come at us on the nightly news with increasing frequency.
The greater availability of global information also gives us much more to worry about. Terror attacks far away, along with natural disasters on other continents, may not be rational threats to us now, but the Survive Channel is not a rational mechanism.
And we have little control, if any, over so many of the “threats” our Survive Channel sees. All of these factors taken together are a perfect recipe for an overheated Survive.
Enough of us have seen the problems caused by an overactivated Survive that we sometimes think we need to move out of a Survive mode. People have often said to us, “We are moving from Survive to Thrive!” and, implicitly, “Isn't that great?” But, in fact, a well-functioning Survive greatly aides Thrive activation. Neither underactivated nor overheated, and with a repertoire of effective responses to the problems at hand, a well-functioning Survive Channel is neither a debilitating distraction nor a lethal energy drain. Then, without the need for a Herculean effort, Thrive can be activated through the visibility of inspiring opportunities and the willingness, support, and ability to pursue those opportunities.
We have learned much about how all this happens, not the least through the literature on great leaders throughout history. The best leaders keep Survive alert but not overwhelmed. They also tend to be very good at activating Thrive in themselves and in others. In the past few decades, we have also learned much about how organizations without larger-than-life leaders can still effectively lead major change—where “lead” (not just “manage”) is the key word. We will discuss these findings and report stories that demonstrate what is possible throughout this book.
The “Modern” Organization
The second stream of research that informs our emerging theory of change focuses on the modern organization. We say “modern” because it is a relatively new phenomenon. In the U.S. and most of the more economically developed world, organizational designs that we often assume have been around for millennia, if only in governments and armies, were really not created until the latter decades of the nineteenth century.
The modern organization draws upon practices and lessons from many hundreds of years of human experience but is nevertheless fundamentally different from what came before it. New technologies that began to evolve from the Industrial Revolution allowed for much less expensive production and distribution and created mass markets like never seen before. But capitalizing on these new possibilities required a scale and complexity of organization that had only begun to emerge in a few limited contexts (like textiles and railroads). This new form could accommodate not just the traditional two to ten individuals located at one site but could coordinate thousands of people disbursed geographically in ways unseen before.
To make this complex coordination work and not devolve into chaos, all sorts of new and formal systems, policies, structures, and jobs were invented. Planning was designed as a much more structured process attached to financial budgeting. Reporting relationships and jobs were written into published hierarchical organizational structures. Financial and other control systems were invented to monitor activity everywhere and to make sure results were on plan. New problem-solving techniques and communication methods emerged to make course corrections if results slipped off plan.
And a whole new set of jobs—what today we would call middle management—was created to make these more complex organizations function as they were designed. “Managers” drove “managerial processes,” which produced unprecedented efficiencies and a level of reliability that was once thought impossible with large and/or dispersed groups of people.
These new organizations were capable of change. But the default setting was filled with rules, policies, procedures, plans, and a drive toward standardization—all essential for efficiency and reliability, but all potential barriers to change. As long as the world swirled at an acceptably slower-than-today pace, all was mostly okay. Businesses and ever bigger governments struggled to adapt quickly because of the organizational barriers and because of human nature. But “quickly” by today's standards was rarely an issue—until recently.
In the past century and a half, this new form of organization has come to rule the landscape. In some contexts, it has evolved to become much more change-sophisticated. It does so with now commonly used ideas like interdepartmental task forces, less “bureaucracy,” and more cultural tolerance for new ideas. But even more so, today's organizations use new, or new versions of, strategy, digital transformation, restructuring, cultural change, M&A, Agile (the software development methodology), and more to help them adapt or capitalize on opportunities created by external changes.
These methodologies can help hugely in this new era of turbulence and uncertainty. But more often than not, even in high-tech settings where people think they have evolved way past Industrial Age organizations, our research shows the typical approaches are currently working only up to a point. Beyond that point, bodies designed for lifelong, long gone and organizations designed fundamentally for a slower-moving and more predictable world both struggle—or at least miss the big opportunities. Smart people see the need to change, and quickly. But far too often they fail to achieve their aspirations. And a feeling that you can only move at 30 or 60 miles an hour, in a context where excelling requires 100 or even 200, can be exceptionally frustrating and stressful.
But it does not have to be this way. Step 1 in changing organizations for the better is recognizing the limitations of the modern form and where those came from. Step 2 is to look at how organizations can realistically be modified to handle both the tasks of reliability and efficiency and the tasks of speed and agility, which we will discuss and demonstrate with stories throughout the book.
Leading Change: Success and Failure
The third stream of research contributing to our emerging theory of change has explicitly focused on observing organizations and individuals in them as they try to purposefully adapt to a shifting context. It also draws on both historical and contemporary studies of leadership.
In an early, foundational piece of this research, we found that transformation efforts failed when there was an insufficient sense of urgency to deal with a faster-moving world. Problems were exacerbated when too small a group, lacking broadly relevant knowledge, connections throughout the organization, leadership skills, and/or a strong sense of urgency was put in charge of driving complex change. This often led to an underdeveloped and undercommunicated strategic vision.
Without sufficient communication of a rational and emotionally compelling case for change, it was nearly impossible to achieve buy-in that inspired and mobilized the action required to drive and sustain difficult changes. Management was resistant to ceding control and too often got in the way of broad-based action. Short-term wins were insufficient to provide credibility and momentum, and when they did occur, they were not celebrated early enough or often enough, which caused any built-up urgency to falter.
When successes were seen, there was a tendency to declare victory too soon and stop short of the finish line. People also underestimated how fragile new changes were, and didn't take the time to truly institutionalize them in the organization's systems and structures.
Our understanding of successful change (and common pitfalls) has continued to deepen and expand based on a number of follow-up studies that continue to add detail and nuance. These studies have addressed the more recent consequences of an increasingly complex, uncertain, and fast-moving world.
In addition to reinforcing the original failure points outlined above, we have seen that the most successful large-scale change efforts start with a clearly articulated, compelling, and emotionally inspiring opportunity. In an increasingly complex world, with more threats and potential problems being thrown at us every day, it is becoming harder and harder to mobilize sustained action through
