OMG! .... NOT ANOTHER REORGANIZATION?!!

“We trained hard—but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization"

--Gaius Petronius Arbiter, 1st Century A.D.

  

Look, I know that not all reorganizations are bad, useless and/or political ‘eye wash’. A well thought out reorganization can and has saved many an enterprise.

Still, what causes an enterprise to consider reorganization? Is something not working the way it should? Has something changed--our customer base, our strategy, our mission and/or our vision? Will reorganizing improve our chances of survival or result in an increased profitability? Or, to use a football down and distance analogy--is it 3rd and 25 and the only play we can call is "punt"? And, finally, why do most employees cringe at the thought of reorganization?

Well I would submit that all of the above are both plausible and real. Yet, I think that in today's "zoom zoom" world, the “We Must Change " mantra is the reason and rationale behind most of the reorganization mania. For the record, I am not suggesting that all reorganization initiatives are simply knee jerk reactions to the "we must change" mandate. No, there are examples like Ford Motor Company who realized that they must change or die. But, out of the countless number of reorganizations launched each year, the Fords' might be the exception and not the rule.

Why, you ask, is the Change mandate so pervasive and powerful a motive? To date, I have not found a better explanation than that given by William Bridges, in his landmark book, “Transitions, Making Sense of Life’s Changes”

Here goes his profound insight:

 “Modern societies are the first in history in which people have been rewarded for keeping the level of societal change high. Most other times and places have rewarded and honored people for protecting the society’s continuities; but our society rewards change in the name of “innovation”. Our economy depends upon it, and if the innovation ceased, our economy as a whole—and, of course, most people’s individual careers—would fall apart.

So we’ve got a change-dependent economy and a culture that celebrates creativity and innovation. There is no way that our careers won’t  be punctuated by frequent changes, each of which demands a transition from an old way of doing things and old identity to a new one. And there is no way that these transitions won’t  take a significant toll on our productivity as we temporarily siphon off energy and time from performing our jobs to making the transitions. If that temporary displacement of energy happens to only a few individuals, it is their  problem; but when it occurs on a large scale, as it does during big reorganizations and mergers, the individual problem of career transition becomes the organization’s problem, in the form of “ reduced productivity”, “absenteeism”, “increased defects” or “turnover”.”

He sounds a little bit like old Gaius P. Arbiter back in the 1^st century AD—doesn’t he?