The result is easy to picture: it rapidly became apparent that delivery of the notorious declaration was proving extremely difficult, if not actu- ally impossible in certain cases, causing the unfortunate paymaster in charge of delivering it to provide whoever applied for it with a “default declaration”, which in fact states the organizational impossibility of delivering the document in question, a declaration which is even more useless in that it does not authorize participation in the invitation to tender, even when this is issued by one of the bodies which has con- tributed to the above-mentioned default. This situation might well be qualified as grotesque.
Why such a stalemate in what was indeed an attempt at change focus- ing on a real problem which arises frequently for the customer/taxpayer?
Are those who made the decision unaware and are those who applied it irresponsible? Certainly neither one nor the other. Quite simply, each side believed that what was written into the rule would actually happen, and that action is produced by the text which defines it. This is a vision of action which can be described as bureaucratic or linear, as opposed to a strategic and systemic vision which I will define later and which is often very far removed from how managers reason, whether in the pub- lic or the private sector.
In reality, things turned out rather like this. Between the different organizations involved, there exist traditional rivalries which we will not be expanding on here, but which result in each side watching jealously over their autonomy and, if given the opportunity, with no hesitation in complicating the other side’s task in order to really convey their situation of dependency. To this can be added the jealousies linked to differences in official or non-official remunerations. The paymaster, in the system which has just been described, arouses a certain amount of animosity because the others, rightly or wrongly, feel that he is in a privileged position. From the moment that he is asked to be the sole point of contact for the requester, in a situation where he is dependent on others in order to reply to the request,these others will not be prepared to put the necessary enthusiasm and speed into the task. Even worse, and here the example invites reflection on the perverse effects of uncon- trolled action, from the bidding company’s point of view, one finds a situation far worse than the one which was hopefully being remedied:
in the earlier situation, however painful the procedures might be, the requester still retained a certain level of control over the process. He could go to the offices, pressurize or even plead. In this new situation, not only is it more difficult to obtain the necessary papers, but the requester cannot even have access to those who deliver them.
His degree of control over the situation is singularly affected and finally thequalityof the service provided has deteriorated. This is not a mech- anism affecting only the system which has just been described.25
What is really at stake, therefore, is not the “right rules”, those saying how things oughtto be. We should always bear in mind that, when talk- ing of action, the conditional tense has only negative virtues. It is used more for self-protection than for getting things moving. This does not imply that rules are pointless – after all, what is an organization without rules? – nor that they cannot be used as levers,but rather that one must get away from visions that are mechanistic, simplistic and blinkered.
And the same can be said for the “right structures”, those defining where each person should be and what they should be doing. This approach to change as a mechanical exercise ends up in the same dead-ends, one might almost say the same lottery, so random is the final result with so much remaining to be done for whoever wants to control it.
Formal organization and real organization
Michael Hammer and Steven Stanton give a very illustrative example of this observation in analysing the reasons for failure in the transition from a conventional organization to a process organization. They observe that this change was conducted, at least to start with, by
“redesigning” the company’s structures, and that this strategy resulted in a dead-end to the extent, as they put it, that, even when the design was good, the real organization was opposed to it. They observe that “the problem was not the designof the process, but the fact that the power continued to be held by the former functional departments”.26The sim- ple fact of distinguishing, as do these authors, between organizationand real organizationtells us more than all those sophisticated theories on the extraordinary abstraction of structures and organization charts.
Despite their appearance of solidity – no doubt relating to the fact that they are relatively easy to understand, to put into writing, and therefore to develop with a mere stroke of the pen; at least in theory, since we then arrive at the problem of implementation – they are still a long way away from the reality of those involved. The fact that such theories are pre- ferred can have dramatic consequences to the extent that managers feel that by working in this way they are doing something useful, while those directly concerned are convinced that nobody is interested in what has meaning for them, that nobody is really listening to them.
In fact, action which focuses on the priority of structures relates to intellectual routine, and does not therefore in itself produce change.
