Evolution happens through trial and error and from the learning generated in this cycle of iterations. Organizationally, it is no different; conditions change (market, customers, regulation, competition, technologies, etc.), and new ways of managing these new contexts are applied (or not). If it works, it continues as it was; if it doesn’t, change processes begin.
In this way, organizational evolution is a process that allows organizations to continue to exist in changing contexts. For this, it is necessary to generate the capacity to adapt and make new forms emerge to take charge of the new contexts. It is well known that applying old formulas to new contexts is one of the most common mistakes.
However, this, which sounds obvious and simple, is more complex. Organizations do not evolve by decree or because someone in some hierarchical place dictated that this was necessary.
They evolve in a continuous learning and adjustment process due to changes in their conditions and the people who deal with them. And there, the thing is not so simple, both at a structural and personal level.
In these processes, we have encountered certain organizational aspects that we consider the “enemies of evolution”. This is not intended to be a unique list, much less a definitive one. But in our experience of applying cultural evolutionary tools to executives and facilitating the necessary change processes, these are the main obstacles we have encountered.
– Lack of diversity and overvaluation of the homogeneous: Seeking “alignment” over coupling to the different, believing that homogeneity of beliefs, forms, and styles is a value, and not being able to recognize that it is in diverse contexts where ideas, innovation and resilience flourish.
– Rigid hierarchies and egotistical association between the role and the person: When people in high hierarchical positions “transform” themselves into the position, leaving aside other traits of their humanity and making the rest relate at the role level with them (managers talk to managers).
– Personal insecurity: The use of excessive control structures added to dissonant leadership styles that install a culture of fear, which often punishes error and divergence.
– Devaluation and ignorance of how people change: The cognitivist assumption that people learn only by acquiring information, that it is enough to “give the instruction” for “everything to be clear,” that a workshop is enough for a leader to learn to be a leader or for a team to achieve higher standards of performance.
– Excessive use of linear and convergent thinking: Occupying action and reaction logics to address problems, ignoring the complexity of systemic interactions that affect performance and results.
– Low leadership coherence: Leaders who want their team to change but are unwilling to question their management style and practices.
– Short-term thinking: Excessive valuation of short-term results and the inability to address systemically and with perspective the problems they have to deal with, taking into account the immediate results and being unable to see the implications of those results.
– Excess of relativism: Seeking to accommodate all opinions and perspectives, assuming the risk of losing the sense or the general progress by validating the control of short-term and egocentric perspectives.
Each of these impedes movement, makes it rigid, and causes the organization to stagnate, crystallize, and tend to die. That process can be slow, taking years, and since the operating inertia is large and deep, they may need to realize they are dying. Like that manufacturer of wagon whips, who only discovered that his market no longer existed when he saw automobiles passing by.
¿Cuáles de estos enemigos están presentes en tu organización?
Author:
Pablo Reyes, Executive Director of Memetica.
Photo by Inteligencia Artificial CANVA
