âIf you to want truly to understand something, try to change it,â the psychologist and organizational development pioneer Kurt Lewin is said to have declared. Over the course of the past few decades, my colleagues and I have tried to change numerous organizationsâfrom small startups to well-established mid-sized businesses to massive multinational enterprises.
In the process, I have indeed come to understand a thing or two about these strange beasts. It's not the most elegant way to learn, especially when starting out, since the true nature of an entity is often revealed as it resists efforts at transformation. It's only when you start trying to move the pieces that you see how they're all connected, what keeps them in place, and what animates them. And more often than not, what you discover forces you to rethink your approach. I'm still learning, to this day, but what I can say with confidence is that the more I've learned about what an organization is, the more effective I've become as an agent of change. It is my hope that this learned knowledge may enable me to reverse that quotation for my readers and help you to avoid at least some of the trial and error. If you want to truly change something, try to understand it first. Otherwise, you won't get very far. At this point in this book, I invite you to pause and consider the question, What is an organization?
Many leaders think an organization is just a business, and their job is simply to run it. If only it were so simple. In fact, the strictly âbusinessâ part of an enterpriseâthe shared work we do to develop, sell, and deliver a product or service to customersâis only part of the endeavor. (That doesn't mean it's not criticalâwe'll come back to this definition of a business and how to optimize it in Chapter 2, when we introduce the Business TriangleÂź.) If you're a one-person company doing everything yourself, the business may be all you need to focus on. But the minute you want to grow or scale your company, you have to do something else. You have to deal with people. You must persuade people to join you and motivate them to come along on the journey with you. You must figure out how to inspire people to cooperate, to collaborate, and to become leaders in their own right. And, newsflash: people can be messy, complicated, and difficultâespecially when you're dealing with groups of them. There is no getting around this truth.
But along with all of that messiness comes incredible potential. That's why, when we want to achieve things that matter, we form organizations: because we know that we can do so much more together than we could ever do alone. And not just by bending others to our will, but by working to unleash their creativity and intelligence. People can be difficult but they can also be original, innovative, caring, and independent. They can be complicated, but they can surprise you with their commitment and capabilities. Which brings us to the question that has spawned a thousand books about leadership: How do we get from messy, complicated, and dispersed to capable, creative, and aligned? If an organization is much more than a business, what's the best approach to managing it, leading it, and growing it? The answer starts with how we see it.
Metaphors matter. As storytelling creatures, when confronted with a complicated, multidimensional, somewhat abstract entity like an organization, we tend to look for images that help us to describe it and make sense of it. We need something we can visualize. And these metaphors we choose will inevitably shape not just the way we talk about our organizations, but how we respond to them and how we lead them.
For example, it's common for leaders and change-management experts today to talk about organizations as if they were machines or computers. Machines have parts, which either work or break down, in which case they need to be repaired or replaced. They have inputs and outputs. Sometimes, they need tune-ups, new engines, or software updates. It's a convenient metaphor, pleasingly concrete. There's just one problem: actual organizations don't work like machines. Businesses are not body shops. And people don't respond well to being treated like parts that either function well or are deficient. If you think simply replacing all your dysfunctional parts or installing the latest trendy management theory like a software update is the answer to building a high-performing organization, you will be in for a long, difficult journey.
One of the central shortcomings of the mechanistic approach is that it sees the whole as being simply the sum of the parts, and the parts as being essentially predictable and self-contained. As anyone who's tried to lead a team of people knows, this could not be farther from the truth. An organization is much more than the sum of the people involvedâthat's what makes it powerful, but also challenging to manage. And those people are anything but predictable, while being profoundly interconnected. In this sense, as in many others, the machine metaphor is a poor fit and gives rise to leadership approaches that are limited at best. And yet this metaphorâand the perspective and management methods it spawnsâis surprisingly persistent in the business community today.
Metaphors matter. How we frame problems and opportunities in our organizations creates the expectations, solution-sets, and âpossibility spaceâ in which we operate. A limited metaphor tends to limit our thinking. So, if organizations are not machines, how might we understand them better? What metaphors or images might we adopt to help us describe and guide them? I've come to the conclusion that that best way to seeâand leadâan organization is as a system. More specifically, as a complex, adaptive social system.
That may not be as conveniently concrete as a machine or a computer, but it's a more accurate and therefore more powerful way to understand the human dynamics involved. Organizations are not machines subject to immutable laws of physics, they are human systems subject to the more complex social dynamics of relationships. I've found that this shift of metaphor works with leaders and teams to release and make visible their mental frameworks and consequently opens the door for them to envision and lead transformations that otherwise might have seemed impossible. Leaders and team members must become systems thinkersâable to visualize and model the ways in which the elements of the system interact and transform. The Growth River approach to creating high-performing tea...