Transcriber: Sam Aslan Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Well yeah, we do forget things. Have you ever found yourself
in a situation in which you have to change a company,
change an organization?
Well, it doesn't have to be big, it can be a small organization.
It can be a club. It can be a group of friends.
Have you seen how difficult that is, how tough?
Well, my job today, in about 12 minutes or less,
is to teach you how to change an organization.
Or rather, I'm going to tell you why organizations do not change,
and what you can do about that.
I think it's very fitting for a business school to teach people
why organizations don't change.
So, today I'm going to be talking about managing organizational forgetting,
and this is a topic that passionates me,
it's a topic I've been researching on for the past 15 years,
and has created very interesting insights that can be useful,
can be applied, and can make you a better manager.
A manager not just of large companies, a manager of small things as well.
Now, if you have tried to change organizations,
you probably know what I'm talking about.
I have been discussing this with people for many years,
and they all say the same thing: changing is hard, changing is difficult.
It's not easy to change. Changing, in fact, is a little bit like fighting a pillow.
You can exhaust yourself, you can fight all you want,
you can fight with left, and you can fight with right,
and at the end of the day, the pillow stays the same and you're exhausted.
This is a happy pillow. He's happy because he has beaten you.
The pillow did not change.
This anecdote had come back from the President Roosevelt in the US,
it is very accurate. Changing organizations is really tough.
Now, most of the time we are thinking about why organizations do not change,
we think about people.
We say, "organizations do not change, because people don't want to change."
Well, I wasn't happy with that explanation.
I don't think it's a very good explanation because it turns out
that depending on the context, we're really willing to change.
And if the context changes, we don't want to change.
It turns out that all this insight came to me thanks to my grandmother.
My grandmother one day invited me to see her,
and as the good grandson I am, I went to see her,
and she looked tired. So I said, "Grandma, grandma, what's wrong with you?
You look tired!" "Oooohh," she said.
Yeah, this woman who had survived the war and had like, lived for many years,
she says, really complaining to me, "Ooohh, I'm tired, because
I had to stay awake until 3 in the morning to watch TV."
"I'm sorry?"
"Well, there was a show I wanted to see,
and it turns out it was at 3 in the morning."
"Grandma, have you ever heard about 'taping' the show?
Like, there is some machine that does that. In fact,
you have the machine down there.
Do you want me to teach you how to use the machine,
so you don't have to stay awake until 3 in the morning?"
"Noooo. You know what? I'm too old for this. I can't do it."
I said, "Well, ok. Suit yourself. Either you stay awake
or you learn how to use the machine."
She would not use the machine. She would not learn.
Because she felt that she didn't want to learn.
"Ok. Fine, grandma."
Now, a few years later, the same grandma – older, of course – calls me and says,
"You know, little Pablo, I have a question for you."
"Ok, what is it, grandma?"
"Have you heard of the Internet?"
"Yea, I think I do, yeah."
"Um, can you tell me what it is?"
"Well, it's many computers connected, grandma."
"Oooohh. And is it true that you can do things on the Internet?"
"Yeah, grandma. That's the idea of client server."
"Oooohh. Is it true that you can talk on the phone on the Internet?"
"Yeah, well, it's not really a phone, grandma, but yeah, you can do that.
-- it was pre-Skype-- but you can talk on the phone."
"Oooohh. For free?" [laughter]
"Yeah, grandma. For free."
So, there you have my grandma, who did not want to learn
how to program a recording machine, who had bought herself a computer,
taught herself how to use an operating system
that looks like a thing you open to get fresh air,
and install the program, and about 2 weeks later
she was actually using the computer to speak on the phone for free.
The same woman.
Now, this is not surprising.
Most economic behavior is motivated by immediate incentives.
When you have the right incentives, people do change.
When you don't, people don't change.
So, the question of why organizations do not change
is more linked to the type of things that the organization is
and what it does to people, than to the people in the organization.
People who are really flexible and willing to change in their private life,
they become stable and rigid in the organization.
And that is what I want to discuss here with you today.
Now, this topic has been published by a bunch of people
and has been essentially listened to by managers,
and they keep telling me the same story.
Doing something is not particularly difficult in our organization.
What is difficult, is to keep doing over and over again.
Doing something new, finding a new idea, is not really tough.
What is tough is to get the idea to stick in the organization,
especially when this idea is new and radical.
Well, I guess you haven't seen it.
My grandma was very proud, so let me just do that.
And what I want to do today with you guys is very simple to explain to you why
changing in organizations is tough.
And we have found with a colleague of mine,
we have been doing this research for a number of years,
and we found that, in fact, there are 4 factors,
there are 4 things that explain why change is so difficult in organizations
and why – if you want to bring something new –
well, you have to do something to the old, as I will argue in a second.
