10 Beliefs That Get in the Way of Organizational Change

Authors: Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss

Let’s acknowledge a hard truth: A colleague you love or respect may be playing a role in unproductively lowering your organization’s metabolic rate. Maybe it’s even you. People often ask us about the right timing for big change, and our answer is almost always the same: How about now? Now is typically the right time to accelerate excellence. But first you need to address some of the common assumptions that may be holding your team back.

1. Meaningful change happens slowly

When we view the human story from the luxury of distance, progress can take decades, generations, even centuries (or longer). History may take that long, but change can be measured in the minutes, hours, and days it takes to identify a problem and start the flywheel of action that ultimately leads to solutions. Indeed, if you look closely, history lurches forward when changemakers decide that the moment that matters most is now.

2. We can do it later

The most successful change leaders we know are acutely aware of the cost of not now, the high price a system pays when it’s static. They live the adage that comfortable inaction is riskier than uncomfortable action. In the national reckoning on justice and race that followed George Floyd’s murder, Bill Valle, CEO of Fresenius Medical Care North America, stood up and essentially said to the organization, “I don’t yet know exactly what we’re going to do, but I know we have to start now.” He then moved quickly to empower a team to help build a stronger culture of belonging at the company.

3. Other peoples’ time is an abundant, low-cost resource

If you’re in a leadership role, your colleagues’ time is the most strategic resource you have the privilege of consuming. The leaders who get speed right treat that resource preciously by doing everything from helping their teams to prioritize ruthlessly to carefully planning and facilitating meetings. The leaders who don’t get speed right tend to use other people’s time casually.

4. We need more information

In a letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos argued that most decisions should be made with about 70% of the information you want. Some of the leaders we know who’ve stumbled in leading change were holding out for 100% of the information they wanted, including crystal-ball confidence in the endings of stories not yet written—precisely how employees would react to a decision, for example, or how competitors would respond to a bold strategic move. It felt safer to these leaders to have more meetings and run more scenarios, but that sense of safety was illusory. All that waiting made the organization more vulnerable, not less.

5. Going fast is reckless

We’ll defer to the rhetorical mastery of Ralph “Waldo” Emerson (he really did go by Waldo) for a more poetic way to say this. In his essay on the topic of prudence, he observed that “in skating over thin ice, our safety is our speed.” For those of you who are still suspicious of moving fast, keep this quote handy. A counterintuitive truth about speed is that it can make us safer rather than less safe by reducing our chances of falling through the metaphorical ice.

6. Going slowly is righteous

At the risk of repeating ourselves, we’re going to say this another way: If you have not laid a strong foundation of trust, inclusion, and clarity, then please slow down and reassess. Take your foot off the accelerator. For everyone else, know that you’re putting at risk your chance to make meaningful change. There is such a thing as being too late.

7. Our people are stretched too thin

Some of you may be slowing things down, even without realizing it, as an antidote to some other social or organizational ill such as anxiety, burnout, or distraction. When those feelings are showing up at scale in an organization, then downshifting is unlikely to help much. Deal directly with those problems. When leaders build trust by solving the right problems and taking care of their stakeholders, they can go as fast as their problems require.

8. We have to be great at everything we do

If you’re unwilling to be bad at some things, then it means you’re also unwilling to free up the resources—capital, time, energy—to truly excel at others. If you want to overperform on speed, you’ll have to underperform on some other organizational behavior. The trick is to choose something that both enables faster speed—to be bad in the service of great—and doesn’t destroy trust with key stakeholders. This isn’t as hard as it sounds.

9. Structure is the enemy of speed

The Navy SEALs have a famous adage that “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” We interpret this to mean, among other things, that while reducing friction can take some extra time in the near term, investment in process yields a faster pace on the other side. In our experience, creating good, clear operating systems is the best friction-reducing strategy available to you. At a minimum, make an agenda for your next meeting.

10. We need more time to prepare

Anticipation of change introduces anxiety into an ecosystem, and the antidote is to replace it with actual change. The longer you wait to lead change that’s needed, the more time the humans around you have to hallucinate—a favorite term of our colleague Tom DeLong—about all the catastrophic turns the uncertain future could take. There’s also rip-off-the-Band-Aid value to getting on with things that allows you to create momentum right out of the gate. As we’ve said before, simply begin.

Frances X. Frei is the UPS Foundation Professor of Service Management at Harvard Business School and a coauthor of the books Move Fast and Fix Things and Unleashed.

Anne Morriss is an entrepreneur and the executive founder of the Leadership Consortium. She is also the coauthor of Move Fast and Fix Things and Unleashed.