The Rime of the Ancient Mariner published in 1789 is by all accounts one of Samuel Coleridge’s, odder poems. The language is strange, the tale is weird, and it comes with ‘explanatory’ notes written by Coleridge. Yet, despite all this, it is considered among Coleridge’s important works. It’s richness, ambiguity and peculiarity leave it open to multiple interpretations—none of which ever seem satisfactory or complete.

I don’t usually read a lot of poetry but I was led to the Ancient Mariner by a friend who challenged me to think about the narrator’s stance towards the Mariner’s experience and what it says about organisational change. 

I had not read the Ancient Mariner before but I have for a long time thought there is untapped leadership and management wisdom to be found in the great works of literature and philosophy. Unfortunately, in the main, the modern education system (including the one I received) doesn’t equip people well to grapple with these works. Additionally, under the perceived pressure of time, most managers seem to prefer a diet of brief articles of the type ‘ten ways to…’. 

I provided a response to my friend based on a few readings of the poem but I was not satisfied with my reply. We have not caught up since to take the conversation further. I am glad of this because I have taken to thinking a lot lately about what the Ancient Mariner can tell us about change. Not ‘managing change’ but rather what it shows us about how we understand change and the assumptions that support our views about managing change. 

The short version of the plot is provided by Coleridge:

How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.

What follows is not a detailed analysis of Coleridge’s intent but rather my reactions to the poem as I think it relates to organisational change. So, to the Ancient Mariner. 

While there are many interpretations of this poem the one that fits best with my initial reading is one in which the Ancient Mariner shows us how people interpret the past, and the ways in which the past is in many ways unknowable. 

I’m attracted to this because we often think about organisational change in a way that positions the future as unknowable and the past as something that is certain, and most importantly, clearly and commonly understood by all. Our managerial certainty takes the form: ‘I know exactly where we are today and I know exactly how we got here, and most importantly, who’s to blame’. Organisational change takes the form of a ‘new broom’ that sweeps away the well-known mistakes of the past. 

This sense of certainty has not been my experience in thinking about, designing or leading organisational reform. Most often the path that has been taken in getting to today is just as unclear as the one that is proposed we take toward tomorrow. 

Mostly, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner spoke to me about the problem of causation.  The Mariner narrates a sequence of experiences that, from within his experience, cannot be understood. The events seem bizarre and unrelated; however, to understand them—to make meaning of his experience—the Mariner (and the crew) inductively assign cause and effect. 

The presence of an Albatross following the ship is associated with good times. The Albatross becomes a ‘fact’ or ‘evidence’. When bad times follow the Mariner shooting the Albatross dead, the crew assign bad fortune to the Mariner’s actions. 

It is not uncommon to see similar inductive reasoning in managerial decision making. Inductive reasoning takes the form, ‘in our experience the sun has risen every day, so the sun will rise tomorrow’. Indeed, James March’s observations on how organisations learn makes the point nicely that most organisational behaviour relies on an inductive approach:

The underlying process is one in which an organization is conditioned through trial and error to repeat behaviour that has been successful in the past and to avoid behaviour that has been unsuccessful.  

Induction is a sound approach as long as our understanding of the world remains a set of probability statements to be tested rather than statements of fact to be accepted. It’s the whole all swans are white and then we found a black one problem. ‘All swans are white’ was a strong probability statement but not a proven fact. So, how often do we question and test the assumptions of cause and effect on which our organisations are so fragilely resting? 

We often hear statements of fact in designing change: ‘we need more mobility in the workforce’, ‘we need to break down the stovepipes’, or ‘we need an adaptable culture’. Usually, there is an acute lack of supporting evidence. More often they rest on the untested assumption of the most senior person in the room or the latest management fad. Actually, they are often statements critiquing the organisation’s past rather than observations about the future. They serve to mark out the current state of the organisation as ‘bad’ while providing a counter statement about what is ‘good’. They are statements untroubled by the act of thinking. They are designed to get to the important ‘doing’ part of organisational change as quickly as possible. 

How certain can we be (and how much we can really know) about our organisational past is an interesting question. I like Adam Gopnik’s observation:

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.

The observation ‘we need more workforce mobility’ is an explanation or interpretation not an historical fact or cause. Leaders and managers deal with a multiplicity of ‘facts’ and ‘causes’ derived from some interpretation of past events of which they only ever have a partial view. To make meaning from all the information available to us we are trained to create a hierarchy, reduce and simplify until we can state the one ‘true’ fact or the one ‘true’ cause.  That’s what we are trained to do. In reality, I think it is simpler and faster. Most leader’s go with what makes intellectual and emotional sense to them, and then set about assembling the requisite ‘evidence’. A sounder, perhaps more philosophical approach to organisational change would not involve seeking certainty so quickly.  We might design an approach to organisational change that works with Bertrand Russell’s observation:

…every advance in science takes us further away from the crude uniformities which are first observed into greater differentiation of antecedent and consequent, and into a continually wider circle of antecedents recognized as relevant…

It may be that if we examined the past with our eyes wide open we would not be so certain. We would not be so certain about cause and effect or so quick to define the past as ‘bad’ and our vision of the future as ‘good’. Maybe that’s the problem, our decision-making is conditioned to have certainty as a start point. 

