How to Change an Organization Without Blowing It Up

Health-care employees can identify new ways to improve patient care.

Too often, conventional approaches to organizational transformation resemble the Big Bang theory. Change occurs all at once, on a large scale and often in response to crisis. These approaches assume that people need to be jolted out of complacency to embrace new ideas and practices. To make that happen, senior management creates a sense of urgency or takes dramatic action to trigger change. Frequently, the jolt comes from a new CEO eager to put his or her stamp on the organization. Yet we know from a great deal of experience that Big Bang transformation attempts often fail, fostering employee discontent and producing mediocre solutions with little lasting impact.1

But meaningful change need not happen this way. Instead of undertaking a risky, large-scale makeover, organizations can seed transformation by collectively uncovering “everyday disconnects” — the disparities between our expectations about how work is carried out and how it actually is. The discovery of such disconnects encourages people to think about how the work might be done differently. Continuously pursuing these smaller-scale changes — and then weaving them together — offers a practical middle path between large-scale transformation and small-scale pilot projects that run the risk of producing too little too late.

Researchers tend to overlook this option because few managers have employed it until recently, assuming they needed to take an all (Big Bang) or small (pilot projects sequestered away from the dominant organizational culture) approach to organization change. That may have been more true in the past when organization boundaries were less malleable, communication more difficult and people less mobile. However, today’s complex and connected global environment makes step-by-step transformation by managers inside most organizations a real possibility, if senior leaders recognize and help cultivate their employees’ collective capability to discover everyday disconnects.