Reasons for inertia in organisations: preservation of the status quo
Reasons for inertia in organisations: preservation of the status quo
Organisations struggle to change for many reasons, even when it's well-known there's a problem. Let's look at the issue of preserving the status quo with some examples.
From a long career in technology leadership roles and, more recently, a few years of consulting and coaching, I am privileged to have visibility within various organisations. What I find interesting is how common it is to have ‘open secrets’ or ‘elephants in the room’ where key recurring issues are known by most, if not all, employees but not addressed.
Agreeing on making the changes that might address the issue is extremely difficult—so much so that the problem may persist for years. Often, these issues might represent significant potential improvements in areas that are core to their business.
As part of my efforts to be a good consultant and out of curiosity, I find it interesting to understand what might contribute to this inertia.
There are first-order reasons such as:
Fear of losing status or authority
Fear of being worse off financially
Fear of chaos or mistakes that lead to loss of reputation
Risk-aversion, or disruption of comfortable rituals
Optimising for personal convenience
Assuming issues were isolated incidents
These topics have been covered substantially in change-management bodies of knowledge, so I won’t spend time on them in this post.
A second-order effect that is the focus of this post is the general tendency for people to preserve the status quo.
Preservation of the status quo
This concept will be familiar to most, but what makes this issue interesting is that it’s not always obvious when this occurs, and our biases make us less likely to detect it when it’s happening. You can be aware of the bias and still be party to it.
For instance, when plans are established, it is common for groups to have little patience for issues being raised that might require plans to be changed. Sometimes, these issues that were quashed due to expediency may come back to haunt the organisation, and risks that were raised were realised.
This particular example is a form of Groupthink, which is, at its heart, about preserving the status quo.
A more general form is described as status quo bias.
Examples of preserving the status quo
During my career, here are a few examples of preservation of the status quo that help illustrate how and why this issue manifests:
A company experienced regular negative feedback on Glassdoor.
In many companies, the user experience of IT services is so inefficient that it materially impacts the organisation's core imperatives.
An organisation moving to new offices struggled to decide to take advantage of the new office layout.
A company experienced regular negative feedback on Glassdoor
During a period of significant change at one company, discontent began to be expressed on a public forum, Glassdoor, a site for employees to anonymously share feedback about their employers.
Early on, leaders were tempted to rationalise the feedback as the actions of “a few bad apples”.
This demonstrates the issue in two ways:
It presumes that the feedback is intended to disrupt the work environment only rather than to improve it.
It minimises the extent of the feedback. Rather than assuming that this feedback may be a sentiment held by more people, it is presumed that it is only held by those posting.
Eventually, the leadership agreed to assume the intent was positive and that the frustrations were potentially more widely held and productive actions were undertaken.
In this case, we conducted regular anonymous Q&A sessions, played back issues as we understood them and shared actions to be taken. We reported progress regularly.
The natural temptation to maintain the status quo delayed our action and the situation got worse before it was acknowledged the issue may have been more significant than believed.
In many companies, the user experience of IT services is so inefficient it materially impacts the organisation's core imperatives.
It's not uncommon to see the core value creation activities of organisations laden with inefficiencies which slow and reduce the value achieved. Examples include:
Software is procured without adequate engagement of users to evaluate and validate the quality of the user experience.
Financial Analysts working on under powered machines to save costs and yet lose more in critical decisions delayed or not made.
Software engineers are working on improving the company's core value proposition, which is hampered by unnecessary bureaucratic steps and losing ground to the competition.
Yet the quality of this service is rationalised to be acceptable, and users raising issues are dismissed as self-interested, or the impact of the problems is diminished.
In this case, it's often that expectations or needs change, and service levels that were once acceptable no longer are.
An organisation moving to new offices struggled to decide to take advantage of the new office layout.
In another situation, I was involved in the planning for the interior design for a new building the company was moving to.
A raised platform was requested to be installed on the sales floor for one of the sales managers to be stationed. This was a common practice historically in some sales teams for companies in Southeast Asia but was not consistent with the present company culture. It would use up valuable floor space and convey a feeling for the sales team of being watched.
Nonetheless, we inquired to better understand the motivation. Indeed, the motivation was to monitor the sales team's performance. The efficacy of this investment was dubious because these were some of the members of the more experienced and trusted sales staff.
Secondly, the request was coming from the field sales manager!—surely if their team were performing the majority of the time, the seats they could observe from their raised platform would be empty ones!
Listening to understand we were slowly able to learn the motivation and work to identify the logic behind the request. Our instinct to deny it would have been the right one, but without further inquiry, we may have failed to reach a common understanding with the requester.
It was conceded that this request may have been more about status and what had been seen elsewhere than something that be a worthwhile enhancement and in tune with the positive culture a move to a more modern office would represent. We could focus instead on enhancements which could truly aide their work.
What can I do to be open to challenging the status quo when beneficial?
There are some things you can do to be less likely to be party to suppressing challenges to the status quo:
Realise that raising issues to leadership is often not something employees take lightly. Consider all feedback a gift that may help the organisation improve.
When issues are raised, it will help to assume a genuine issue exists.
Try to avoid the temptation to rationalise issues away for the sake of expediency which can strongly influence our actions.
Don’t diminish the extent of the issue—if a person raises an issue, it can help to presume that possibly nine others felt the same but didn’t. It might even be 99 others…
Approach each issue assuming they are real grievances.
Actively listen to understand.
Empathise with the individuals affected.
Consider the size of the impact should you be wrong about the extent of the issue. What might the consequence of an issue of that magnitude mean to the organisation?
Don’t prioritise looking for evidence that invalidates the grievance. First, look to understand the issue. The desire for expediency can lead to faulty assumptions that interfere with truly hearing what is being conveyed.
Avoid the temptation to rationalise the issue or deflect fault. As a leader, it is your responsibility to cultivate the work environment.
Have you observed the preservation of the status quo in your workplace? How did it manifest? Was it ever addressed?