Page 122 - The Resilient Organization

Resourceful, Robust, and Adaptive 109

Arguments against Change
• Any change introduces elements that are new and hence potentially
risky.
• Changes tend to take the focus away from the core business or “job
number 1” and thus become distractions.
• There is only so much change any organization can accomplish at
any one time.
• There is resistance to change—and even rejection or fear of it.

To overcome the syndrome of change (and innovation) being a costly
distraction, there are a few imperatives. One is to manage the exploration
of the new. This involves the creation of small-scale experiments that can be
run outside the mainstream management systems and learned from (see the
Chapter 9 case study for examples).
The second imperative is to build on already-existing change seeds in the
company. There are likely many different ideas and initiatives in the organi-
zation even if some of them are underground. Burgelman (1983) speaks of
always-existing autonomous behavior in organizations—grassroots
activism that cannot be suppressed but can sometimes force adaptation of
the corporate strategy to be inclusive of the potential opportunity. He uses
the descriptive concept “strategic forcing” to illustrate this struggle between
the old and new: strategic forcing is about making the old accommodate the
new, somewhat (but not totally) changing the strategy.
The third imperative is to cultivate cognitive frames that allow the consid-
eration of the existing situation in different perspectives. Such considerations
may open up new strategic avenues and uncover so-far-unthought-of options.
In some organizations, such framing contests (Kaplan, 2008) take place rou-
tinely; yet it is important to ensure that the competitive frames are simply not
minor variations of each other but instead present genuinely different ways of
looking at an issue. One way to examine this is to ask: What opportunities
open up if this problem of framing, rather than that one, is adopted? In other
words, what if we see the business challenge as an aging of our customer base
versus an opportunity to enter senior care? This is a matter of perspective,
and it is probably the cheapest, if sometimes the hardest, form of change.