Venting – "Animal Farm"

Venting – \”Animal Farm\”

In George Orwell\’s classic allegory of the events surrounding and aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the action follows 3 distinct phases;

Phase 1 consists of the animals deciding that a change is necessary and that it indeed must happen, no matter how uncomfortable the consequences. It is the \’greater good\’ that requires the repressive overlords to be themselves overthrown.

Phase 2 involves the planning and actioning (ugh) of the Revolution, and the state of near Utopia that exists, even if only for a very short time, before…

Phase 3 where those now in power and having dominion over the rest of the population start to behave in a way that makes life after the revolution at least as hard (if not harder) than it was before, and nothing has really changed in the day-to-day lives of those on the farm.

I guess the message is either \’Be Careful What You Wish For\’ or perhaps in the deeper \’You Cannot Change The Instinct Of Man\’. Whatever. I\’m no scholar, and I don\’t want to be drawn into the meaing or otherwise of a literary classic.

What I DO want to say about it is this:

That looks a lot like how Businesses, Corporations, and (to a lesser extent) IT Departments have evolved over the last 10 years or so. And it\’s worryingly cyclical, and cycling more frequently every time.

I\’ll explain…

The recent shenannigans in the Financial Markets / Oil Industry / some other crisis means that everyone agrees change should happen. It doesn’t matter what the crisis actually is, you understand – what matters is that those at the top have been percieved to have lost their way by people just below the top. Sheesh, the Brits even recently elected a coalition government – how desperate was that ?!?

And so the Change Agenda / Transformation Journey / Meaningless Portmanteau begins. Everyone gets excited about a new \’Head Of..\’, new \’Divisions\’, etc, basically anything that stops them thinking about what THE ACTUAL PROBLEM is. Plenty of time and money is spent in these stages. There\’s rewards, communications, some parting of the ways, all in the cause of Vision and Change, because change is good, right ?

WRONG ! Change for change\’s sake is NOT good. I\’ve lost count of the number of restructures / reorganisations / road maps / blueprints I\’ve witnessed in 20 years, and not ONE of them does more than make people think they\’re doing things differently. Sure, there are more KPIs, more metrics, more RAG statuses to let everyone know how well things are going, but in essence nothing has changed.

(as a bit of a rant, I know of a place where the Restaurant, Shop, and Café have had 3 refits each in 10 years, yet to replace a worn-out desk or chair requires an Occupational Health Assessment)

Change is only effective when things ACTUALLY change. A new OS on the Desktop is great, but shifting to more collaborative working (and by that I mean talking to people and understanding their wants and needs in a mutually respectful environment) would bring about a greater change in your business. A new coffee machine will boost morale (and revenue) temporarily, but it\’s ridiculous to expect your workforce to be more motivated because they drink FairTrade Decaff Americanos instead of fairly nice free coffee from a vending machine.

It\’s just that it\’s hard to change a culture, it\’s hard to change the nature of business, and it\’s hard to focus on what the problem really is before diving in and changing everything. Things that are hard tend not to get done.

However, I don\’t believe that change is impossible. Once we stop thinking of ourselves in terms of \’He does this job, she does that job, and they\’re different jobs\’, we might start to get some forward traction. Sure, the jobs may be different, but the people doing them are not so different as they might think.

I wonder what Orwell would have thought about that…

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