Chapter Six
The Laws of Change
Change is essential if humanity is to progress. We may be subjected to it, or indeed we may be the agents of change. Perhaps both!
Peter de Jager, a consultant on the management of change 1) showed how Sir Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion applied to the implementation of change in human behav- iour. Newton’s laws show that a process will continue along the same path unless some outside force is applied.
So, human behaviour will only change when effort is applied. The magnitude of change is proportional to the force applied. It makes sense.
There is a law of change that I heard of at one time and have found quite useful that goes something like this: "To make an arithmetic change it is necessary to apply an exponential effort." In other words to make a two times difference it takes a four times effort. Or three to nine, etc.
A personal case: I was giving a talk to a group of foremen in a paper mill during one of my consulting assignments and mentioned the law of change and how it applied. Then I said to make a significant change you have to BLAST!
Well, next day as I went around the plant, various people said: ‘‘What did you say to the foremen last night? They are all raising hell today!’’ So, maybe I overdid the lesson.
Having said that, I now have to recognize a chapter in my book Management Reader 2) called ‘‘Trying Harder’’. The essence here is that effort alone can only increase output a small amount, something like 28%. On the other hand, a change of method can increase the output many times over. So the message is simply:
‘‘Trying harder doesn’t work; change the method’’. A lesson to be remembered, and to be included with the laws of change.
Another example: I was in charge of a job evalu- ation project where the target was to write and rate 10,000 jobs in one year. A large commitment. And we were getting behind schedule. Our team was writing an average of 3 jobs per interviewer per day and that was not enough. I urged the staff to work harder and improve the current output. After a while, no change. Still 3 jobs per day.
So I remembered a seminar where we were told how to reschedule work to reach deadlines that were slipping. This was for companies working on equipment to reach and land on the moon - and return safely to Earth. Hun- dreds, if not thousands of contractors and sub-contractors were involved and all had to coordinate to a fixed schedule to make the established deadlines. A small delay in one operation could cost the whole program huge losses. So the individual projects had to be finished on time.
If a project gets behind schedule what can you do to catch up? Several options:
- add a lot more labour
- add an infusion of much more money
- increase the quality risk
- make a major change of method
We could not add more money or more labour but we could consider quality and method. So we changed from each interviewer working directly with the job incumbent, to training the supervisor of the job to be described to write the job and our interviewer would edit the output. This increased the quality risk a small amount but increased output by two or three times. We then were able to meet our deadline of 10,000 jobs in that one year. A major accomplishment.
How does all this relate to creating a sustainable world through a new ethic? Well, it takes huge effort to make major changes and an urgent need for new methods that we may yet have to learn. No mean task.
Now, what kind of changes would we anticipate to create a sustainable world?
Change requires motivation and incentives or we continue as with Newton’s Laws of Motion - continuing in the same