Leading Change -- This Fall on ABC

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The April issue of FastCompany has an article on the change effort going on at the F.B.I. (“Mission Impossible?”) and I think it’s worth checking out. The bottom line is that in our post-9/11 world, we need the F.B.I. to be an organization that focuses on preventing terrorism and not just tracking down the perpetrators after the crime occurs. It has to move from a reactionary culture to an anticipatory culture. What makes this change particularly challenging is that it’s not just about “how” the F.B.I. goes about fulfilling its mission – it’s about its mission as well. In other words, the F.B.I. is going through both a business model change (from criminal investigations to counter-terrorism) and an operational change (from narrowly-focused investigations to a broad, coordinated strategic approach to countering terrorist acts). The article wasn’t too optimistic about the organization being capable of making such a change:

People who know the F.B.I. best – including many who’ve spent their careers there – would say that its culture, leadership philosophy, and links to the political arena make major change in “the bureau,” as it is also known, highly improbable. It is, they argue, just too entrenched, too bureaucratic, too rigid, too old, too slow to understand, and execute the scale and sweep of change that needs to happen.

This is sounding like one dumb dinosaur. Not good for them, not good for us.

This resistance to change, given all the implications to the bureau’s future and our country’s security, got me thinking. One thing I suspect is a factor in people resisting change is our natural, human tendency to treat the unknown or unfamiliar with skepticism or downright hostility. When we are not in control of a situation, when the external environment imposes change on us against our will, we naturally imagine the worse and spend considerable time and energy fixating on the negative in all its permutations. Our imaginations kick in and we come up with all sorts of dire implications to the change. We love horror films because our instinct toward self-preservation has wired our imagination to see the worse and respond accordingly. We can’t see any other possibility unless someone shows us a different story, a picture of what the new world would be like. Something that visualizes and describes “a day in the life of…”

But if people can use their imagination for the worse, then we can tap into that same imagination to image the future. Why not use the power of our imagination and show people an F.B.I. that is working and acting in the way it needs to as a counter-terrorism organization? And who best to show us this different F.B.I. than Hollywood? Yes, it’s time to bring back “The F.B.I.,” the TV series. (In case you weren’t around, “The F.B.I.” was a very popular TV series on ABC from 1965 to 1974.)

Too farfetched of an idea? Well, I direct my skeptical reader to Master Schein’s discussion of the importance of establishing “temporary parallel learning systems” as part of any transformational change effort. In his own words:

If, however, senior management recognizes that elements of the culture have become dysfunctional, then it must launch a transformational change program and create a management process that makes such deep change feasible. The actual change activities will vary according to the situation, but almost all such programs involve creating a temporary parallel learning system in which some new assumptions are learned and tested. It is too painful to give up a shared assumption in favor of an unknown substitute. If some part of the organization can learn an alternative way of thinking, and if the alternative can be shown to work, then there is less anxiety as the alternative is gradually introduced into the main part of the organization. The trial and error in the temporary parallel system creates some of the necessary psychological safety by providing role models for new ways of thinking and behaving. (The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, p. 130-131)

So why not have a TV series serve as a temporary parallel learning system? What better way to make the new way concrete and tangible? So Hollywood, show all of us what the new F.B.I. could and should look like. Stretch our imaginations. Show us it is possible. Take us inside the drama of counter-terrorism but also organizational change – a drama many of us know only too well. Show us the patriotism of those going against their self-interests for the good of our country. But keep it real and not the fantastic nature of 24 so people can buy into it. And make sure Harrison Ford gets the big role. No one plays tough and vulnerable quite like Mr. Ford. And my vote for the name of the series is Today’s F.B.I. Leading change, sixty minutes at a time. I think it’s long overdue.