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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

A month ago I mentioned how the transformation of muscle tissue into an electric organ in some fish exemplifies how evolution works — it morphs existing structures into needed ones.

Several readers challenged the validity of evolutionary theory, describing my acceptance of it as naive. I’m perennially astonished that people who would never dream of challenging the theory of quantum chromodynamics or Einstein’s resolution of the wave/particle duality of electromagnetic radiation are so highly opinionated about evolution — a subject just as complex, even if it’s more accessible.

To be fair, I don’t think there’s a subject taught worse. Every time you hear the phrase “survival of the fittest” you can tally up someone else who learned it wrong. It’s a shame, too, because once you understand how evolution works in nature you understand a lot about how change happens everywhere else. And if you haven’t been keeping track, change has become the one constant in everyone’s lives, so understanding how it works can come in handy.

Once upon a time we designed computer systems to mimic their manual predecessors. Our early systems didn’t change the jobs people did very much, only how they did those jobs. Although we encountered resistance, it was nothing compared to what we experience now, when the systems we deliver are embedded in fundamental transformations of our businesses.

You have three choices when you take on a massive change effort. First, you can think of your task as delivering software that adheres to the specifications. The technical term for this is “dismal failure.” It’s a popular methodology because you get to claim success while everyone else gets to go back to their farms and villages, avoiding the discomfort that goes along with abandoning old ways and learning new ones. If people actually used your new system, you’d risk finding out if it wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Another option is to “manage the change.” This is basically an exercise in successful corporate politics, because the discipline of change management involves analyzing the victims and participants of the coming change and figuring out how to navigate through their sensitivities.

You need to manage change or change won’t happen, because people generally don’t like it. People don’t like it because they’re smart and understand evolution on a personal level. In nature, changes to the environment drive evolutionary change by changing what constitutes “fitness” — traits that used to be adaptive in the old environment become irrelevant or harmful in the new one. Business change is environmental change carried to our day-to-day experience, and as in nature, it makes traits that used to be adaptive irrelevant or harmful to our own future success.

If all you do is to manage change, however, your project will succeed but you’ll make the next change harder. In the long run, you either create a corporate culture that embraces change or you’ll create a corporation of listless and dispirited cynics.

IS leadership can’t single-handedly drive corporate culture, except within IS itself. (A hint: How good have your mainframe Cobol programmers been at adopting object-oriented technology? IS isn’t all that good at change, either.) As part of your company’s executive team, though, you can help shape leadership attitudes on the subject.

What’s needed to create a culture that thrives on change? It isn’t complicated. First, define the behavioral and attitudinal traits you’re looking for — dissatisfaction with the status quo, active interest in making things different and better, an entrepreneurial spirit, and so on. Then make sure you hire and promote people who exhibit those traits. Even more important, find new roles for them when you’ve eliminated their jobs through process redesigns or reorganizations. Employees will adopt the characteristics that help them survive and succeed. The company leadership gets to define what survives and succeeds — that’s how to make the culture evolve.

This, of course, means filling the company with mavericks, trouble-makers, and general pains in the neck. That’s why lots of corporate leaders say they want companies that embrace change but few actually have them.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Recently I described some research I bumped into 20 years ago about a parrot that appeared to understand both the meaning of the words it mimicked and at least some elementary rules of grammar. Not having heard anything more about it, I concluded the research didn’t pan out and parrots are mere mimics after all.

My thanks to dozens of IS Survivalists who set me straight on this subject. Dr. Irene Pepperberg and Alex, her African Gray Parrot, are alive and talking to each other. It’s fascinating research. Bop over to http://www.cages.org/research/pepperberg/index.html to learn more about it. My apologies to any parrots I may have offended by likening them to the wrong class of human beings.

Offending human beings is OK, though. It’s your turn if you’re one of those who insist on giving the company what’s convenient rather than what’s important. You probably don’t recognize yourselves. To help you sort it out, you’re the ones most likely to explain that anytime you deliver something that’s inconvenient, it’s really a violation of IS standards that will further increase maintenance costs, cause PCs to require rebooting five times a day, and besides, the company really doesn’t need it anyway, regardless of what the person doing the work says.

The history of the PC is excellent evidence of this attitude, as an IS Survivalist who asks to remain anonymous pointed out in a recent letter: “Since the IS organization ignored us, we bought PCs to do our work, until the IS organization woke up and discovered their mainframes were dinosaurs.

“So the IS organization went to our management and took over our PCs and then demanded money to manage them. They then complained we used them for things other than functions their mainframes used to do, and since they never tried to understand what we do with them, they mismanaged them.

“The costs for PCs skyrocketed because of this mismanagement, so CIOs were invented to keep us from buying anything. Then the CIOs discovered our computers were becoming obsolete (because they wouldn’t let us replace them) and they mandated we replace them, but we had no money because we gave it all to the Information Systems people who squandered it on lousy PC support contracts.

“Instead of finding out what we need to do our work, and providing tools for us to use and standards for us to follow, IS people now dream up misguided, grandiose, expensive projects to do it all for us and leave no money to do the things that need to be done. And we, the user organizations, end up doing all the computer planning ourselves, developing our own standards, and inventing workarounds to the cumbersome system set up by the IS organization and the CIO.”

Overly harsh? Maybe. For example, I don’t think CIOs were invented to keep end-users from buying anything. That’s what corporate controllers are for. CIOs were invented to be comforting to business executives who had trouble relating to technical managers whose sole excuse for holding their jobs was that they got things done.

The first PCs to enter businesses were bought to enhance personal effectiveness. They lacked the really stupid features of the 3270 interface and they made end-users independent of IS (a huge factor in their popularity). If somebody sold software that would be worthwhile to the end-user, that end-user could simply buy the software, install it, and enjoy the benefits.

This is InfoWorld’s 20th anniversary year, and in those two decades IS has gained control of the “personal” computer. In doing so we’ve tried our best to make it as impersonal as possible.

When I attended the University of Minnesota, its management tried to encourage the use of mass transit, not by making mass transit more convenient but by reducing the number of parking spots. Students, faculty and administrators, however, preferred the device they could personally control — the automobile.

We can talk about how PCs are an enterprise resource all we want. We can’t, however, change human nature, and end-users don’t want an enterprise resource on their desks. They want a personal device that provides access to enterprise resources.

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