as soon as this has a total or partial monopoly in place, whether this is de jureorde facto.
proof of such immobilism, it will indeed be difficult to envisage the slightest evolution. It is while on the subject of such mechanisms that Chris Argyris speaks of “defensive organizational routines”.3 Indeed in these endless discussions on change, certain people, whom one might consider to be very optimistic, see its necessity as well as the resistances which oppose it – the very start of the process: “A change of direction often starts when enough people talk about it, before really knowing what it is”, write Waterman, Peters and Phillips.4Experience makes one sceptical when faced with such a statement.
More generally, the diversity of literature on the subject is a record of such debates and hesitations on how to proceed. We will not be going over that here.5 We shall content ourselves with inventorying a few terms of discussion, emphasizing a certain number of deceptive illu- sions, and highlighting the point of agreement that gradually reveals itself – the importance of knowledge – listening and sharing of knowledge – as soon as one really wants to take action on organizations.
And first of all, what is it that legitimizes change, the nature of which most authors agree to be unnatural? In a word, we have already said it –
“crisis”, difficulty, malfunctions and, very often, urgency. Erhard Friedberg writes: “In brief, change is always ‘impossible’ in big and not so big organizations, and there are always a thousand good reasons for not changing, for not destabilizing the pillars of the existing way of doing things.”6This is echoed by the metaphor from the sports world,
“You don’t change a winning team.” One only starts making adjust- ments if the team has lost, if there is no other choice. It is enough to emphasize the reactive rather than proactive nature of change. It is rarely a process of anticipating or even accompanying transformations in the environment. It is always a reaction to symptoms where one must wait for them to become extremely serious before they trigger an action. “You don’t change a winning team” really means that even if the team plays badly, even if it shows obvious signs of weakness, victory – however provisional it may be – legitimizes its continued existence.
“One continues to govern solely in urgency”, points out a top French civil servant7 and former trade unionist, who was at the heart of the restructuring of regions in decline and sectors undergoing change.
When sometimes this is not the case, when one wants to overturn something that does not appear to be experiencing any particular prob- lem, one provokes astonishment and circumspection. And when the manager of the French judo team – an Olympic discipline in which France has been a brilliant example over recent decades – exclaims “You don’t change a winning team!”, the headline is shown across seven columns
Change, Yes, but Change What? 81 in the national daily sports paper.8 To the question that managers throughout the world ask themselves every day and that is put to him by the journalist, “French judo is successful in the very long term. Do you have a miracle recipe?”, he answers:
Never being satisfied with anything. If something works, it must be broken, otherwise one settles into routine. Unlike many federations, we have no hesitation in changing a winning team. That’s judo. We have a continual culture of combat. If you let yourself fall into rou- tine, you’re dead. You’re already behind.9
Basically, Rosabeth Moss Kanter says the same when she invites the American giants to make the effort to reappraise things before it is too late.10 This issue of the legitimacy of change was part of the writer’s personal experience when asked by the director of a big internation- ally successful company – a world leader in its market – to work on its organization in order to adapt it to what he saw as the future for its business. However powerful this executive may have been at the time, he had never succeeded in motivating his management people – even those who were closest to him – to accompany him in his approach. Everybody used the excellence of the company’s results against this.11
Nonetheless, any discussion on the difficulty of change, any implica- tion of other people’s responsibility in order to explain immobilism – and therefore the need for a crisis to make things possible – cannot form a blockage to the following concept, which I am convinced will be at the heart of future debates and therefore also at the heart of future difficulties: at the start of this new century and across a large part of Western Europe, organizational change (that is, actually trying to change what people do12) is perceived as a threat and indeed often as a step backwards. Since the resource became scarce concurrently with the customer’s victory, incessant recourse to the word “reform”, including where it is used to impose the observation that it is no longer possible today to offer what was guaranteed yesterday in terms of welfare pro- tection, retirement or, more seriously, general working conditions, has made the actors involved, and in particular the most deprived or weak- est, extremely distrustful and cautious. Setting against them a simple economic fatalism is not – or not any longer – enough to convince them, in the same way that denouncing their conservatism, their exag- gerated attachment to their “acquired benefits”, only serves, as shown by experience, to make them more radical.
As we will be seeing later on, it is in that sense that the teaching effort – which cannot be reduced to a communication effort since com- munication is a weak version of teaching – is crucial. This is so, in order not only to make the “necessities” more acceptable, since their legitimacy can always be disputed in terms of organization (for what, for whom does one work? What is the true end-purpose of the work and hence the organization?), but also to negotiate the terms and conditions of appli- cation with the actors themselves.
