On the Difficulty of Change and its Management

The characteristics which we have found in bureaucracy – in technobureaucracy more specifically – are part of a single system. This means that they are in harmony, that they reinforce and strengthen each other, making it extremely difficult and dangerous to define and then initiate a process of managed change. This explains why the body of literature on the subject of change is so abundant and diverse, as we will see later on, as well as why leaders are constantly engaged in a quest for a ‘philosopher’s stone’, for a recipe which would with a minimum of risk spell out what to do, so as to make change acceptable to the workforce and to control its effects as it is being implemented. To better understand the scope of this problem, let ussummarize through the five points listed below what is at the core of today’s bureaucracies, and which is going to have to change under the pressure from the customer, if they are to avoid disappearing or imploding, taking a needlessly heavy human toll: