How Things Change

I captured this awesome display of color and light on a recent crisp autumn evening because it felt like it was shouting at me to pay attention to the beautiful changes in the season. It inspired me to think about how things change.

These trees depend on their leaves to produce the energy they need to grow. Yet they also seem to understand how their long term survival depends upon shedding those leaves, year after year, as a way of preserving energy for new growth for the future. It’s nature’s way, and they offer no resistance.

Trees specialize in this seasonal change. Yet their change also depends on having the right environmental conditions. Too much heat or not enough moisture and they become stressed and are unable to follow their normal patterns. They are specialized in one kind of change that is essential to their existence, yet they are unable to adapt to prolonged environmental stresses. And, if the adverse conditions persist for too long, a tree will die. This is a paradox of nature that can be applied to other things too, like people and organizations.

It’s been observed that being highly specialized – becoming really good at one thing – can pose a challenge to becoming good at something else. For people, it has to do with how with repeated practice, our brains form mental models that guide our actions and shape the way we process new information – all without our being aware of it. Said another way, the better we get at one way of thinking, the bigger our blind spots become, and the harder it is to see things from other perspectives.

This also applies to science where it’s long been considered that the discovery of new knowledge comes from the work of highly specialized experts who focus their scholarship on narrow subject matter. The usefulness of this approach is now being questioned as we face more complex problems that call for innovative solutions that integrate perspectives from multiple disciplines and cultures. This is especially true for some of the most complex challenges, like sustainability, climate change and social justice.

For organizations, becoming really good at doing something one way can pose a challenge to becoming good at doing it in a different way. The more an organization is populated by people who are highly specialized in one way of thinking and one way of doing something, the more difficult it becomes to integrate diverse perspectives. This becomes a obstacle to the kind of innovation and change that organizations need to survive.

All this leads to the question – when confronted with a prolonged shock to the system, are these organizations like the trees? Are they doomed? Or can they find a way to survive through change, and even thrive, by developing new ways of thinking?

A shock to the system is often initiated by an event so significant that it causes a critical self-reflection of existing beliefs. Many people consider the murder of George Floyd to be this kind of activating event in how it triggered a world-wide questioning, examination and revising of existing assumptions about social justice.

To survive a prolonged shock to the system, adaptation is not enough. Organizations must undergo transformative change, which starts with being open to alternative viewpoints – those from outside the previously established realm of expertise. From there, what can follow is productive discourse, where evidence is weighed, arguments assessed, alternative perspectives explored, and new knowledge is constructed by consensus. This can lead to revised assumptions and perspectives that are more open and better justified. Only then can organizations begin to act on these revised assumptions by talking, thinking and acting in ways that are consistent with their transformed perspectives.

With my work in organization development, I have developed a heightened awareness for how organizations form cultures that cause them to act in ways that are motivated by assumptions that have been uncritically assimilated and are largely unconscious. These organizations tend to hang on to the status quo without realizing that the world around them has changed and their status quo assumptions are not universally shared.

Transformative change is not easy but, for an organization’s relevant survival in a changing world, it is necessary. Transformative change is not a slow gradual evolution – it’s more choppy, punctuated and cumulative. The eventual destination is a higher level of thinking where, with a new interpretation of the past, it becomes possible to see a different future.