Protect the Future by Honoring the Past
Can you identify the source of this quote?
“Organizations now change their internal shape with a frequency – and sometimes a rashness – that makes the head swim. Titles change from week to week. Jobs are transformed. Responsibilities shift. Vast organizational structures are taken apart, bolted together again in new forms, then rearranged, again. Departments and divisions spring up overnight only to vanish in another, and yet another, reorganization.”
Sound familiar? It’s from Alvin Toffler’s 1970 bombshell Future Shock. Thirty-three years ago Toffler described - as an emerging phenomenon - what most of us accept today as routine.
“This process,” warns Toffler, “repeated often enough, alters the loyalties of the people involved, shakes up lines of authority, and accelerates the rate at which individuals” begin to lose their effectiveness.
How do you zoom ahead, at full speed, without killing the engine that drives the bus?
People find “protection” from the trauma of change through the use of what Toffler calls “change buffers.”
A “change buffer” is anything that offers stability in the midst of change. Religious ceremony, TV Land, restoring an antique chair. Even the annual rite of Christmas card mailing protects us from change by reminding us that some things don’t change.
So what?
As your organization charges ahead – as it certainly must - make sure someone is in charge of protecting the change buffers. When your logo changes, have the art department design a wall plaque showing the old and new, side-by-side. As your product line evolves, assign someone the task of maintaining a company museum to honor where you’ve been. Learn to tell stories of your tremendous past achievements.
Don’t LIVE in the past, but keep the past ALIVE. Use the past to protect the future.
Ask these questions at your next staff meeting:
- What are our company’s most treasured traditions?
- How can we honor those traditions and create change buffers?
- Does our newest employee know how we got where we are?
