More Detail on Resistance (cont. 1)

Introduction
Radical organisational change (revolutionary or transformational) is more difficult than incremental (evolutionary or transactional).
"...organisations over time develop certain routines (ways of doing things) and complementarities among their components (structure, technology, strategy, culture, and people). Since internal organisational components are aligned and mutually reinforcing, they enable the organisation to be integrated and consistent, thus making it possible for it to maximise its performance. However......it is costly for organisations to affect major change because of the implications of readjusting the complementarities between its several components (when one thing changes in a major way, the rest will need to change too), this the organisation can develop inertia..."
Cyrus Rebello, 2011
Inertia
There are 2 types of inertia, ie structural and cultural:
- structural (is defined as
"... A resistance to change rooted in size, complexity, and interdependence in the organisation structure, system procedures, and processes..."
M. Tushman et al as quoted by Cyrus Rebello, 2011
- cultural (this is more powerful than structural as it comes from age and success.
"... As organisations get older, part of the learning is embedded in the shared expectations about how things are to be done. These are sometimes seen in the informal norms, values, social networks and in myths, stories and heroes that evolve over time. the more successful and organisation has been, the more institutionalised or ingrained these norms, values, and lessons become. The more it has institutionalised norms, values, and stories, the greater the cultural inertia - the greater the organisational complacency and arrogance..."
M. Tushman et al as quoted by Cyrus Rebello, 2011
Inertia and resistance to change can occur at any organisational level, ie from individual upwards
"...how often have you seen people finding all sorts of reasons why certain changes are 'unrealistic' or 'premature' and 'cannot' be implemented? Or, how many times have you seen people agreeing to go ahead with a certain change, while the same time, in practice, they continue to cling onto their old behaviours?..."
Cyrus Rebello, 2011
Some of the reasons people resist change:
- parochial self-interest
- misunderstanding what the change is about
- lack of trust in management
- low tolerance of change, etc.
NB Resistance is entirely expected and natural as individuals and groups attempt to protect their identity and autonomy.
(for more details, see elsewhere in the Knowledge Base)
"...social systems are self-referential: they interact not with an objectively given environment but with the images of their environment......through the cognitive categories, understandings, and perceptions that have historically been established in a social system, the environment is brought into it - but notice that it is 'brought into' in the social system's terms......from a social system point of view, the environment is what the system says it is..."
Cyrus Rebello, 2011
Many organisations in the watch and typewriters industries failed to take into account developments around digital and micro-processing technologies. They stuck to their traditional, but obsolete, identity of watches and typewriters. As a result, many of them went out of business. They did not use the new technology to challenge and question the status quo.
"...to be successful, they needed very different concepts of themselves and of what the future might entail..."
Cyrus Rebello, 2011
NB
"...a system's identity operates like an attractor - it indicates the persistence of a pattern that attracts a system to remain the way it has been......in social systems, an attractor defines the context within which certain behaviours are made possible. Resistance is a manifestation of the presence of an attractor that keeps the system from adopting behaviours outside the scope of its current attractor...... resistance arises when the forces of our established attractor are more powerful than those of the new or emergent one......change is a matter of losing their grip on the current attractor and enabling a new one to emerge..."
J. Morgan as quoted by Cyrus Rebello, 2011
 Attract a new attractor by:
- supplying new information which challenges the current status quo
- articulating a new discourse of thinking on how the information is to be interpreted
- engaging in new actions, like your assessment criteria, new reward system, new structure, etc so that the system is pushed into a new state.