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Hierarchical organizations of the form most people work in today have been around for some 4000 years. They began in
China
and
Egypt
and followed the advance of civilization as tribalism gave way to urbanization in the wake of growing populations. For 3999 years we have experienced some noticeable and often serious difficulties in these social institutions which, despite their apparent shortcomings, remain potentially one of the most creative and humanly fulfilling forms of organization. Managerial hierarchies provide a structure well suited to enabling human beings to engage in their primal drive to work and be productive. In form, managerial hierarchies represent the most productive social institution for competitively pursing the creation of economic wealth.
As far back as 2500 years ago, Confucius was employed as a civil servant in the Chinese government in the
province
of
Lu
. In his writings, he documented some of the problems encountered within his early managerial hierarchy: greed and fighting over compensation; unrealistic aspirations for promotion; narrow self-interest; interpersonal rivalries; rebellion against authority; evasion of accountability; failure of imagination and innovation at crucial times; the need for incentives and motivation; interpersonal conflicts and politicking; and on and on. Sound familiar?
We are continually bombarded with a never ending onslaught of unsuccessful and costly fads and panaceas (a.k.a. “Flavors of the Month”). But none of these departures from the basic form of the managerial hierarchy have produced anything useful, and in most cases have led to the establishment of social institutions that were far less productive and weaker from an economically competitive, wealth generation perspective.
The problem is predicated upon the all pervasive existence of half dozen or so serious misconceptions about fundamental human behavior. These misconceptions have been with us for so long that have become as accepted as foundational truisms. Few even stop to ponder their validity, and because we don’t, we wind up designing faulty systems to manipulate and support human behaviors in order to get desired outcomes from our organizations. The fundamental principle of organizational design states that “Every organizational system is perfectly designed to produce the outcomes observed from the operation of the system”. If we get undesired outcomes from our organizations, this principle suggests that we change the design of the system. By and large this is exactly what we have done during the past four millennium, and we could continue this process for another four millennium without producing a form of organization that fully and consistently yields our desired set of outcomes. The root of our dilemma is not in the actual system designs, but in the erroneous assumptions underpinning the designs – the misconceptions accepted as the truths about fundamental, universal human behavior itself.
If we are to finally succeed in designing organizational systems that predictably and consistently produce the performance outcomes that contribute to desired standards of competitive economic wealth as reward, then we must unravel the misconceptions about the fundamental nature of people in their pursuit of the goal directed behaviors we call work. Our perpetuated poor performance in organizations cannot be blamed on the idiosyncratic behavior of people in the presence of good managerial leadership systems – the “people” systems – for we will find that the truth is the people are fine and can be left unchanged. In reality, the blame for continuous poor organizational performance lies with the managerial leadership systems that have been designed on the basis of invalid underlying assumptions about the true nature of human behavior. It is these assumptions and the resultant managerial leadership system designs that require changing. Requisite change management starts with establishing a correct base of assumptions about human behaviors then designing organizational systems that align to this set of human factors within the context of realistic outcomes as defined by the organization’s strategy for achieving its desired future state.
Corporate HR leaders who are frustrated with déjà vu outcomes from yet another change process, and CEO’s who are less than pleased with yet one more trip into the board room to explain why reengineering failed yet again, would do well to re-examine their fundamental assumptions about human behavior. Redirecting the time, money and energy away from trying to change people and directing it instead towards changing the fundamental design of “people” systems is the critical key to stopping the endless cycle of low-gain, high-pain quests for organizational performance improvement. The science exists today to create these desired sustainable high performance organizations that have eluded us in the past. The change processes have already been engineered to implement the science. It remains a matter of recognizing the root of the change management dilemma and choosing to apply the science.
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