Organizational Inertia & Tactics of Sabotage

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I ended an earlier entry, Resistance to Change, with the statement, “Indeed, over the years, resistance to change can become a characteristic of an organization that is so normalized that it is ‘what we do.’ This will lead to the organization sabotaging change – overt, covert, and subconscious.”

In Edwin Friedman’s approach to changing organizations, Friedman says that the emergence of resistance to change as a sign that a leader is being effective. Resistance to change can come from organizational culture, for example, a certain pathology is just the way we are – it cannot be changed.  There might be structural barriers, for example, incentive structures that are counter to successful organizational outcomes.

There are also direct actions by individuals and organizations to resist change. Sometimes this is deliberate; that is, sabotage. Other times it is behavior that does not appear as mal-intent; that is, it seems driven by some subconscious need.

Resistance and sabotage are part of a successful path to organizational change. Expect them and manage them. ¹There will be those in the organization and external observers who resent the word “sabotage,” because they do not feel it is “who they are.”

This entry is an experience-based analysis of organizational inertia and sabotage.

Types of Organizations and Their Relationships.

I will define the organizations, which I managed or served as a change consultant, as a “performing” organization. They are expected to deliver a science-based product for customers. The products are computational models and simulations or data sets. The customers are researchers or application specialists, for example, weather forecasters.

The performing organization is embedded in a much larger organization, Federal agencies – bureaucracies. Though important functions of the Agency, they are only a small part of the Agency’s portfolio, and they are not the most important part of the Agency’s portfolio.

Being embedded in a larger bureaucracy means that the performing organization has important relationships with other parts of the Agency. These relationships include other Agency units that may have similar missions. These similar units will have characteristics of competitors, collaborators, and potential partners. To management at the Agency level or to external advisory panels, the units with similar interests and capacities are attractive resources to be brought together and made more effective.

In an operational sense, a performing organization is likely to rely on other performing organizations for essential resources, for example, computational services or data streams.  Human resources, security, and other Agency units, also, provide services, and they are, also, potential rule setters. These resources are usually shared resources. Therefore, a resource essential for one performing organization’s products are shared and, perhaps, competitively allocated.

In addition to performing organizations, program offices are another important part of the Agency environment. Program offices provide funding to the performing units. Therefore the skills to build the product and the money to pay for those skills have been placed in separate units. This sets up a difficult power dynamic.

Program offices are likely to have responsibility for several performing units.  Any one performing unit is likely to require resources from several program offices. Program offices in U.S. science agencies are likely to include elements targeted on research outside of the Agency, for example, academia and non-governmental organizations. In Federal agencies,  there may be the expectation that program offices encourage public-private partnerships that include for-profit businesses. The collection of Federal organizations and their contract employees, academic and non-governmental, non-profit organizations, and private sector, for-profit organizations is referred to as the “community.”

Even within a single Agency, a performing organization is likely to compete for its resources with other, both similar and dissimilar, performing organizations.  A performing organization is likely to have to seek resources from multiple, competing program offices. In the best of worlds, this nest full of performing organizations competing for their monetary worms is inefficient. It makes it difficult to develop, test, and deliver products – often, essential products for the Nation’s well being.

In addition to a performing organization’s Agency environment, other agencies are likely to have similar capabilities. There is likely funding crossing from one Agency to another.  From the point of view of the public, Congress, or, for example, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, these multiagency units with similar interests and capacities are attractive resources to be brought together and made more effective. Cross agency activities are chartered to pursue those multi-agency ambitions.

Lack of a Common Vision

The goal here is not to describe the entirety of the bureaucratic environment in which a particular organization exists.  The point is to convey the complexity of the environment in which a performing organization exists. As a consequence of this complexity one performing organization is likely to have dependencies with several program offices within an Agency. It is, also, likely to have weaker dependencies with program offices in other agencies.

If an Agency is divided, coarsely, into an Executive layer, a Program layer, and a Performing layer, then an essential requirement for organizational change is a common vision of the need for change that links the Executive layer, the Program layer, and the leadership of the Performing organization.

