The pernicious cycle of restructuring

How resistance to change keeps the public sector tinkering

Many authors writing about restructuring will address the question of recurrence or frequency at some point, and to many of us in public service it can feel like that too:

After the restructure is before the restructure.

Over time I've come to think of this issue as a bit of a trap, because: what is the right amount of restructuring?

I don't doubt that frequency is an issue, even in the three years that I cover in my dataset (2018 – 2021) there were 20 teams that where restructured twice, and I have estimated before that as a public servant your odds of being in a restructure within three years is 70% - likely you’ll be in two. And that does something to people. Quite a few responses in my survey last year said that there wasn't even time to fully see through the effects the last restructure before the next one came.

All that I think is true, but:

I've come to think of the frequency of restructuring as more of a symptom and not a cause.

It's a sick cycle that's being fueled by something - and that something is what we need to understand. Today I want to talk about one of the elements that I think makes up at least some of the fuel: “change resistance”.

“to resist” photo by ALEXANDRE DINAUT

“Change resistance” is a pretty broad term used in many fields to describe why and how people don’t adopt changes. In the field of organisational change it's traditionally been used to point the finger at defense mechanisms of staff and their reluctance hindering innovation and lowering efficiency. A tale as old as time… particularly for the public sector.

But more recently attention has turned to the validity of the intended change itself and to the hierarchical leaders who drive it. Some authors have argued that resistance is a perfectly reasonable reaction to ill-conceived change, and others write about managerial ideas and the resistance to them both being part of a “healthy” dynamic - a necessary “dance” - to move an organisation forward. I like that idea a lot - two sides of a coin.

Only when you look at restructuring, the coin is heavily weighted towards one side.

One side has the hierarchical power to instigate the change and to make all decisions around it, and the other only has the power to react to it.

And let's be clear: I don't even think that the existence of hierarchical power is the fundamental problem here. It's the very process in which restructuring almost always plays out, and the unintended effects it has on its participants, that fuels are continuous cycle. Let's look at this step by step:

Step 1 Someone identifies an issue: that's usually a leader with the ability to make this “a thing”. It may be a new manager coming in, someone having enough headspace to think about an issue that they see, or an external impulse that requires a team to react, like a ministerial directive, a new strategy, or another request from the top of the totem pole. So meetings are booked, conversations are had, and depending on the size and scale of the situation, teams may be formed and consultants may be brought in.

Step 2 Research: The processes I've witnessed have indeed taken this step serious. Trying to understand where the issues are, “mapping the current state", finding “pain points” (in case you’re playing buzzword bingo). This step can even involve the team in question! I've certainly been in uneasy workshops that asked some of these questions.

But the troops tend to get nervous when they see managers asking questions about “pain points” and “improvements” - or even worse, external consultants.

So this may also stay behind the curtain, relying on managerial opinion and “best practice” advice.

Step 3 Design & Negotiations: This is where the skill of the manager really shines (I don't mean that sarcastically). Ideas for solutions are being floated and weighed-up - what capability are we missing, how should a team be positioned, what can we afford, how can it all fit together? I've observed this as an intense phase of internal politics that requires great diplomacy and skilled negotiations, though it can also get painfully bogged down in semantics. And presto – we have a plan!

Step 4 The (pesky) consultation: Since employment law requires consultation, consult we must (now I’m being sarcastic). And this is where “change resistance” comes into play - the traditional change-agnostic literature has produced an array of strategies that managers should deploy in order to communicate the proposed changes well.

Even the academic literature on this question often borders on instructions for manipulation and coercion of staff, bamboozling them into support, as if they were robots whose buttons just need to be pushed in the right order.

Here I need to stop being sarcastic though and highlight this: At this point, managers have invested a lot of time and effort, sometimes over months, and have carefully negotiated and considered different options - genuinely, in my observation. They've been on a WHOLE journey together in their boardrooms, for better and for worse, and have come out the other end with a hard-earned agreement supported by the powers-to-be that can be carried forward.

This journey results in a host of well-known phenomena: group thinking, sunk cost, positivity bias, path dependency, and a legacy of personal investment of time and effort – a huge emotional, psychological and strategic load, all leaning on this moment.

That’s genuinely understandable, and it’s the result of managers doing exactly the job they where hired to do. NOT of ill intent, careerism, or lack of concern for their staff.

But now follows:

Step 5 The 9am All-Team Meeting: At 8:30 AM the e-mail invite for the “all team” meeting goes out, and shortly after a terrified, frustrated, anxious group of staff gather to hear the news. They are presented with the carefully crafted plans, framed in the communicative skill (or lack thereof) of the leader in charge.

They hear it all at once, they were not part of negotiations, have not weighed up options, argued their case and heard others, and finally concluded on the limitations and opportunities that fall into the balances.

They just hear what is planned for them, alongside assurances of good intentions, thorough considerations and brave new world to come. Like they have before.

OF COURSE they have a reaction to that, particularly when the changes on their team, their work, their own role feel like and drawback to them. So they prepare their feedback, and they provide in the best format they’re capable of, either under a lot of strain or cool as a cucumber.

And what does this feedback feel like for the managers? The ones who have crafted and negotiated these plans so carefully? My analysis of decision documents from nearly 400 restructure shows very clear patterns in the consultation-response discourse. The dominating tone of manager responses is (paraphrased, but not far off verbatim):

“Thank you for your feedback. We understand what you mean, but we thought about that already and it’s all part of our plan. So we'll go ahead with our ideas anyway. Don't worry though, it will all work out.”

THIS, in my option, is managerial change resistance. The very nature of the restructure- and consultation process means, that:

Even the most well-intentioned, empathetic, serving leaders are so invested in their plans, and have so much history behind their ideas, that it becomes nigh impossible to question them at this point in the process with what the staff are saying.

In the process I've been part of, managers have indeed taken the feedback serious and discussed it as a group - but I never saw any serious consideration that the foundations of their ideas might need shifting. They had worked too hard on those, they had to keep standing. That's why changes end up being superficial, tweaks to job descriptions and the odd reporting line. As I reported previously, one third of restructures sees no changes at all.

THAT is managerial change resistance. And it's as much responsible for organisational change ideas failing, as supposedly any resistance by staff is.

For today I'm leaving aside the question of whether restructures are actually about changing an organisation or practice – that’s for another time. Let’s assume that is it - then I still see no other way than active collaboration between managers and staff to collectively pinpoint where the real bottlenecks in the organisation are, and negotiate how they can be addressed together - including structural changes.

Instead, the very nature of the restructure process as it’s practiced today makes opponents out of managers and their staff.

Managers can't imagine that staff participation can be productive - because their repeating experience is that of a sometimes heated and emotional response to their (supposedly rational) ideas of changes.

And by the same token, staff don't trust that their managers will take their opinions and advice serious - because they have seen it being dismissed over and over also.

And this is how the wheel keeps spinning. It doesn't even matter how frequent restructures are, it’s this cycle, this procedural opposition and exclusion of practical ideas that makes them so unproductive – not to mention destructive.

I do hope that this practice can, and will, change. But it will take a tremendous effort from both sides, starting by acknowledging the damage done by past experiences, and that neither side alone is “resisting”. Though I would be amiss not to mention that one side holds more powerful reigns than the other.