I am part of a reading club “Papers in Systems” that discusses a chosen paper every month. This month we read the lecture back script from Donald Schön’s Reith Lecture Series from 1970 Session 2: Dynamic Conservatism (PDF). I found this very entertaining and insightful reading, especially as someone who often tried (and failed!) To create changes while working in various companies. Nicely realizes that we have difficulty creating changes because social systems (like the organizations in which we work and with which we deal with) Actively resist change.
The entire transcript is worth reading, but here are some selection quotes that I think you illustrate the most important points.
The example is characteristic of social systems, be it the social system of a ship or an industrial company or a company or a community. The system always contains at least three elements or dimensions that are included: a social structure – a number of related roles and authority relationships – a technology and a theory. And by a theory I don’t mean academic or sociological theory about the system: I mean what it is, who believes that people in the system do what they do. The theory consists of the views that are kept within the system – the system that determines the images of the environment, what our competition is, what our future is, what we are heading for and how we should handle it. Both the structure and the theory reflect the prevailing technology, just as the social system of the ship reflected the technology of shooting before the introduction of Continuous Aim Fire Spots. These dimensions are all related. They cannot be broken apart.
The system as a whole has the property of resistance to changes. Sometimes we talk about this property as if it were inertia: this is a metaphor from physics and refers to the property of an object to stay where it is, unless there is a force that exerts it. But it’s a fairly passive metaphor and Instead, I suggest that organizations are dynamically conservative: that means they fight like crazy to stay the same.
First, there are threshold values of the change and critical energy mirrors that have to be achieved in order to equip a change of state. You can strike away in an organization for a long time without reaching the threshold. When you reach the threshold, you can suddenly see that events go into a highly volatile and temporary mode, and then the further energy input can have no effect at all because the thing has started to withdraw. Between this below the threshold and the saturation point, when the input of the energy begins to a kind of decreasing return, there can be a zone of the exponential increase in which the process becomes critical and actually becomes self -supporting. For a certain system, it takes a certain amount of energy before you can break through and allow the dynamic conservatism of the system, and then it tends to achieve a new type of balance: a new type of dynamic conservatism begins to work, and and Further energy input begins less effect.
Some points from our discussion were also revealing:
- “I saw how people sometimes take advantage of the reaction: suggest the opposite change and then use the resistance energy to go a different direction” – I thought this was a clever remedy, and it is one that I am active for my children Use 🙂
- A source of resistance is the fact that the system is comfortable and “understood” in its current state and emphasizes that they have to communicate with the people who are affected by changes and create common properties. And there are often many failures when communicating from shaks and whys a change!
- Leads to a corresponding strategy: minimize surprise