Should we give up on the big organizations?
Everybody who has tried to change organizations know how hard this can be. Changing people’s beliefs and values is a pretty difficult thing to do on its own. The larger the number of people you want to change the more effort is needed to pull it off. If we want to convert traditional organisations to Stoosian organisations we need to introduce a lot of new memes and replace some old ones. (meme - an idea, behavior or ...more »
Everybody who has tried to change organizations know how hard this can be. Changing people’s beliefs and values is a pretty difficult thing to do on its own. The larger the number of people you want to change the more effort is needed to pull it off.
If we want to convert traditional organisations to Stoosian organisations we need to introduce a lot of new memes and replace some old ones. (meme - an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture). Our problem is that larger organizations have an arsenal of defense systems in place to ensure cultural change is minimized. Most organizations aren’t aware of these. They come in the form of: new hire workshops, management development programs, trainee programs and quality and control departments with their endless streams of procedures and guidelines. These defenses freeze the current dominant memes and hunt new ‘threatening’ ideas with a ferocity which reminds us of the Spanish Inquisition.
What I want to do in this session is to explore and discover ways to bypass or destroy those defense systems. I have some ideas, but definitely not the answer (else this session was called: “Do X to save big organizations”). I hope some creative and caring people want to join this open session and find some answers. Because I really don’t like the idea that larger organizations are beyond rescue.
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