Deep Organizational Change Almost Always
Requires a Burning Platform

Deep sustainable change in organizations almost always requires a burning platform and there are two kinds: reactive and proactive. The reactive kind is when managers wait until a situation has gone critical to seek help or try to alter destructive patterns-of-interaction. Alternatively, managers who adopt the proactive kind of burning platform realize that while the situation may not be critical right now, it probably will be if they allow destructive patterns-of-interaction to continue frustrating and undermining their work-group. Managers and their staff need to ask the question, “How bad are we hurting?” If the answer is, “Not that bad,” then things normally go on as they are, until the next organizational problem raises its ugly head – normally when they least expect it. So how do managers and staff members who see the world so differently come to see the world otherwise? Edgar Schein’s model for raising organizational awareness is a powerful tool for changing how managers and staff members see themselves, others, and the world around them.

• The first step is to use objective data from the organization’s actual performance to begin to cast doubt on an organization’s ways of doing business and cultural norms.

• The second step requires managers and staff members to begin to see themselves as being partly responsible for causing an organization’s performance problems and issues. Once this sense of personal responsibility sufficiently penetrates a person’s denial and defense routines, they begin to experience survival anxiety or guilt about the “truth” that they really need to help the organization change. In the final analysis, organizations are collective-cultural entities that are led, managed and changed one person at a time.

• As their awareness increases, the third step is for individuals to allow their contributions to the day-to-day problems in an organization to function as additional disconfirming evidence that further convinces them that things cannot continue the way they are. When the weight of evidence of these three steps combines, this becomes a powerful motivation for managers and staff members in an organization to change.

But Schein points out that as soon as managers and staff members accept the need to change, they begin experiencing learning anxiety; e.g., the fear of doing things differently, changing the patterns-of-interaction in relationships, and reconfiguring the world (reality) in which their work-group operates. This creates both cognitive and emotional dissonance.

Survival anxiety and learning anxiety function like a self-reinforcing loop where survival anxiety creates learning anxiety, which in turn increases survival anxiety. This is why most managers tolerate organizational and interpersonal interactions that are dominated by poor performance and destructive conflict. Schein claims that there are two principles that summarize a process for moving beyond this self-defeating cycle.

• Initially, survival anxiety and/or guilt must be greater than the learning anxiety on the part of managers and staff in order to penetrate their defenses and begin the process of recognizing and changing ineffective performance and patterns-of-interaction.
  
  
• Creating change requires that learning anxiety be reduced by creating a climate of psychological safety for managers and staff members, rather than increasing survival anxiety for the people involved.

One of the best ways to decrease learning anxiety in the face of survival anxiety is to depersonalize the issues and conflict, which mitigates or eliminates blame. This is one of the greatest values of hard quantitative data and measures of performance – they depersonalize conflict by showing that over 85% of the root causes of organizational performance problems are in the structures, systems, and culture – put good people in bad systems, you get bad performance.

Bottom Line: Managed properly, the interaction between learning anxiety and survival anxiety can be used to create deep, profound, sustainable change in work-groups and in entire organizations.