By Craig Perrin
To get a sense of the reappraisal now underway in change management circles, consider another reappraisal – at the dawn of modern physics, one hundred years ago.
By 1900, physicists had been applying Newton’s laws of motion for 200 years to predict natural events and fuel the industrial revolution. Yet a few scientists had grown uneasy because Newton’s laws failed to explain various newly-observed phenomena. Then, in 1905, Albert Einstein reframed their notions of space and time and paved the way for some startling achievements – among them, releasing the power of the atom.
Today, many change leaders feel a similar anxiety. Having seen the failure of important initiatives, these leaders now question some time-honored “laws of change.” They believe that new demands require new ways to conceive and guide their efforts.
In the past, leaders counted on periods of stability, assumed that change took time, saw change as a process, saw change leadership as a special role, gained support with a clear business case, and succeeded by delivering customer value.
Today, leaders face constant overlapping changes, need quick wins to build momentum, see change as the permanent landscape, see change leadership as everyone’s role, appeal to the emotions as well as the mind, and succeed by meeting threats and opportunities.
Like Einstein’s relativity, these new rules may seem no rules at all. But neither Einstein’s world nor this world is anything new. In 500 BC, the Greek philosopher Heraclites said, tersely: “All is flux.” Modern change management, like modern physics, is a sharper image of the world as it is – in constant movement, with every part affecting every other part.
If “all is flux,” then no one can reasonably expect to succeed solely with a standard project plan, no matter how detailed. Instead, leaders and employees must respond flexibly to dynamic conditions within and outside the organization. In contrast to a “Newtonian,” phased-based approach, modern change management has a new central task: developing change-capable people who alone can build a change-capable organization.
Consider a final parallel with modern physics. To the naked eye, an object, say my desk, appears solid and permanent. At the atomic level, however, my desk is a mass of moving particles, loaded with kinetic energy. In the same way, an apparently stable organization is a mass of individuals, each a force either promoting or opposing needed change. The sum of these forces for change might be described in a kind of equation:
C = LE2
The change capability of an organization (C) equals the quality of leadership (L) times the square of the energy of all employees (E). As Einstein’s famous equation describes the enormous power of the atom, this equation describes the enormous power of the individual – if we can release it – for positive change.