The problem of causation for the Mariner is the events he is experiencing cannot be explained or crafted into a meaning from inside his experiences. It is as if he is puppet making sense of his performance but true meaning can only be made at the level of the puppeteer. Our position in relation to the sequence of events is central as to whether (and what type) of meaning we can make from our direct experiences. 

In relation to designing organisational change, most change methodologies perpetuate the idea that certain actions, if sufficiently well planned and well communicated, will lead us to our desired outcomes. We are told, for example, that our communication about change needs to be complete, controlled and focused. But, the meaning and experience of change is crafted at all levels of the organisation. It is constructed through an individuals association with past experience, interpretation (and misinterpretation) of senior leadership motive, cobbled together through interactions with local ‘trusted’ sources, and understood through an perceptions of local cause and effect. 

Imagine we are all in a building with, say, seven floors. From the windows on each floor we have a partial view of change, and consequently, a different perspective and interpretation. If we were to travel between floors we could add to or enhance our partial view. In our organisations, very few people have the opportunity to move between even one floor and the next to get a better perspective on change.  Views of change are localised. These views are augmented by individual imagination and local task needs. To argue that change is a coherent action that affects the whole building in one way is a nonsense. Our understanding of change and the methodologies we have derived from that understanding are flawed from the outset. Change is a campaign constructed of localised events that aggregated up can only be interpreted by someone outside the building (whose view is also partial but constructed from the experiences of others).

The Mariner's survival when all others perished is without good cause. He cannot determine understand this from his experience. But once he, surprisingly given his recent past, recognises the inherent value of life he is relieved of the dead albatross hanging around his neck. Importantly, he also overhears or listens-in on a discussion among the ‘puppeteers’ that provides him with a skerrick of insight into the larger picture. Prior to this, the past and present were rendered meaningless except through the Mariner’s (and the crew’s) allocation of causation. In terms of the example of strong inductive reasoning provided earlier, the sun, rather than coming up in a predictable way for the Mariner, has started coming up arbitrarily. The certainty of past experience is broken. The Mariner’s story could not be understood by the participant’s the story. 

Similarly, it is extraordinarily difficult to understand the pattern of organisational change from within an organisation. The design, management, communication of change should be loosely arranged to follow a natural path and to maximise emergent opportunities in implementation. This might lead to an approach where implementation is a partnership, there transparent access to information, the methods are crafted to link the reason for the change to the character of its delivery, it is focused on organisational and workforce capability rather than target setting, and most importantly, able to accommodate local variation and innovation. Too often, organisational change is seen as an objective to be achieved through a few mechanical steps in a short timeframe. For me, it is this mechanical approach that is at the heart of the often repeated quote: ‘The brutal fact is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail.’ 

Leading organisational change is about the telling, re-telling and re-interpreting the story of the change by all involved. Every leader will tell the story slightly differently and every employee will hear it slightly differently. The message, reasoning and direction are constantly being re-interpreted and re-packaged. 

Additionally, the interpretation of the story will not be the same for every group in the organisation. For example, those responsible for managing the important work of business-as-usual will (and should) interpret change differently to those tasked with constructing a new organisational capability. The central themes should remain broadly true but the approach and method is adapted to suit context.  Mobilising people from 'that's a good idea' to 'changed behaviour' requires a localised narrative, localised timeframe and localised meaning. This activity is constant. Too often everybody becomes bogged in the morass of tasks and the need to be doing (or seen to be doing).

The Mariner, driven by guilt and his experiences wanders the earth, telling his story over and over, and teaching a lesson to those he meets. His penance is to tell his story and his audience, the wedding guest, wakes up the next morning ‘a sadder and wiser man’. 

Finally, the story of organisational change should carry the message of hope. Hope may not be a method but it is the essential inoculant around which meaning, commitment and endurance are grown. Many organisations set sail on change without giving sufficient hope to the leadership and the workforce. Indeed, some kill off hope as soon as the journey becomes difficult. Hope needs to be fortified and nourished. There are few leaders in any organisation that are skilled in refreshing hope for the workforce. Most leaders behave like managers. They have been trained to develop plans, derive KPIs and follow the bouncing ball (no matter how sophisticated the path it follows), and most of all, to complete the task that is in front of them.  

Mostly, organisational change is not a task managed but rather a quest to be led and a story of hope to be told.

 

Thanks for taking the time to read this post.

Sources:

The Rime of Ancient Mariner online: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173253 
 ‘Brutal fact’ quote: Beer, M. & Nohria, N. (2000) Cracking the code of change. Harvard Business Review, 78(3), p. 133

James G. March, (1981) ‘Footnotes to organizational change’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 26, p. 565

The short summary of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner compiled from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rime_of_the_Ancient_Mariner and A Short Synopsis of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner": http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/mariner.htm

Bertrand Russell (1918) Mysticism and Logic, p.188.

Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages, Lincoln’s language and its legacy. The New Yorker, May 28, 2007, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/28/angels-and-ages 

 

Picture credit:

Photo by 0ystercatcher - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License  https://www.flickr.com/photos/49828152@N00