Page 206 - The Resilient Organization

192 Part Four: Step 3. Rehearsing a Culture of Resilience

oppose an institutional change (such as the AT&T Labs’ leadership in 1997
and 1998) may create overwhelming obstacles just because they take exist-
ing ways for granted and deem them appropriate. Moreover, those who
seek change can take existing institutions for granted as much as anyone
else. The ODDsters’ failure to develop politically necessary relationships
with senior managers even when their successful annual planning document
demonstrated the ODDsters’ value, for example, may have derived in part
from their tendency to take their institutionalized role as an AT&T
Labs–based support group as given.

The Basic Processes of Institutional Transformation
Managers who understand the problem also need to understand the
processes by which they can change institutions. A standard model
describes a substantial part of this. New rules of a game become real
through a process of first “habitualization,” then “objectification,” then
“sedimentation” (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; see also Tolbert & Zucker,
1996). People start doing something a particular way, and that way seems
to work. So they repeatedly do it that way (habitualization). When activi-
ties must be explained to others, particularly to people who join the system,
they come to be seen as part of objective reality (“the way things are done
around here”). That is objectification. Sedimentation is the completion of
the process. The behavior becomes so taken for granted that it becomes a
standard part of people’s mental furniture.
For activists, however, the most difficult challenges occur before any-
thing like habitualization can take place. How does a supporter of institu-
tional change first get an organization to use new ways? DiMaggio (1988)
describes the deliberate creation of institutional change as “institutional
entrepreneurship” and each individual effort as an “institutionalization
project.” He argues that successful creation of new institutions “is a prod-
uct of the political efforts of actors to accomplish their ends and that the
success of an institutionalization project and the form that the resulting
institution takes depend on the relative power of the actors who support,
oppose, or otherwise strive to influence it.”
To succeed, ODD had to carry out an institutionalization project itself
or persuade others, higher in the organization, to do so. DiMaggio portrays