It is thus understandable how the necessary anticipation of the future in order to legitimize change, the difficulty in undertaking and imple- menting it even before the storm clouds are seen or understood by any- body else, can feed the current fascination for a leader and his “vision”.
I will return later on to this approach which I consider to be partly illusion. But it clearly highlights the paradox of modern organizations, in which nobody has the necessary room for manoeuvre for adjusting things while the “indicators” are good, at the very time when they should be getting ready, anticipating and even benefiting from the company’s healthy situation in order to undertake in peace and quiet what will have to be done later in storm and tempest. Since there is nothing “concrete” to justify such action, one counts on that quality of
“vision” which is literally impalpable to common mortals. And one could even say that counting on the executive’s “vision” or leadership in this manner goes against the trust that one might naturally place in the organization’s members, in terms of initiating a process of change as well as – why not, after all? – helping to achieve it successfully.
Unfortunately, trust is not part of the culture of elites nor even, through the system, of that of the troops. Everyone is used to looking towards the executive and his know-how, in normal times, or his vision, in times of crisis. And yet who has not noticed, only looking at the example of Air France, the necessity of long, hard and painful strike action, with occupation of runways, that is, affecting the work tool, in order to legit- imize the first true process of change undertaken by this company?
And, from having been at the heart of this process, I would like to emphasize how much the unions contributed to the definition of
“doing things differently”, the acknowledgement of its necessity and likewise its implementation, and was in fact a key factor for its success.
But things had to be pushed by events to actually get there!
Even when the necessity for change is recognized and accepted, the problem is still a long way from being resolved. Must one, as suggested by Michel Crozier, start by acting on the summit – although this deals specifically with the French situation – because of the difficulty here in
understanding that what is happening penalizes the overall evolution?13 Must change, to the contrary, be undertaken “in plants or departments a long way away from general management”, as suggested by a number of other writers,14in order to then be transmitted via capillarity? The answer is of course largely contextual. However, the question suggests taking one step further – observing that change also is systemic. We will be seeing, further on in this book,15that this can be thought out not only in terms of priorities but also in terms of levers, that is, points in the system on which one can act and where one can reasonably assume that, when combined with others, they will strengthen each other in order to produce change.
Is this the business of individuals or of organizations? In other words, does one need to change people, their “psychology”, their “mentality”, in order for organizations to evolve, or else does one first need to trans- form the organizations – here largely assimilated to structures – in order for individuals to adapt to them? Beer, Eisenstadt and Spector think that the first strategy is bound to fail, and that it is even one of the principal identifiable factors of immobilism. They write:
Most change programmes do not work because they are based on a fundamentally false premise. In fact, the theory explains that a change in individual attitudes leads to a more general evolution of behaviour. A change in behaviour, repeated hundreds of times by dif- ferent people, ends up by having an effect across the whole organi- zation. According to this model, change is like a conversion experiment. It is enough to inculcate the “right religion” in people for behavioural modifications to immediately follow … This theory is an accurate description of the other side of a change process. In fact, individual behaviour is very strongly fashioned by the role that the individual is made to play in the company. The most effective way of modifying behaviour is therefore to place individuals in a new orga- nizational context.16
Experience has shown me that these authors are right and I will try, in the following pages, to provide tools for constructing this “new organ- izational context”.
Other approaches recommend a combination of both levels – that of personal transformation and that of organizational transformation17– emphasizing that it is the transformation of individuals that leads to the transformation of organizations. It seems to me, however, that the less understanding one has of the complexity of the situations in which Change, Yes, but Change What? 83
they are evolving (that is, systems), the greater the burden for necessary change that is placed on individuals, on their psychology or their good- will, as described by Fitoussi and Rosanvallon:
It is also essential to understand the entanglement of situations and positions for different individuals in order to appreciate what may look like resistance to change. What is described as blockages in the company refers, in many cases, only to an insufficiently close analy- sis of the conflicting characteristics of individuals.18
Even if this can shock or surprise, it is less a question of asking the var- ious people involved to change their attitude or mindset and convinc- ing them to do things differently, than of finding the organizational levers for persuading them to behave differently. If change – in organ- izations, it is understood – were a matter of individual psychology or mentality, its implementation would be even more likely to be left to chance or indefinitely postponed. In the next chapter, when I show that actors do what they do because they are intelligent (in the sociological sense of the term) and that, at the end of the day, we have no problem with human stupidity but only with intelligence, this is not proof of a blissful optimism. Instead, it will emphasize the difficulties involved in change (since one can no longer tell meaningless stories to people), while at the same time demonstrating the possibilities.
