Change, Yes, but Change What?

The characteristics that we have seen for a bureaucracy — or more precisely a technical bureaucracy — make up a system. This means that they have developed coherence in relation to one another, that they mutually reinforce and strengthen each other and make it extremely difficult and perilous to define and implement a controlled process of change. This explains the quantity and diversity of literature on change (we will return to this later on) as well as the ever-renewed quest among executives for a “philosopher’s stone”, a recipe that allows one, with a minimum of risk-taking, to find out what one needs to do in order to have it accepted by the social structure and put into operation while at the same time controlling its effects. For a better understanding of the problem that this poses, let us take a quick look at the five points which today form the nucleus of such bureaucracies when forced to change under pressure from the customer, if they do not want to disappear or implode and at the same time produce a pointlessly high human cost: 1. compartmentalization and verticality, constructed in line with the technical logic of speciality and task; 2. clarity, perceived as virtuous in itself, but where one has seen that it ends in the creation of internal monopolies, and finally by the organization’s manipulation by its members;