Recently I ran into one of the six essays I wrote during
the change program I attended at Oxford/HEC Paris, 2007-2008. I was intrigued by a lecture by professor
Keithe Ruddle based on his article In
Pursuit of Agility. During the
lecture, professor Ruddle commented on “transformational” change and some of
the traits of the CEOs who drive it. He labeled them “heroic” leaders; leaders
different from those he labeled “command and control”, more often recognized by
their “plumber” approach, you know, fixers of organizational leaks. Professor Ruddle made a case for a new
leadership approach that he labeled “adaptive leadership”, a distant cousin of
the “situational leadership” taught by Ken Blanchard et al. Heroic leaders are moved by a sense of
destiny and hunger for an enduring legacy.
Transformational change is a power coercive change
strategy camouflaged by language in vogue during the past quarter century. As with any other power coercive strategy,
that is, it is top-down and driven by a critical selected few. Change strategies that gain their strength
from power include the dictator, the economic, and the political
strategies. There is one big upside to these strategies: speed.
On the downside, they tend to litter the organizational landscape with
“losers”, who work hard to turn the “win-lose” approach to speed into a
“lose-lose” outcome during the implementation phase. Also, “losers” have a way of getting even
with the “winners”.
Recently, perusing an online conversation in LinkedIn, I noticed an African proverb
quoted by Terrance H. Seaman, a professional change management consultant: If you want to go fast go alone, if you want
to go far go together.
The quotation and the wisdom behind it have stayed
with me for days.
I have been a student of change for the past 40 years,
and I am still learning. Change is a very
complex subject. The larger the
organization, the more complex change management becomes. There are no short cuts along the way, only
lessons from our experience. Beware of those
bearing the false promise of the magic bullet.
There are none.
The problem with humans is that often they forget
history (experience), condemning them to repeat their mistakes. Yogi Berra, in his inimitable style, would
say: Déjà vu all over again.
The Washington experience of the last five years is a
classic case study. In 2008, Democrats
won the Presidency, The Senate, and the House of Representatives. As a result, they had the political power to
enact any legislation they deemed “transformational” without consulting or
involving the Republicans. And so they
did with Affordable Health Care or Obamacare
– a comprehensive overhaul of our healthcare system. Arrogantly, they refused to divulge the
contents of the law before putting it to a vote. Those asking what was in the law were
admonished to vote for it if they wanted to know what was in it.
Two years later, the Republicans gained control of the
House. For some reason, the electorate
saw to it that checks and balance needed to be placed over the Democrats. As Obamacare
moved into the implementation face a number of issues (leaks in the plumbing
jargon) began to surface. To fix these
issues, the collaboration of the Republican-controlled House plumbers was
needed. Guess what, it was not
there! Instead, they would stand
stubbornly pat on the need to repeal the law they did not participate in
formulating, a law they did not “own”, and a process they saw fueled by the
arrogance of those who had won the election in 2008. The indignant Democrats asked the Republicans
for compromise when none was offered by them during the drafting of the law in
the first place. The wisdom of the
African proverb was surely missed by both sides.
The sad part about this experience is that Republicans
too favor streamlining of the healthcare system, not necessarily in the way it
was adopted into law, but possibly like the one that slowly is emerging during
the implementation debacle with special provisions, timetables, exclusions, and
so on.
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