"Changing Washing" revisited

The idea that sent me down a new path

It’s funny how a simple phrase, a few reasonably common words put together in a novel way, can turn something complex into something simple and tangible. “Change washing” was that for me.

In January 2020 (… what a different time it was), Thea Snow and Abe Greenspoon published a blog post in which they coined the phrase:

Change-washing (noun): the process of introducing reforms that purport to bring about change but fail to result in any substantive shifts in systems, services or culture.

They wrote that, in their view, public servants were not tired of change itself as so many people assume, but of the “constant superficial tweaks to systems and services that require retraining and relearning – but, fundamentally, change nothing”.

Reading this set off mental fireworks for me. THIS, at last, described what I had become increasingly frustrated and furious with over the last years of my working life. And so far, every public servant I ever mentioned this idea to has had a similarly intense reaction. In my view, Thea and Abe really hit a nerve with this term and I believe that is hasn’t lost any of its relevancy since.

I intuitively linked this idea to my experiences of internal restructuring, even though it applies wider than that. To me, those were the scenarios that most exemplified what Thea and Abe described, and I soon found similar notions in academic papers that ultimately set me on the path that I’m on now, writing a dissertation on internal restructuring in the public sector. And with 2 years of study under my belt and having read nigh on 1,000 documents from restructures (I know…), I hope to add a few observations from this neck of the woods.

There are two elements to the idea of change washing: the constant repetition of the same procedure, and the bullheaded suggestion that this change is somehow profound and “game-changing”.

Let’s look at the continuous cycle first: the frequency at which teams and entire organisations undergo “transformation” is a pretty hot topic in research with many papers finding reasons for critique: Norman & Gill (2012) called restructuring “an over-used lever” and an “addiction”, and Braithewaite diagnosed in 2005 that “restructuring is so pervasive, in fact, that observers could be forgiven for thinking it is the only change tool available”.

In my data I have at least 494 restructures in NZ’s public sector organisations between 2018 and 2021 that affected an estimated 45,000 public servants in some shape or form. Proportionally, that means that 73% of all public servants go through a restructure of their direct team a least every 3 years. Corporate staff more often than that.

So that’s… a lot, right? I must admit, I worked hard on gathering this data. But when I saw it bare in my excel sheet, I realised that on its own it doesn’t really say that much. I came to feel the same way about other academic articles on the frequency of restructuring or organisational change in general. Frequent change can wear on people - but if it was for good reason and a positive experience, then that might be fine…? So there must be more.

That’s where the second, perhaps more important element comes into play: the overstated profundity of the change that is introduced. This shows up pretty strongly in the narratives that decision-makers use to justify structural changes to their teams and to describe their intended outcomes:

The language of restructuring is dominated by abstracted, ambiguous narratives, business-jargon and genericism.

About a third of restructure narratives make cohesive links between structural issues- and solutions (e.g. we need more senior roles for career progression, we have more/less budget, etc.). Two thirds give little more than statements like:

Our future state: we produce high quality policy, we’re responsive today and shaping tomorrow.

or

A focus on alignment and consistency vertically and horizontally would ensure appropriate links between strategy, delivery and performance as well as across key customer groups.

… before presenting new organisational charts and impact tables where people can see if they still have a job in this brave new world. From where I’m sitting, many people who go through internal restructures and get presented with such documents by their leaders may well label this process as change washing (and worse).

So why does that keep happening?

One explanation is that organisational change in public service is neither about the subject matter at hand, nor about the strategic goals or transformation mentioned. It’s purely and simply an act of managerial power and intent.

Many people have told me with great certainty that internal restructures are just a way for managers to “get rid of” difficult and unwanted people in a team. I would not dispute that, but it’s such a knock-out argument. It sucks the air out of the discussion, and I don’t believe that’s the full story.

To get to the often lengthy, highly polished restructure documents filled with models, visualisations and principles that I have chewed my way through in my study, managers and their advisors’ spent weeks and sometimes months in workshops, off-sites and sandbox-sessions to analyse, design and negotiate the semantics of change. These serve as areas for internal political struggle and negotiation - for sure. But to deny that public managers are - at least in their minds - attempting to do something worthwhile, or acting in a way that is expected them, is to ignore the conditions and incentives that they work within.

In other words, we may need to consider the nauseating buzzword-bingo that staff get confronted with in a change scenario as a feature, not a bug, of the way that public sector is set up. This also explains recurrence - it happens over and over again, because it works as desired - or well enough - for some.

What does not appear to be incentivised by the same public system is genuine collaboration with the workers who actually fulfil the functions that are supposed to be improved, evolved, transformed - which Thea and Abe touched on in an updated article as well.

“Change washing” as an idea has done a lot of good for me, at the very least as a diagnostic term - a name that frustrated public servants like yours truly can give to the dull sense of Groundhog Day that we get from each failed attempt to change how we work. I’d like to see us discuss its relationship to power structures and managerial motivation, and to the expectations and norms that produce this washing machine that we continue to swirl around in. There are many, many more fish hooks to be pulled apart here.