Learning for a Change

So what is the deeper explanation for the failure of corporate change efforts?

At the deepest level, I think that we're witnessing the shift from one age to another. The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature. I've been thinking about this shift for 25 years or more: We need to realize that we're a part of nature, rather than separate from nature.

Think about any environmental problem that we face, from global climate and resource issues to population crises. Or look at the problems that seem to afflict people in organizations: Why are contemporary institutions so inhumane? And somewhere in the middle, between environmental issues and personal issues, there are institutional issues: Why do we view our organizations as rigid hierarchies rather than as communities of practice?

Whether you're talking at the macro, the personal, or the institutional level, the questions all point in the same direction: The real character of an age is evident in how it conditions us to think, and how it conditions us to think determines how it conditions us to act. The thinking and acting of the past 200 years -- nurtured in Europe, accelerated in the United States, diffused throughout the world today -- is a machine mind-set. That mind-set directly affects how we see organizations -- and, therefore, how we think about creating change in those organizations.

What implications does a machine mind-set have for companies that seek to undergo change?

In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine -- a machine for making money. That's a key point in Arie de Geus's book, "The Living Company" (Harvard Business School Press, 1997). Ironically, the word "company" couldn't be more at odds with the idea of a machine. "Company" has roots that go back long before the Industrial Age. In fact, it has the same root as the word "companion": It means "the sharing of bread."

Somehow, during the course of the Industrial Revolution, this very humane sense of "company" changed, and the company became more and more machinelike. For the most part, seeing the company as a machine has worked. There are people who design this machine: They put it together and get it up and working. They are founders. There are people who operate or control the machine: We call them managers. The machine also has owners, and when it operates correctly, it produces income for those owners. It's all about control: A good machine is one that its operators can control -- in the service of its owners' objectives.

The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it. You hire a mechanic, who trades out old parts that are broken and brings in new parts that are going to fix the machine. That's why we need "change agents" and leaders who can "drive change."

But go back and consider all of the evidence that says that most change efforts aren't very successful. Here is our first plausible explanation: Companies are actually living organisms, not machines. That might explain why it's so difficult for us to succeed in our efforts to produce change. Perhaps treating companies like machines keeps them from changing, or makes changing them much more difficult. We keep bringing in mechanics -- when what we need are gardeners. We keep trying to drive change -- when what we need to do is cultivate change. Surprisingly, this mechanical mind-set can afflict those who seek "humane" changes through "learning organizations" just as much as it can afflict those who drive more traditional changes, such as mergers and reorganizations.

Where, specifically, does the mechanical approach go wrong in effecting change?

The easiest way to see this is to look at our interpersonal relationships. In our ordinary experiences with other people, we know that approaching each other in a machinelike way gets us into trouble. We know that the process of changing a relationship is a lot more complicated than the process of changing a flat tire on your car. It requires a willingness to change. It requires a sense of openness, a sense of reciprocity, even a kind of vulnerability. You must be willing to be influenced by another person. You don't have to be willing to be influenced by your damn car! A relationship with a machine is fundamentally a different kind of relationship: It is perfectly appropriate to feel that if it doesn't work, you should fix it. But we get into real trouble whenever we try to "fix" people.