But we need to go further than this simple anecdote, and show in what way the reduction of an organization to the sum of the individual attitudes of its members, or of some of its members, can produce the paralysing and perverse effects that we have just talked about. Let us return to the transport company which was mentioned in the introduc- tion. It now finds itself faced with growing competition, mainly inter- modal, especially in relation to its high contribution customers. In answer to their continual demands for more speed, more punctuality, more effi- ciency, the company has developed a technical tool that the whole world sees as providing remarkable performance. It has even “adjusted” its office hours so as to offer its customers a regularity and reliability to which they attach a great deal of importance. And yet everybody seems united in acknowledging, both inside and outside the company, that the service which accompanies this technical excellence is poor and in any case nowhere near the expectations of passengers. In particular, the level of personnel accompanying customers on their journeys – the inspectors – who, as their name indicates, check that everybody is in order, show little enthusiasm for entering into contact with them and a fortiorifor promot- ing the company through behaviour towards encouraging commercial openings. They even have a tendency to “disappear” as soon as the situ- ation becomes complicated, after an incident, a delay, a disturbance – leaving customers to look after themselves and thus provoking a climate of irritation which has often been highlighted by the press.
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Of course, the company’s management became worried and arranged for these agents, as indeed for other categories of personnel, to take part in huge programmes for “training on service attitudes” in which every- body is seen to explain and demonstrate the need to modify their way of managing relationships with customers in the direction of greater availability. However, these programmes were not a great success and did not have a huge impact on passenger satisfaction, plus they even added to the deterioration in the company’s social climate, already marked by repeated social actions among the inspectors. Management interpreted this response as a very negative sign, showing, if proof was really needed, that these categories were closed to any change, and the agents themselves took refuge behind increasingly passive avoidance behaviours, only seeming to take an interest in optimal management of their personal lives – in this case the possibility of going home in the evening as often as possible – and the continual rise in their financial gains, helped in all this by union organizations who were only too pleased to be involved.
So what is the origin of the misunderstanding and failure in this attempt at change? Once again, a wrong apprehension of what an organization really is, reducing it to a set of individual attitudes which have to rely on the good will – or in this case the bad will – of the actors involved. In doing this, we have not taken into consideration this reality that we clearly see, as we move forward, is a crucial issue of change and yet at the same time so very difficult to grasp and accept. Here it is the complexity of the surroundings in which the inspector finds himself, his context, which has been neglected.
This complexity can be quick to assert itself in this way, immediately indicating that it corresponds to the real organization, the one that needs to be taken into account in the process of change: the inspector is on his own in front of a customer whose needs can only be exacerbated when the situation becomes disturbed. Not only will he express a profound and sometimes aggressive discontent, but in addition he will be hungry for information allowing him to reorganize his time, let his friends know, and so on. However, it is the inspector who is accountable for everything that happens in the company without any possibility of passing on the responsibility for problems to other people, to whom the customer does not have access and about whom he knows nothing. As a humorous illustration here, when the company asks its inspectors to give information to customers, it might have just the same results by reversing the situation. One side has no more information than the other, especially when customers nowadays can use their mobile
phones to obtain information that is fuller and more reliable than that available – with great difficulty and with no particular guarantee of reliability – to the inspector.
In fact, this inspector, rather like his colleagues in reception, is living in a compartmentalized organization, where each party takes decisions without worrying about their effects on other parties or even on the whole set-up.31 Each of these decisions can be justified, legitimated, dictated by the desire to satisfy the customer, and yet its final result may be catastrophic. The same can be said of the choice between punctual- ity and connections that every transport company knows so well: when a train or airplane is late, must the others be made to wait so that those who are the victims of this lateness can catch their next means of trans- port? Or, on the contrary, is it important to privilege the network’s overall punctuality, so as not to lay lateness upon lateness? Each of such choices can be justified. But however that may be, in the company being used as an example here, not only is the inspector not informed, but he also does not know on what criteria the decision will be based.
And when such criteria have been drawn up in common, which is sometimes the case, it is unusual for them to be applied, as those who are in charge prefer to keep their autonomy, their uncertainty, and therefore their power. An inspector who wants to keep travellers informed thus runs the risk of being overruled by a decision contradict- ing what he thought he could announce and justify.
The same can also be said for station masters who are assessed on the punctuality of departures from their station. So when an incident occurs during a journey and the inspector asks the manager of the next station to call in the forces of order, there is little chance that his request will be heard and executed. Promises will be made to him but not kept, reinforcing his sentiment of isolation and abandonment. It is evident that the problems confronting these inspectors are a long way from those that a strategy for change, anchored on service attitudes, or even attitudes alone, would be likely to handle successfully.
What is revealed here, more fundamentally, is a non-listening mech- anism which results from the priority given to the rule on reality, or confusion between the two. Some think that by producing “good” rules, they are doing their work and they devote all their energy and intelli- gence to this; others feel confusedly that things shouldn’t be this way, but find it difficult to assess the situation: firstly, they do not have enough distance for that; and, secondly, if they had this distance, it could sometimes be dangerous to make reference to it. For in all bureau- cratic environments, the universalist and egalitarian rhetoric condemns Change, Yes, but Change What? 101
all sense of identity, and therefore adaptation of the rule, even if this is, on a daily basis, the condition for the organization’s survival. Doing something is good. Saying something is to expose oneself to reproach in the case of a problem. One cannot expect actors placed in this situ- ation to always live it positively. This explains a few explosions – less easy for unions to control when they themselves are far from the reality.
In the case under discussion, an incorrect interpretation of what an organization really is, the hasty and protective simplification, the more general refusal of complexity, are going to produce perverse effects:
results which not only do not correspond to officially designated objec- tives, but which also aggravate the wrongs that they are supposed to remedy. In the situation we are looking at, one could call this the
“vicious circle of discontentment”. The less the inspectors are taken into account in certain decisions, for the reason that they do not directly concern them – confusion between appearance and reality, ignorance of the systemic aspect – the more they are persuaded that their company is rejecting them, which is no doubt false in human terms, and yet true in organizational terms. However, it is that and only that which counts for actors who always have more of a feeling for what is real than those who manage them. This results for them in behaviours of withdrawal, of non-investment in work – for which in addition they are severely criticized, with the backing of surveys on real time of work. In such a context, when their “attitudes” are called on to palliate the organiza- tion’s inadequacies, they come to the conclusion that they are being made fools of, and use their situation of strength to always ask for more, particularly in terms of organizing their personal lives, their working hours and time off. In brief, they play on protest as compensation for organizational ignorance, supported vigorously by union organizations who are only too ready to capitalize on such mechanisms.
This is how conservatism and opposition to progress flourish and prosper in these organizations, where everybody complains that it is impossible to get them to move forward, but where everybody passes the buck. On one side, management departments throw back the failure of attempts at change any old how onto agents who are themselves par- ticularly attached to their privileges and onto their union organizations which feed on this in the proper sense of the term;32on the other, the personnel concerned are made extremely suspicious by the fundamen- tal lack of knowledge of the reality shown by those who are inviting them to change. There is often only one way out of this sort of situation – a crisis with all that that entails in the way of drama, financial cost and above all human cost.
We will have the opportunity to return to this case in more detail, in particular when evoking the possibilities of changing the way the cards are dealt. But for the moment if offers us a different vision of what an organization is, of what must be the focus of all attention when things are to be changed.
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