If we listen and understand the rationality of actors – together with its systemic dimension – we will open out some paths for action. And yet such points for action, in order to be found outside of the global and megalomaniac plans that we were discussing earlier, presuppose the ful- filment of two conditions that our experience leads us to think of as essential. The first of these is a shared diagnosis of the problem or, to put it differently, the existence of a minimum of consensus between the organization’s members on the real nature of the problem that is revealed behind the symptoms. This shared diagnosis cannot only result in spontaneous discussion, simply by bringing the actors together around a table. It must be fed by what we will later describe as a “listening”
function by the organization and indeed its members. This paves the way for real discussion and helps to avoid the controversies and feelings of guilt which immediately block the process of change. The second condition, as I have already said, is to have enough trust in people to be able to ask them, once agreement has been reached on the problem, to play an active and dynamic part in drawing up solutions. How can one think that a meeting between the CEO and a consultant, even when
they are the most intelligent people in the world, could possibly take the place of the creativity of an organization’s members, provided they have been given the appropriate information? What is more, such an approach will subsequently give legitimacy to decisions that manage- ment will be called on to make with a view to establishing the imple- mentation of change.
If the observations drawn up in preceding chapters are correct, then our organizations must make profound and continual changes if they want to adapt to a world which has revolutionized them and will con- tinue to do so. No doubt this is why management literature produces every day an impressive catalogue of “new organizations”, new struc- tures, new concepts which interpret quite clearly the proliferation of ini- tiatives virtually everywhere in order to face up to the ever-increasing number of challenges. Even businesses in the “new world economy” do not escape this movement – between 1999 and 2000, eBay, Amazon.com and AOL announced deep-seated reorganizations, intended to adapt their organization to a market that was undergoing substantial changes.
In 2003, Microsoft did likewise – noting the erosion of its monopolistic position and trying to assess the consequences. From practice commu- nities to cooperation, presented as the key factor for cost cutting and continual improvement of quality, not a day goes past without the appearance on the market of new ideas and practices in terms of organ- ization. This consensus and proliferation result, at one and the same time, in pressure exerted on the organizations and hesitations in the responses made to such pressure. There is no longer a place today, as there was in the good old days of mass production or, more recently, in the times of triumphant Toyotism, for a dominant model that imposes itself and pro- vides a key guaranteeing performance under optimal conditions.
In fact, there is no longer any model at all that really focuses on the nature of the organizations that need to be set up, nor on their struc- tures, nor on how to steer them. At present, caution and good sense seem to have won the day by giving priority to the methodologies of steering change rather than to the substance which predefines what must exist.19 This position, although at first glance less reassuring for managers, is nonetheless far more realistic. It formally acknowledges the fact that organizations are now infinitely more varied than in the past, because they are no longer in a position to impose methods of operation on their markets, allowing them then to resolve their own problems, whether technical or human, rather than resolving those of their customers. They can no longer impose uniformity on an environment which now insists on individuality. The response to this Change, Yes, but Change What? 85
individuality is even more difficult to provide because the universes have themselves become more complex, the number of “individualities”
to be taken into consideration has never stopped rising alongside the simultaneous appearance of increasing numbers of contradictions between the end results that are needed in order to satisfy everybody.
Even “best practices”, so popular because they make it possible to learn from the experience of others, have become more methodological than substantive: in an article published by the Harvard Business Review, Jerry Stermin and Robert Choo20show how, in terms of change, com- panies could benefit enormously from the experience of non-profit organizations. Analysing what they call “the power of positive deviancy”, they tell the story of an association working to reduce mal- nutrition in Vietnamese children: having seen that the children of one village community seemed better fed and more healthy, they tried to find out why. They quickly realized that this community had different behaviour patterns, with regard to both what they ate and how often they ate. They therefore tried, with some success, to extend these deviant practices to the surrounding villages. However, they concluded that it was not the types of food – eating more or less fish or greens – which formed the basis of the problem, but the reasoning, that is, the demonstration that it was possible to do things differently from what tradition seemed to have established once and for all. In modern busi- ness language, we might call that experimentation.