I’ve had a number experiences recently with trying to get a large organisation to change its mind. It is quite incredible the number of ways bureaucrats can express the view “Yep, we got it wrong, but no, we’re not going to do anything about it” usually involving euphemisms like “there are clearly lessons to be learned.” I’ve kept firing back strongly argued missives, more to make myself feel better than any expectation that someone might actually say “Yes, we were wrong and here’s how we’re going to fix it.”

I often talk about ‘institutional inertia’ – the way big organisations resist change. It can be quite brutal – years ago I interviewed an amazingly inspirational sustainability director for a project I was doing – I marvelled at what she had achieved with no resources. I heard a year or two later that she had been made redundant. The person who told me this news explained “I think she was a bit too high octane for them” – in other words she was too good at her job and it was ruffling too many feathers.

It’s easy to get despondent, but there are ways to work around the inertia. I’m writing this in a hotel room in Birmingham before a client workshop – the third in a series of four we are running to develop a sustainability strategy. That might seem like overkill, and, yes, I could put together a reasonable strategy with the information I have now, but a. it may miss out crucial detail which I don’t know I don’t know (hat-tip Donald Rumsfeld), but more importantly, b. I won’t get the same buy-in if key people aren’t involved all the way along the path.

My number #1 rule of tackling institutional inertia is:

Keep involving people in the change process.

 

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