Breaking Through Constraints (SSIR)

But as you move toward the more intangible elements, such as people’s deep-seated attitudes and beliefs, your leverage for effective change increases. You come closer to looking at the underlying reasons why the rules, physical structure, and work processes take their current form.

they worry that the organization does not have the wherewithal to adapt and thrive in those new realities. So we start there with a larger frame for tackling the situation: building adaptive capacity. As

Three patterns exist side by side. The reliance on the short-term fix grows stronger, while efforts to fundamentally correct the real problem grow weaker, and the problem symptom alternately improves and deteriorates…

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we identified several specific ways such balancing processes can thwart otherwise promising change initiatives: control-oriented managers who are threatened by new levels of openness and candor; delays in metrics that show costs of changes but take time to show benefits; polarization and competition between converts to a new way of doing things and

Differences in status, power, title, and function are lessened during the process.

people in our organization started to feel like they now knew “Karen,” that once-faceless young analyst in a distant corner of the fight whom few had previously heard of, let alone actually met. When complex problems arose that might require Karen’s expertise, someone in another pocket of the organization could feel confident reaching out to her ac