Things I’ve learnt this week along my internet travels and conversations with smart people.
Rage against the status quo
I happened upon this super interesting article about Organisational Inertia.
Organisational Inertia is a cultural resistance to change in a business where the status quo is accepted and preferable.
Given service design by its nature is normally influencing and driving change this phenomena is definitely something I’ve been acutely aware of. I hadn’t heard this term before so finding this was definitely an “aha yes, that’s what it is!”.
Essentially the study (outlined in the article) investigated how organisational inertia affects innovation, business model innovation, and corporate performance across the sample.
No surprises really, the results revealed that organisational inertia negatively impacts on innovation.
You can have the best ideas, the best technologies, the best designs but if the people aren’t behind it, it isn’t happening. Culture eats strategy for breakfast after all.
Over lunch this week Soheum, Jarrah and I were talking about the concept and our experiences of this.
The ever wise Jarrah shared the theory of learned helplessness, a totally fascinating concept.
Learned helplessness is a psychological condition where individuals become convinced they have no control over a situation. This condition leads them to stop trying to change their circumstances, even when opportunities for change become available.
We all know what it is like to be a giddy new starter brimming with ideas. Over the years the culture sucks it out of us. We don’t think we’ll ever be the ones to give up, but somehow, slowly, most of us do lose our giddiness and resign ourselves to “it’s always been this way, it’ll never change!”.
There are a few characters, the distrupters, the visionaries, who are seemingly immune to this. They drive on they don’t let the status quo hold them to ransom.
To these types, change is exciting, it is alluring.
I know plenty of these people, and in design we need these people, they keep us going and keep the momentum when everyone else starts to lose their sparkle.
We do also need the calm, composed and calculated types who are both wise and wary too though.
And we definitely shouldn’t chuck organisational history in the bin and pretend it’s not relevant.
It’s left me thinking about my own approaches to overcome this and other cultural issues when delivering work. So to be continued… I am feverishly learning more about this.