Change has been a topic of discussion for years. Personally, I have been working on it for 25 years. At Logotel since day one. The word “change” appeared on the very first slide that Giuliano Favini – founder of Logotel – projected at an event where guests, before entering the room, were required to jump over a rope stretched across the entrance. It was an invitation to disrupt one’s routine.
Change has become a chapter in the encyclopedia of management, the engine of an almost permanent state of crisis, a cultural reaction to an asteroid we keep expecting to arrive. A concept drained of meaning by being repeated like a litany – the sound remains, but its force is lost. Well. Here we are. Now that we truly need to change, we are either too exhausted to do so, too distracted, or unsure where to look – because there are a thousand asteroids. As in the fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, if you keep shouting “wolf, wolf,” eventually no one believes you. And then the wolf arrives. That is when change finally happens – not by choice, but by imposition, and it may not be painless.
Economic organizations are a construct that dates back a couple of centuries. Leadership and management were forged for a world that evolved linearly, through a steady flow of decisions taken by reading the stars of megatrends. You could see megatrends coming and prepare accordingly. But everyone could see them coming, and so everyone prepared in the same way. The result: for decades we have built similar companies, with similar skills and similar processes, designed by similar management schools. Guided by the logic of benchmarking in order to be better – or at least standardized – through comparability. Measured to rank in a league table or stamped with certifications to prove that, once things are done in a certain way and certified accordingly, we are a guarantee of quality, reliable and solid organizations.
Just think about it. We run in order not to move, because we have built models that turn into structures where dynamism is sacrificed to bureaucracy, to poorly applied efficiency, because there are no internal antidotes to success or profitability poisoning. And so the literature on change has acquired a new definition: change fatigue. A form of exhaustion that does not stem from change itself, but from having to follow pre-packaged, poorly focused change management programs – arriving too late, after the world has already changed (again).
Where do you start eating the elephant?
Leaders, managers, and professions. Those who suffer most are managers: crushed by the weight of having to change, without knowing how. Because the view from above – the world of trends, once linear – collides with a context that is confused, contradictory, and aporetic. The speed of transformation creates a tangle of decision-making paralysis. Meanwhile, the most powerful transformations are unfolding in everyday life: in professions, ways of working, and the expectations of employees and customers. If we step down into reality, hybridizing all-powerful technology with the ability to create, curate, and transmit new forms of meaning – the “semantic capital” discussed by Luciano Floridi – then something genuinely new can happen. But managers are designed to manage and push (some even to pull). What we need now are managers who create space, who populate a new organizational landscape made up of environments for experimentation and learning opportunities that move through imagining, trying, and even smashing new things with a hammer – precisely because they are new and therefore hard to compare: with the past, with competitors, or with the reports of consulting firms.
But unless we change the atavistic KPIs embedded in the very kernel of management, nothing will truly work. Yesterday’s KPIs are in conflict with the creation of environments and cultures capable of renewing themselves. ROI, chargeability, individual productivity, and even traditional value-creation metrics are of limited use when it comes to navigating the world we inhabit. This is because there are other metrics we are failing to listen to – articulated, with different emphases, by research institutes such as Gallup, Ipsos, and Pew Research Center: people no longer trust their leaders, engagement has never been so low, learning pathways have never lagged so far behind, and adoption programmes keep failing.
If we truly care about productivity, we need to start measuring its most powerful precursors: the ability to spark motivation, to develop skills, and to cultivate behaviors different from those that have brought us this far. The courage to experiment, to take risks, and to be carried forward by genuinely liberated talent – talent that rarely takes the shape of a contented manager – must contend with a mindset obsessed with (immediate!) success. Restless by passion.
Before launching large-scale change management programmes to stimulate entrepreneurship – a word that has recently come back into fashion – we should work on the conditions that make it possible in the first place: management itself, and new metrics. We can already picture the skeptical faces of those thinking, “you should be saying this to my boss.” Faces that are strictly two-dimensional, because the “engagement workshop” was held remotely, for the sake of efficiency. Boom!
Leaders. It is up to you to build and above all to communicate a coherent sense of direction. To strike a note that carries loud and clear through the noise of everyday life.
To shape expectations with genuine imagination. To break through change fatigue – and to pierce the earwax of habit – requires intensity, repetition, clarity, force, and coherence. Coherence that, today, means being able to live with contradictions and stop-and-go momentum – and to turn them to advantage. An uncertain, unpredictable world does not spare us second thoughts, course corrections, or adjustments to sails and tactics. But we must be able to craft a narrative that reaches everyone. One in which silences are pauses that create rhythm (there is no music without the space between notes) – not an absence of meaning or attention.
Change is a vector generated by an individual’s ability to interact and collaborate with others: to ask, respond, debate, form alliances, meet, help one another.
That is why we need to rapidly build ecosystems grounded in community logics (another word whose meaning has been worn down by being repeated like a gadget) – where the variety and frequency of the connections people activate are the emergent properties of real change, not an end-of-project metric.
And motivation? It is not an input, but an outcome. Starting to play the notes is what weaves the melody that produces motivation. Recreating the excitement a child feels when discovering and learning is a good thing. Helping people understand how their work affects the value they are trying to build together is the real antidote to stress. And our motivation – and the motivation of the people who work with us – will be the multiplier that carries momentum over time. It is not a button. It is a result that becomes a tool.
What is happening in our cities?
For Vasco, there is a lot of confusion. For us, the task is to create “future trailers” with people – to begin building a positive, participatory, and desirable narrative of what we can do together. And do better.
