Why do organizations usually change only when they have to – in times of crisis? My prime reason for writing Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change was to answer this question. In business school the implication always was that change should be smooth, planned and linear. My subsequent experience in mergers, acquisitions and turnarounds persuaded me that this was the exception rather than the rule. In the chaotic, volatile steel industry, for example, change was essential but very difficult to carry out. Managers seemed to be constrained – by unions, by technology, by government, and often by the competencies that had made them so successful. As a result their firms only changed when their backs were to the wall. And we see this phenomenon every day in other institutions – armies change only after they are defeated; building codes are revised after structural collapses; security is tightened after serious breaches, and so on. It seems that reform is often possible only in the aftermath of disaster.

I concluded that there have to be systemic reasons for this phenomenon and found the best examples of them in natural systems. Nature uses disaster to renew herself: healthy forests need fire and insect attack; lakes and rivers need spring floods; mangrove swamps need hurricanes. Complex systems thinking allows one to translate these natural analogies into penetrating insights as to how to make organizations tougher and more resilient – capable of adaptive change. As a manager you do not have a choice between stability and change: it’s a choice between change on your timetable and change on someone else’s. Organizations need to be continually tested at many different scales if they are to be made more resilient. Of course they are being tested all the time anyway but they are often unaware of it – there is no feedback.

Not surprisingly, if natural systems use crisis to change, then humans should be geared up to handling it. This is exactly what I found. Evolution has prepared us for living on the savannahs of Africa, where resources are mobile and transitory: the herds migrate and natural food sources come and go. In our hunting/foraging mode of life we are very sensitive to change and in small hunting bands communication was wide open. This sensitivity and openness gradually disappears, as organizations grow into large scale, more complex enterprises designed to exploit fixed resources. Managers become internally focused and abstracted from the realities of the outside world – they become constrained. So the primary role of crisis is to break the constraints on change that are a feature of all large-scale successful organizations. Their very competencies interfere with their ability to adapt – when contexts change, their strengths become weaknesses.

To overcome this tendency firms have to work hard to recreate ‘hunting dynamics’ on the edges of their organizations – small, innovative teams that are exposed to the minutiae of the business and have the skills and the communication processes, both to alert the organization and to take pre-emptive action.