By Chris Nichols
Recently I got into a rental car that had every electronic innovation you could imagine. I usually love gadgets on cars, but it was late at night and raining, and as I drove, the sheer number of buttons and special functions made it difficult to drive efficiently and safely. Simple functions like turning on lights, windshield wipers, and adjusting mirrors weren’t intuitive. They were obscured by other gizmos that had been added, piled onto the steering column and dashboard. The complexity of the car’s gadgetry interfered with the car’s foundational purpose and its effectiveness on the road. This wasn’t the result of thoughtful design but someone’s decision to add every new idea engineers had devised into one vehicle. It just didn’t work as well as it should.
The car was for me a symbol of what happens when leaders decide to accommodate change rather than lead it.
In today’s fast paced world, we all need to make space for innovation, to include R & D in the core of our organizations and not drive the innovators (or the Christian world, the Apostolic leaders) away. Without creativity, we get stuck in outmoded forms and functions that keep us from doing the work we need to do with greater impact. Effective leaders then take innovation seriously and let it impact the way their organization functions.
But too often, new ideas or technologies are taken into the life of the organization without making any fundamental changes in the organization itself. Leaders add departments, create new titles, and institute pilot projects without eliminating old ones. Instead of transforming the organization, it increases in size and complexity but not in effectiveness in fulfilling its mission.
When leaders simply add innovations into the organization structure without ever making choices to let it impact overall design, an organization becomes like my rental car: filled with innovations that distract without adding value or power to drive the primary mission forward.
Simply accommodating new ideas without changing organizational design results in bureaucracy. As each new idea is given space and authority within the organizational structure, they compete with each other for money, time, power, and space. Increasing complexity requires more managers be hired whose primary gift is making the new, more convoluted structure work. With more managers in place and more and more innovation added, bureaucracy results. Increasing bureaucracy requires we hire even more managers who love the complexity and design systems to make it all work. Soon, making the organization function becomes more important than the mission.
At some point, making it work becomes more important than the primary mission of the organization and, if leaders aren’t watchful, becomes the mission itself.
Ichak Adizes’ pioneering research on organizational dynamics and corporate lifecycles identified bureaucracy as the penultimate step to the death of an organization.
Too often, leaders who are busy encouraging innovation don’t recognize the signs of increasing bureaucracy. The general busyness and energy being generated distracts them from seeing that the whole organization is getting bogged down. They assume because it feels lively that it must be healthy. They fail to see the organization working itself busily towards its own demise.
How are leaders who want to invigorate the organizations they lead and truly innovate for greater effectiveness supposed to avoid the innovation accommodation dilemma?
1) they must always keep the mission at the forefront of their thinking. They must evaluate in light of it and ask questions in response to it. If the mission is not being effectively fulfilled then they must ask why. They must do significant analysis to try and understand what the barriers to the fulfillment of the mission are. Quality understanding of those barriers can lead to good decisions about next steps.
2) they must always ask the hard questions about structures themselves. When new ideas that are indeed more effective in reaching goals are instituted, what old ideas, structures, and programs need to eliminated? When there are too many levels of approval needed for relatively simple decisions or when decision-making trees become so complex that even the decision makers don’t fully understand them, something must change. Leaders have to keep streamlining structures not simply adding to them.
3) Leaders must be willing to lead change at every level. They must be willing to create environments that test innovations against existing programs and organizational functions and then replace old ineffective ideas with new, more effective ones. They must look at the way the organization is running, know who is running it, and if the organizational function itself reflects the mission or has taken on a life of its own.
Accommodating change leads to bureaucracy and death. Leading change brings innovation and life. What kind of leader will you be?
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Great post Chris. For too long leader tried to avoid change, and now it is easy to swing to the other side thinking that if we are changing we are growing. However, we must remain focused and change is should always lead to our mission and vision. Anything else is just a distraction.