“All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they’re getting . . .”

It’s one of the old-saws of organizational consulting. But consultants are not alone in thinking it. Systems theorists have been saying the same thing in different words since the beginning of the 20th century.

Though it may be cliché, it’s a deceptively simple principle that has many layers. For one thing, it suggests that any group or organization’s performance—good or bad—is not an accident. Root causes (design factors) are always at work. Given that 90% of organizations fail to achieve their strategic objectives, according to management studies, it’s clear that there are many design factors that are either hidden, confusing, unconscious, ignored, or all of the above.

What is Strategic Change?

The core aim of strategic change management is to first reveal all the design factors that are critical to the performance of the whole system, especially factors that may have “gone underground.” These tend to be the issues that impede effectiveness, that is, the ability of an organization to achieve its desired goals. The emphasis in strategic change management is on understanding the organization as a human system, not just an economic one, as is the case with traditional strategic management. This is critical because the issues that typically stymie performance are behavioral ones, i.e., ones that impact how people feel, think, learn, and interact in the workplace. The goal is to realign these actions with the organization’s core strategy to achieve better results.

How Does Leadership Facilitate Strategic Change?

The preeminent role of leadership is to surface the salient aspects of the current system design that are impacting performance. These include environmental, behavioral, strategic, structural, process, and technological factors, among others. Leaders do not necessarily been to be experts there to fix things. Their true contribution might be to see the whole system and help the individuals, groups, teams, and departments involved to reexamine and adjust those factors that are counterproductive, outmoded, or unintentional. The problem in most organizations is that people who work there are too close to the system and the unconscious aspects of its design to see it clearly. This is human nature.

The process of reexamining the current design and getting better reality takes work and courage. To the extent this bigger picture becomes clear, however, positive change tends to follow.