Why organizational change fails
Resistance to change is natural and no transformation should ignore it
Organizational change often makes employees feel like a fish out of water. More precisely: like the wrong fish in the wrong body of water. No matter how many change agents an organization employs, the effort to bring the rest along the change journey will fail if nothing but rhetoric is changed. While some cod species stray into coastal waters, there is a reason they do not follow the salmon up the stream, and it may help us understand why failure rates of organizational change are so high.
Homeostasis
Resistance to change is instinctual at the level of the individual organism. Without healthy homeostasis, the self-regulation process by which an organism tends to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are best for its survival, life is impossible. In higher functions of life, there is a similar bias towards the baseline supported by psychological protective instincts set against all change. The homeostatic baseline provides a balance between the inner and outer conditions for optimal survival and is essential for any organism to thrive. If its homeostasis is not maintained, the organism is doomed.
Osmosis
All living organisms adapt to their immediate environment. There is a simple reason saltwater fish die in freshwater and vice versa: osmosis. Osmosis is the movement of liquid molecules through a semipermeable membrane from a low-concentrated solute to a highly concentrated solute.
Saltwater fish can’t survive in freshwater because their bodies contain a highly concentrated salt solution. The freshwater would flow into their body until all their cells accumulate so much water that they bloat and die eventually. On the other hand, freshwater fish can’t survive in the ocean or saltwater because the seawater is too salty for them. The water inside their bodies would flow out of their cells, and they would die of dehydration.
Molly be thy name
There are species of fish that can survive in both freshwater and saltwater. The euryhaline fish can tolerate and migrate in both bodies. Poecilia sphenops is a species of fish known under the common name Molly that can inhabit freshwater streams, coastal brackish, and salty marine waters. It sounds like an ideal fish type to use as a metaphor for a goal of change adaptation at an organization seeking to transform.
When change initiatives focus on changing mindsets, they are trying to engineer attitudes in their members to accept and embrace change. They attempt to turn everyone into change agents and ignite passions for an alternative vision — one person at a time. It is equivalent to turning all fish into Mollies by plucking them from their natural environment and forcing them to operate within deadly waters. It is no wonder the shock of this sudden change meets fierce resistance. Not every fish can be a Molly. And perhaps not every fish should become a Molly.
Molly doesn’t care much about change, for it can adapt wherever it needs to survive. But even Molly has a preference and will swim back to its preferred biotype whenever the opportunity presents itself. Turning as many employees as possible into change-loving transformational agents instead of transforming the environment to help them thrive is short-sighted. Even the hardiest euryhaline species will always seek a biome where they can be the best versions of themselves.