The motivation for organizational change often comes from the Executive layer, perhaps, with strong input from external members of the community. The target of their interest is likely a Performing Organization. The Program Offices may or may not share the Executive’s enthusiasm for change. Indeed, it must be realized that people and sub-organizations in the Executive layer, the different Program Offices, and the multiple Performing organizations will all display resistance to change.

Given that several Program Offices have relations with any one Performing Organization, it is a formidable task to develop a common vision across Program Offices. Given the dependency relationships between Program Offices and Performing Organizations, it is unreasonable to expect that effective changes in the culture of a Performing Organization will occur without complementary changes in the Program Offices. Conversely, if the Program Offices resist change, then lasting change in a Performing Organization is unlikely.

The description provided, here, of a performing organization embedded in a larger bureaucracy with competing organizations and allegiance to multiple program offices, conveys one of the facts at the center of the fragmented capacities in the U.S. science culture. When it is realized that all of these organizations are adapted to working and succeeding in this fragmented environment, then this becomes a self-evident source of organizational inertia. It is the nature of inertia to resist change, and this is ultimately realized as an organizational force that drags efforts of organizational change back towards the historical culture.

With this complex manifold of organizations and massive inertia, the lack of a shared vision of systemic change across, at least, a subset of key elements of the Executive, Program, and Performing layers challenges culture-based, organizational change, causing it to flirt with impossibility.

Discontinuity

In the entry Communications and Continuity, I stated, “There is a no more effective way to change an organization than persistence and continuity – the stout stake of the organization’s goals and the leader pulling all strands of the organization towards that goal.”

Discontinuity is a primary component of organizational inertia and provides an environment and sustains a culture that allows and promotes sabotage.

Within a Federal organization, discontinuity is a fact of life. Indeed, there is a level of discontinuity designed into the system. Major discontinuities are related to elections, congressional appropriations, and turnover in program offices and line management. There are changing interactions with external factors, for example, the public. Unfortunately, many performing organizations accept the inevitability of the discontinuities and position themselves as powerless in their presence. A primary task of the management of a product-producing organization is to maintain focus on sustained, progressive goals through discontinuities.

At the level of the performing organization, this is where the power of planning, the statement of mission and goals, and leaders maintaining the focus on organizational goals becomes important. Rather than each new leader writing a new plan, if the new leader comes in, follows, and evolves a agreed-upon organization plan, then organizational continuity, cohesion, and culture will follow.

It is the relationship between a Performing Organization and its Program Offices that are most important. If a performing organization frames themselves as a dependent or subordinate to the Program Offices, then the Performing Organization will inherit the discontinuities and the anxieties of the Program Offices. Establishing strategic continuity at the Program layer, that is, within Program Offices, is essential to the organizational change required for a successful, science-driven, product. Anxious, discontinuous, fragmented program offices lead to anxious, discontinuous, fragmented performing organizations and deficient products.

The relationship of a performing organization to the Executive layer of an agency should be less direct than the relationship to the Program layer. However, tectonic shifts in the Executive layer can be disruptive and damaging. They can, also, be potentially beneficial.

Unfortunately, my experience is that many agencies, programs, and performing organizations promote discontinuity. In fact, I once worked with a program manager who desired to pass on an organized program to their successor. The instructions on departing, beyond the spreadsheets to meet the necessities for budgetary accountability, were to delete their files. There is, often, the expectation that each program manager and line manager make the program or performing organization “their own.”  I have seen conscious disregard to the history of an effort because the new manager expected this mantle. They view it as part of how they will be evaluated. Therefore, they are vested in discontinuity at the individual level. To succeed managers must be evaluated on the success of an organization’s products rather than how they have left a ephemeral personal imprint on an organization.  ²other issues of training, all acting directors, deferring of power, role of lobbyists, and hierarchy etc.

Causes of Resistance and Tactics of Sabotage