At the final hearings of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, Commissioner Peggy Brown asked Defence associate secretary Matt Yannopoulos to reflect on an earlier observation that Defence seems resistant to change and how he thought that might be changed.
In short, Yannopulos’ response was in three parts: consistent communication in an enterprise as large as Defence is hard, Defence has many competing communication priorities, and middle managers keep deciding that Defence priorities do not apply to them.
Like many large organisations, working in Defence feels like Groundhog Day. The same problems rise and fall with predictable and repetitious regularity. For example, former Defence secretary Allan Hawke lamented middle managers’ ‘learned helplessness’ as a barrier to reform over twenty years ago.
If I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here
Defence leaders need a new place to begin their analysis of the reform problem.
Defence is not alone in facing rapid, unpredictable, and, in some cases, unprecedented change. Also, like many organisations, Defence is a purposeful system. It is organised and structured to deliver on that unique purpose. It is an enterprise comprising many complex, interrelated, and interdependent parts whose behaviour is difficult to predict and imperfectly informed.
Such systems are naturally resistant to change or disruption because they have been designed to deliver consistency and stability. In an increasingly uncertain and volatile environment, it is questionable whether striving for consistency and stability would be feasible or desirable.
Middle managers are not unnaturally resistant to change, as senior leaders are fond of suggesting. Instead, they respond to systems cues and incentives that reward permanence and continuity. Even the most erudite and persistent communications will not change their behaviour.
Instead, we might ask, ‘Why do middle managers in Defence believe they are so powerless to influence change?’ and ‘How have they come to believe they are powerlessness?’ These are questions about the systems that shape behaviour rather than the symptoms.
Defence is an enterprise constantly in motion, not a fixed set of problems to solve. Piling on the communication about Defence’s many priorities is a fixed solution to a fluid problem. Effective reform and change come from leaders acting as levers to influence the shape of the organisational flow.
Help, I’m trapped!
One way to think about improving organisational flow is to work on the system blockages.
Coronary heart disease occurs when major blood vessels to the heart become blocked and narrow, restricting blood flow to the heart. There are various stages of treatment, but all are focused on reducing or removing the blockages to blood flow.
In organisations, blockages are known as system traps. Identifying and working on these traps gives leaders a more complete way of bringing about change focused on improving the system’s overall performance.
There are four main types of system traps: novelty, strategic lock-in, poverty, and rigidity.
Robodebt had all the hallmarks of a novelty trap. The novelty trap stems from an obsession with delivering organisational ‘hacks’ through innovation. A ‘new’ or ‘novel’ idea captures leadership imagination, winning the support to expand and extend rapidly. The idea becomes the star, and implementation races ahead of consequences with disastrous outcomes. The concept behind robodebt continues to trouble the APS.
Large IT implementations and the PwC consulting debacle show the signs of strategic lock-in. A highly intensive strategy consumes all available organisational resources. Switching between strategies is almost impossible when the strategy doesn’t deliver the expected benefits.
Trapped in the strategy, the organisation becomes intellectually, economically, and emotionally exhausted by the implementation of a solution that is known to be sub-optimal. Switching between large IT implementations is difficult for these reasons. PwC’s widely reported ‘revenue at all costs’ strategy locked the firm into a pattern of behaviour that has diminished its reputation in Australia and damaged the industry.
Middle managers in large organisations are often caught in a poverty trap. They have the ideas and may be able to repurpose existing resources to implement them, but they are hamstrung by leadership, policy, or process that reduces their capacity to implement a new idea and navigate their way through the continuously changing context. They are unable to act due to circumstances beyond their control.
The Defence enterprise is caught in a rigidity trap. When enterprises become highly centralised, tightly connected, and self-reinforcing, they become inflexible and brittle. Fixed objectives that reduce adaptability, learning, critical thinking, and diversity are symptoms of an enterprise caught in a system rigidity trap.
As the Defence and Veteran Suicide Commissioners and Defence senior leaders acknowledged, the potential for change for an enterprise caught in a rigidity trap is low.
Rules, order and systems
Undoubtedly, reform and change in Defence is difficult, but it’s not impossible. It does require imagination, courage, patience, and endurance. It requires leaders with high systems thinking skills who can see the system traps spitting out symptoms. as Robert Pirsig neatly captured in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
Many large enterprises find themselves in a prison of ideas, policies, procedures, structures, and behaviours that are a system of thought that resists surface-level change management — a prison of our own making.
A systems approach to transformation, reform, and change acknowledges that middle managers face related and interdependent problems. They encounter mixed messages, contradictions, and misinformation daily.
A central challenge for senior leaders initiating change is separating legitimate resistance from dysfunctional inertia. The opportunity to communicate dissent is part of feedback in a system; saturation communications admonishing better behaviour is probably not.
Less systems thinking, lower performance
Any new approach for seeing, valuing, and doing is only as good as the capacity of the individuals engaging in its design and implementation. For systems-based endeavours, the capacity of the participants for systemic thinking will always be either an enabler or a constraint.
It is unrealistic to assume that enterprises without high levels of system thinking capabilities can effectively engage in a system-based approach to transformation. This might be why calls for ‘systems approaches’ have not transpired into actions and outcomes.
The central questions become, ‘What are the requisite systems thinking skills necessary for success? ‘Do the individuals and teams engaging in the application possess those skills? If not, then how could this skill gap be bridged?’
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