I. LIFE IN THE BLENDER

Let’s suppose, for the sake of illustration, that one Friday, as the week is winding into the weekend, you see a notification from the Wall Street Journal reporting that the company you work for is in advanced discussions of some sort with your largest competitor. After forty-​eight hours of much frantic pinging of your peers and little concrete news, late on Sunday comes the official press release: The two companies are merging. There follows a flurry of announcements from your senior leaders, who are, to a person, both “excited” and “thrilled” by the news — some are even “energized.” Work the following week is a frenzy of speculation, interrupted briefly by the fanfare heralding the Arrival of the Management Consultants, and thereby begins a period of meandering unease while the deal moves through the approval process.

At last, the white smoke emerges from the regulatory chimney, and the deal is given the go‑ahead. Now, the slow-dripping uncertainty of the last months is replaced by a great flurry of busyness and renewed executive enthusiasm, all this attending the onset of the Reorganization. The new senior team is announced, and then the leaders on that team announce that they will each be spending the next few weeks on the Listening Tour, followed by their own restructuring of the people beneath them, and so on and so on, each announcement leading in turn to further listening and review, leading in turn to more reorganizations. Along the way, the Bad Old Names of various departments will be unceremoniously defenestrated, and the Obviously Better New Names will be rolled out to scenes of universal approbation. In all this, you will marvel that things were quite so broken in the old world — now a distant memory — that it requires quite this much reorganization to get back on the rails, but everybody seems very convinced that this is just the ticket, and that everything is so much more sensible now, and frankly, who could have been so stupid as to put up with all that old stuff anyway.

Your boss has to spend hours a week in meetings ironing out details of your new department, and no longer has much time to update you on what’s going on. In all the musical chairs, some of your co‑workers discover they no longer have a seat, and so quietly pack up their belongings and leave. One of the executives on the new senior team announces his retirement, effective immediately, and this, thankfully, presents the opportunity to make the senior leadership team even more perfect — and exciting — in ways that no one was able to imagine when they put together the old new senior team just a few months before.

It then becomes apparent that the strategy that led to the merger is no longer as even better as people thought it was, and that a new one would be even more even better, to reflect all the good things that have recently happened. More fanfare heralds the Arrival of the Rival Management Consultants, and thereby ensues more intense activity in conference rooms, and a special PowerPoint template to give the new strategy a unified look and feel. Then the rollout, as part of which everyone is told they need to be able to tell the story of the new strategy; the senior team and the consultants seem very convinced that the defining characteristic of a strategy is mass recitation, and they have more words in their job titles than you do.

Then it emerges that what with the new company and the new names and the new leadership team and the new strategy and the new PowerPoint template, the old ways of doing things are looking a bit dog-​eared and in need of tidying up, and so work begins on the Model. This will take people who previously reported regionally, and make them report functionally — however, with a dotted line regionally, obviously, because otherwise it wouldn’t make sense — and at the same time, the people who reported into the corporate organization will continue to do so but in a federated model, governed by a new group of functional integration councils, each of which will be responsible for establishing and monitoring service-​level agreements and agreed standards. These latter will help people who were, last week, working happily alongside one another to continue to do so, but with betterness.

To eliminate the risk of silos — which have built themselves a few times before, apparently — the company will be reassigning executive offices, and moving everyone else around and into an open floor plan, because collaboration. Meanwhile, as reports have begun to reach the senior leaders of some fatigue in the ranks — only to be expected, of course, given the unavoidable realities of today’s dynamic business world — a festival day is announced, during which  employees will be able to hear directly from Thought Leaders, who will share their thoughts, and which will culminate in a keynote session featuring both the Wellness Guru and the Inspirational Speaker, who will alternately encourage attendees to breathe deeply while clearing their minds, and to shout loudly while filling their minds with alpha dog energy.

To sort out all the thousands of details of the Model, the various teams of consultants fan out across the organization and host town hall meetings so that everyone can understand how they must now do their jobs. As the last of these is winding down, all those present are distracted by a notification on their phones from the Wall Street Journal, reporting rumors that the company is considering splitting itself in two. . . .

 * * *

An exaggeration, perhaps, but not a complete fantasy: Life inside many companies today feels like an endless procession of upheavals, each unleashing another torrent of change and rearrangement and reconstruction, each once again reshuffling all the pieces into some supposedly more desirable configuration. This is life in the blender. And while it’s not always the case that all the blender buttons get pressed at once — not every merger is followed by a reorganization, for example, and not every strategy change leads to an operating model change — it’s a rare organization that goes for very long without at least a quick blitz here and a little pureeing there.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve seen this firsthand. As a fledgling management consultant, I sat in a cube at our client’s offices while a merger announcement upended the lives of the people around me. As a junior HR professional, I saw a year’s work for dozens of people tossed out when an incoming leader wanted to do things her own way. As I moved through the ranks, I accumulated more examples, both big and small: the frustrations at a new piece of technology, when the old one seemed to work just fine, or at the new approvals process that seemed to slow everything down; the relocation of a department from one building to another, because efficiency, and then back again, because no one was quite sure why; and all the Reinventions and Transformations and Reboots and Resets and rosy promises and rolling eyes. And then, as a senior HR executive at Deloitte and then Cisco, I saw more closely than ever before the chasm that change can create: the leaders, impatient and frustrated at the inability of those in the trenches to get with the program; the people on the ground, exhausted by the latest initiative or innovation, and frustrated at how hard it was simply to get on with their daily work.

I emerged from these experiences skeptical of change. Not always, but certainly when it struck me that change was happening for the sake of change, or that change was making things worse rather than better, or that change was making things murkier rather than clearer. Of course I had learned early on in my career to say with great regularity how excited I was about change and how incredibly comfortable with ambiguity — as many of us had learned to say — but as the years went by, I found myself feeling that the truth was more complicated. In my two decades working in large organizations, I’d seen change that had unquestionably led to better results and better work and better experiences; at the same time, I’d seen plenty of change that was a disaster for all concerned, and that extracted a heavy toll from individuals, and teams, and ultimately from organizations themselves. Yet no one seemed to question the notion that change was always and necessarily a Good Thing.

So I set out to dig a little deeper. This book contains what I have discovered.

In the pages that follow, we will explore some of the history that has led to the idea that disruption is both really good and really essential. We will learn about why change has the effect that it does on the human animal and why it can be so profoundly disorienting for us. We will ask ourselves what our continued willingness to shake things up, in organizations big and small, implies about our model of a human at work. And then we will examine what we can do instead: what we can do to bring a greater sense of stability to our workplaces and our teams, and how we might thereby either mitigate the unwanted effects of disruptive change or else give ourselves a firmer foundation from which to face into them.

But before this, we will start not with a composite story of change like the one above, but with real ones.

Excerpted from The Problem with Change (Little, Brown Spark 2024)

Copyright © 2024 by Ashley Goodall