Veteran HR executive Ashley Goodall calls it the cult of disruption, and it has overtaken our world. We all subscribe to the need for constant change in organizations – or pretend to – because it’s heresy to say otherwise., he sums up the commandments of the constant change mindset this way: “Large-scale change is necessary, always; instigating change is the way to win; and if you are not disrupting every element of your operations, you are losing.
Many change initiatives fail, he says. Yet nobody suggests maybe the cult of change is wrong or needs to be curtailed or targeted more carefully. Businesses worship disruption and Mr. Goodall believes its prophet was Clayton Christensen, whose 1997 bookled to the widespread belief that companies must disrupt themselves before a competitor did.
Although top executives want to know how things are going, they are defeated by the sheer scale of many gargantuan organizations. Mr. Goodall calls it altitude sickness. Their model of work, Mr. Goodall says, is that people can be thought of as just another set of widgets and people management is mainly a question of incentives. Change follows easily from that frame of mind.
Mr. Goodall highlights the importance of teams in the workplace, offering individuals the chance to bond in small groups where they can gossip and share and help each other. But he says teams are essentially invisible to senior leaders, who don’t realize how they connect the dots for their members in the collective effort to be more productive.