The Difficulty of Changing Endogenous Organizations

When one lets work or the customer slip, one creates near-insurmountable handicaps that are tackled only when driven by necessity. This explains why, unsurprisingly, change is always more reactive than proactive. But generally it remains purely ‘cosmetic’. To be properly thought out, well-designed and genuine, change requires a thorough understanding of how things work in reality, rather like what I have tried to share with the reader in the case studies in this book. That is what distinguishes structure, where modifications brought about through succeeding ‘reorganizations’ change little, from how an organization actually functions and, in the process, enables us to identify the levers available in order to change the way actors behave. This is because this is the key, as we have seen in some of the examples in previous chapters: as long as we do not change what people do, we have done little but paper over the cracks, hence the expression ‘cosmetic change’.