The first thing we found is that the organization
in fact is a collection of assets, things, objects.
Now, we tend to believe that we are rational human beings,
we're superior to things.
Things are just things. I have a mind. I am a human being.
But it turns out that most of the time
we are the objects of things, we're the slaves of things.
I could ask you a simple question: where do you buy your food?
Well, where do you buy your bread?
And you would say probably, "Well, not far away from home."
And it makes sense. You're not going to go very far to buy your food.
It turns out that you bought your apartment, or you rented the apartment,
or you went to a residence, if you're still in school
and the residency decided where you're going to buy your food.
You don't go to the other side of the city.
Well, assets work that way.
Once we have things, it becomes very difficult for us to get rid of the things.
The things that we have shape our behavior.
There is a whole stream of thought that calls about the meta-reality of things,
how the things that we use in fact shape our behavior,
and by shaping it, prevent us from doing different stuff.
This is very, very interesting, especially in organizations.
Now, only in the mind of accountants $1 million in cash
is the same as $1 million in a machine.
If you have the cash, you can do a lot of things.
Once you have the machine, you can only do
the things that the machine lets you do, nothing else.
You can of course sell the machine, but it's not the same story.
To make things worse, assets are never used randomly.
In fact, they're used following a series of routines.
Routines may look like a little bit complicated,
but in fact they're the procedures, the steps that we have
to use those routines in a practical way.
Now, you cannot use the assets any way you want.
You cannot get to the company anytime you want.
Most companies will tell you that "from 10:00 we're closed.
We cannot work at 11:00. We cannot work at 3:00 AM.
We have to come to work at 9:00."
Well, those are the routines. They don't have really to do with the assets,
they have to do with the use of the assets.
Of course, that prevents change, because the routines are what they are,
and in some cases they're very difficult.
To make the thing even more complicated,
organizations are not just assets and routines.
They're connected to the structure.
And structure – to make it very simple – is a way to divide hierarchy,
who is the boss of whom: she's my boss, and I'm the boss of this guy;
and who does what: I'm in charge of organizational forgetting,
you're in charge of marketing, and she's in charge of finance.
Well, the structure obviously implies a definition of power.
Devise power in a certain way,
and by doing so, prevents organizations from changing.
The last thing then is something more fluffy.
Important, but fluffy, and it has to do with the culture of the organization.
Culture in the sense of things that we take for granted,
understandings of the world.
French people say that culture is what remains
when everything else leaves, and that is true, to a certain extent.
Culture is the way we understand the things we do in the organization,
who we are, why we are here, why we are doing what we have to do.
Now it makes sense now, if an organization is this,
anything new that doesn't fit with this is going to have a hard time.
So what do successful managers do?
Well, they do 2 things:
The first thing they do is they understand that the organizations are CARS.
They have a CARS. They have culture, they have assets,
they have routines, and they have a structure.
And when they do so, when they understand that, they ask themselves,
"Is the novelty, the innovation that is representing the change
compatible with the CARS? Isn't it? Why isn't it so?
What is bothering the innovation?"
In my experience, very personal and very limited, but that's the only one I have...
whenever something new collides with something old, the old tends to win.
So, as a manager, as a person in charge of change, you have to take into account
not just the new, you have to take into account the old,
you have to take into account the CARS.
That way, you can actually increase the chances that your CARS,
that your change efforts are going to have an impact in the organization.
But that doesn't happen.
Most managers are so excited, so passionate about the new.
We like the new so much, and sometimes we despise the old,
that we are unable to understand that the old still has roots.
And the roots are very deep.
Much deeper, much deeper, ladies and gentlemen, than the new.
So you have to act on that.
You have to take your energy, all the energy you have, and work
not just on thinking about what you want to impose to the organization,
how the new organization has to be, you have to work on forgetting.
And forgetting, of course, is a metaphor.
Now you understand by now that managing organizational forgetting
is dealing with the metaphor.
Organizations don't forget, because they don't think.
But managers do think, and what they need to do
is think very carefully about these 4 dimensions
to be able to break them down, to prepare them for the arrival of the new.
That way you can succeed and change.
So if you have to summarize what I said, if I have to make it short
and you can leave this video, you can leave this room
with something in your mind, I will say to you
that do not forget, that if you want change, if you want successful change
if you want to be an agent of change in your club, in the organization,
in a multinational firm, even in the world, in a social business
do not forget that everything you do is being done on the CARS,
and that CARS will limit your capacity to change,
unless you understand what it is, and you beat it first.
So, let's summarize everything with a sentence:
When the old and the new collide,
the old wins, unless you do something for the new to win.
Be that agent of change, understand what's blocking the new,
and make it happen.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)