“Change Management“

Also one of those modern anti-words. In a nutshell, it means the struggle against the concept or principle:

“This is how we always did it!“

Because you assume that, in order to “improve” something, you have to change it. Yet you do not want to leave change to the evolutionary process or to “the masses”. Since there is no trust that employees or the citizens really know how to do “change” (basically, citizens and employees are mostly considered more stupid than they actually are), you suppress “grass-root movements”. Instead, you want change “from the top”, forced by managers and controlled or somehow manipulated.

This idea makes me shudder. Because in my understanding, the term manager more and more refers to an at least slightly insane priest who thinks he has supernatural powers and can make miracles happen through witchcraft.

The miracle expected by “Change Management” is innovation. Even though nobody really knows what innovation is and how it is done. It goes without saying that the magician and his witchcraft, too, will not work. If, by accident (or through other influences) something actually happens, then the magician, naturally, willingly takes the credit and the “cash”.

I often was frustrated because of the “this is how we always did it”. Regardless, I never saw it totally negative. After all, it contains some kind of conservative warning that reminds you of the fact that innovation will always have a negative destruction in its wake, even if said destruction is creative. Consequently, the often criticized sentence admonishes us to also see and answer for the consequences, regardless of the cry for necessary change. If you see the positive side of it, you get the appeal to see a challenge with all its consequences.

A short time ago, I remembered some other sentences I also often get to hear, for instance:

“Where would we end up if everybody did this?“
or

“What does he think he is doing …?“

More often than not, these sentences are uttered without much reflection. I sadly miss any positive connotation. Even more, I discover a “moral” judgement. I also heard this sentence quite a few times in my own enterprise, for instance when young employees spontaneously integrated rules that were quite questionable. The first reaction of the administrative department whose job it was to see to it that everybody sticks by the rules was doubt. Of course, mostly they did not first answer the important question: “WHY was all this done?“

Even though, basically, nobody can say why in the “social systems” created by people rules and regulations always exponentially multiply and develop lives of their own as a matter of course. Until they control the system. I like calling this effect “bureaucrazy”.

And when “bureacrazy” has us by the neck it is really high time to “break with patterns”. Even if it takes a lot of courage and you might actually get frightened. But still, it is important that, whenever we #break_with_patterns, we can answer the question: WHY!

A short time after his inauguration, our former Federal President, Mr. Roman Herzog allegedly said that the first thing one should do is abolish all laws with uneven numbers. And then look and see which laws you actually miss. You could easily re-introduce them. And then you should do the same thing with the laws that have even numbers.

Some way or other, that is also a good metaphor for #breaking_with_rules.

RMD
(Translated by EG)

About the picture:
I took the picture from a Wikipedia article on Ganesha. It is a work in its own right by onoikobangali.