Want change? Don't wait for management

One of the challenges of making change happen is knowing where to start. Typical textbooks will make you believe that the best way to create change is to seek top management support.  Sure, that's the easy answer... but what's the reality?

Consider, for a moment, the five Mafia families of New York. Until the decline of the Mafia in the 1980's most of the families divided the five boroughs and the spoils of their trade between themselves. By working together, they had formed an extremely strong network, with a powerful layer of management at the top. However, how it all unravelled is telling. While their management seemed invincible, it was overstretched, and top heavy. Law enforcement was able to exploit the weak links in their networks. In a strange way, management became their own downfall because too much weight was placed at the top of the organisation.  All of the gaps and weaknesses that festered below ultimately brought the Mafia down.

While we may be glad at the Mafia’s demise, there are learnings to be had.  Since then a great deal of work has been done so that (reputable) organisations won’t suffer the same fate. In the 1990’s, rather than rule with an iron fist, organisational learning set about finding ways to empower people and workers to learn. Fast forward to the present day and we now find ourselves in a world of rapid, high-tech and high-paced change, in which the need to empower workers to learn for themselves is more critical than ever. Management needs to be seen as enablers of autonomy. We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the Mafia. We want a decentralised, collaborative environment in which the worker learner can thrive.

But how do we achieve this? There are three key ideas that help us understand how change actually happens.

1. Most changes happen through people, they are social movements, and social movements are organic. It's usually someone who decides to make a stand for change. Take, for example, Greta Thunberg. No matter what you may think she has become a global phenomenon at such a young age. People heard her message, shared it and it has had global ramifications.  Nobody gave her the ‘green light’.  She has made the world take notice through her tough-minded criticism.

2. Most changes that have been made in the past were recognised for their value afterwards, even if they were screamingly obvious. Any kind of lasting societal change has to come from the people. Support from management is usually secondary. And as in many new start-ups, the idea will only work once tested.

3. There is no risk in seeking permission. The reward is in the risk. Things can go wrong at any time. Things can go horribly wrong. Yet, there is nothing stopping any of us from leading a change in our organisations. To seek permission all the time is just risk avoidance behaviour. To drive change we must take risks.

So take note, we do not have to wait for permission to drive change in our organisations. Change comes from people who decide they have had enough and want to see a difference made.  As we transition from the knowledge worker to the worker learner (see Jacob Morgan on the Future of Work) it’s important that people are empowered to learn new things. We need our people to learn the way forward and change needs to come from the people who are doing the work.

Finally, if we return to the Mafia’s biggest flaw - their inability to keep track of what their management systems were doing due to size, scope and depth of their operation - we can see clearly that turning to management can't solve every problem.  As we navigate out of the wastelands of COVID-19, we need fresh ideas, new concepts and paths forward that should come from our ‘worker learners’. Our teams should be pushing boundaries in new areas, learning and developing the way… not waiting for the nod from ‘The Godfather’.  If we wait for ‘management’ we might just be waiting for our demise .

Dr Luke Houghton is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Business Strategy and Innovation and is a member of the Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems. Luke is actively engaged in research in management problem solving with over 30 publications in this field.

Luke is the Convenor of the Griffith Professional Course, Managing Organisational Transformation.