If It Ain't Broke, Break it.

Yesterday in Group Comm class we were talking about if success is measurable, and it got me to thinking about how organizations react to success and failure, namely the following question: If an organization is successful in one round of action, should the conversation afterwards be about change? In other words: If it ain't broke, should we fix it anyway?

The answer from most contemporary Org Comm and Business researchers would be a resounding "YES." There's the idea that if you are being reactive as opposed to proactive, you are already behind the curve. A sports example: Why is Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland Athletics, considered such a good executive? Part of the support for his style is that he doesn't wait for his team to do poorly before he executes drastic change--or what Andy Tollison tells me is called disruptive change.

In fact most of our class--including our professor--agreed that proactive/disruptive change is necessary for successful organizations. I'm not going to disagree with that; it's pretty clear that staying ahead of the curve is an important component of continued success.

In class I drew the following diagram:


In retrospect, the question I have is more spectral than diagrammatic (that's a big word). Here's what I should have drawn:


The fact is that a feedback process cannot possibly result in absolute change or absolute stagnancy; 100% change is rare in organizations (and I would say impossible), and there has to be a strong, concerted effort to make no changes whatsoever.

Looking at a feedback process AFTER failure and BEFORE success, there is probably a high degree of change occurring, falling somewhere on the right side of the spectrum. The only situations in which I could see little change in those feedback processes is if luck is the major factor in success; for example, if we were guessing heads or tails on a coin flip, it doesn't really matter if you change strategy/process/leaders/whatever in between rounds of action.

What about after success? In the 1950's, you would probably hear "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." That's a bit ignorant by contemporary standards. Now you'll hear that proactive change is ALWAYS necessary, which I don't think is right either. How can organizations determine what degree of change will lead to continued success? Time to do some research...


(On a side note, happy birthday to Jill Kelly! She's 25 and loves statistical design, so I got her Randomized Blocks of friendship. See you at kickball, Jill.)