Change, Yes, but Change What? 95
On the one hand, we know perfectly well that we can give an organiza- tion 20 different structures and finally have a high continuity in the methods of functioning; on the other hand, as we will see further on in this book, modifying the structures is not in any way a preliminary to true change: usually, it makes do with being the statement ex postrather thanex ante. It relates far more to “active inertia” than to a true action of change.27Such inertia means that one is only interested in what one is used to seeing, hearing or talking about. A memo, a follow-up letter, the publication of a new charter, are all part of the routines to which people no longer pay great attention but which fulfil the function of action, satisfying everybody until they are suddenly awoken by the principle of reality: for example, “profit warnings” in the United States plays the same role as sudden and uncontrolled strikes in France.
This is what a major insurance company tried out when, at the time of a merger, it wanted to group together into a single entity the bank- ing activities which, until then, had been split between four different establishments, operating in several European countries. In one of these countries, already marked by language and cultural problems, this involved merging two banks which were apparently totally opposed:
bank A was perceived as being a “bank for the wealthy”, in which actors at all levels had wide margins for manoeuvre, allowing free rein to their entrepreneurial leanings; bank B, on the other hand, formerly a public savings bank, was looked on as a “bank for the poor”, displaying a man- agement that was far more standardized, which its own members described as military.
In appearance, however, the structures of both banks were almost the same and resembled the picture that can be seen across Europe: division into regions, into areas, into districts and into branches. The objective drawn up by the person responsible for the merger and his team was, in a relatively short time, to arrive at an organization that functioned in a uniform fashion, which was expected to legitimize the adoption of a new trading name, a new logo – in brief, a new image. These managers therefore threw themselves into drawing up a single structure, ironing out the few differences that existed between the two initial establish- ments and, above all, they started the development of a package of strict, complex and detailed procedures, intended to produce the uni- formity of operation that they sought. The outcome was the develop- ment of a multitude of working groups, each created whenever a new problem arose. The energy involved was considerable and nobody had even thought about calculating the time spent on the process, so distant did this seem from everybody’s preoccupations. Meanwhile, successful
completion of the merger – that is, harmonization, bringing everything into conformity with the general model – appeared to be the guarantee for the success of the operation.
After a few months, the first anxieties came to light: first of all, nobody seemed able to ensure overall coherence across all the projects and sites which had been started up without anybody knowing either the exact number or topics; and also the few on-the-spot observations that were carried out from time to time demonstrated that everybody had their own individual way of doing things, so that what should have been a procedure of integration finally turned out to be a disintegration of the new entity: the more rules were made specific and restrictive, the less the local actors appeared to care about them, except to highlight their abstract and inappropriate nature to their managers.
What had happened? Once again, the real organization had raised its head. A survey carried out as requested by the managers rapidly brought to light the fact that, in the traditional system, particularly in bank A, the key duo, which in fact shaped the bank’s reality, was that formed by the district manager and the branch manager. The first, responsible for the application by the second of directives and policies drawn up by the bank, in the conventional system had a few margins for manoeuvre which were quite useful in negotiations of the operational manager. Not only was he involved in appraising the branch manager, but he also had a function of supporting him with regard to commercial policy and, even more important, a possibility of adjusting the objectives fixed for the branch in line with his appraisal of specific situations. The relation- ship between these two partners was therefore deep, but at the same time varied and thus in contradiction of the path to uniformity followed by the new team.
When the new organization was put in place, with its package of structures, rules and injunctions intended to produce the non- differentiation that was so sought after, the stakeholders had not accepted without grumbling the move from the situation of actors, which was theirs in the previous system, to that of factorsto which they now found themselves reduced. Everybody took hold of the new standards and used them, not in the way intended by those who had issued them, but in line with their own situation in the local game. Identical rules only ended up creating different systems and, as the bank’s general manager remarked philosophically after the presentation on the results of this work, “For the mechanics, we were good; but perhaps we neglected the human aspect.” The problem is that one does not exist without the other, and that an action for change focused on the first does not make Change, Yes, but Change What? 97
it possible to anticipate or control what the second proceeds to do with it. Never has the expression “putting the cart before the horse” had so much meaning, never has the reversal of priorities been so blatantly obvious with all its related consequences in terms of wasting human and financial resources.