The nature of organisational immune systems
Anyone who has tried to change the way an organisation operates knows the extent to which existing processes have to be changed or swept away, and how the mindsets of the existing managers prove an impediment at every step of the way.
Changes that affect the vision or values of the organisation are even harder to make, as you have to change the underlying beliefs of everyone who is loyal to the old ways. The immune system is made up of the attitudes of the managers, process manuals, IT systems, tradition, and people who still remember the good old days.
You can hear the immune system in action whenever you hear the phrase ‘that’s not the way we do things around here’.
The immune system preserves the values of the organisation, and perpetuates the way it does things, whether or not those things are still worth doing.
And the immune system is both a blessing you need to praise and a curse you need to undermine.
Why an immune system is a blessing
Quite simply, the main reason a strong memetic immune system is good is because it stops you doing stupid things.
We may be told to ‘believe a man can fly’ every time we watch a Superman movie, but our mental immune system tells us that this is most improbable, and neatly quarantines the meme as ‘fantasy’. It is entirely likely that people have occasionally believed they really could fly, but this meme would fail to spread in all but the messiest of fashions.
Similarly, organisations have internal controls to ensure that new ideas are properly evaluated, both to balance risks and potential benefits, but also for reasons of 'fitness’ to the corporation’s beliefs and vision. These controls, in a well-run organisation, will prevent ideas from taking root that do not support the objectives of the organisation. So ‘the way we do things round here’ avoids meme clashes and prevents the rise of internal tensions, at least in principle.
The curse of change
Nothing prevents an organisation from functioning quite so effectively as change, and so the immune system prevents the change by protecting the current way of working.
Organisations exist (or should exist) for a reason, and 'culture change' is therefore a distortion of that reason. If preserving the vision is a good thing most of the time, it is a major problem for the leader who wants to improve either the culture or the processes of his organisation.
If you want to bring about change, you have to knock out the immune system and (just as with a biological system) that can be dangerous. To get from ‘good’ to ‘great’, the organisation has to go through ‘awful’, and it can get stuck there.
This is an easy trap to fall into, as if you over-weaken the immune system (or fail to reinstate it once the change is embedded) then the organisation will effectively become brainlocked as it fails to remember what it is supposed to believe in anymore. Brainlocked organisations lack purpose and clarity of direction and are often reduced to internecine warfare.
The immune system prevents brainlock by protecting, retransmitting and reinforcing the vision and values of the organisation. Death by initiatives Another symptom of an under-strength immune system is the prevalence of management fads. Each fad (whether it be TQM, excellence, knowledge management, chaos, corporate social responsibility, management-by-objectives, process re-engineering, team-based management or anything else) is enthusiastically embraced by the management of the organisation and imposed over the top of all the other initiatives.
Of course, it fails to deliver the improvements in productivity, profitability, staff retention or whatever the objective was.
So the management tries something else, which of course fails too.
Shapiro (1997) describes this as fad surfing: ‘the practice of riding the crest of the latest management panacea and then paddling out again in time to ride the next one; always absorbing for managers and lucrative for consultants; frequently disastrous for organizations’. Weak immune systems create conditions where organisations can be overwhelmed by fads and initiatives, and they lose track of why they exist. Fads are perpetuated because corporate immune systems are weak but they fail because human immune systems are strong.
Each fad has one or two true believers in an organisation, but while the rest of the corporation picks up the general principles and the buzzwords, they fail to become infected with how the fad works.
If the fad is something complex that requires widespread and total adherence (like Six Sigma) then anything less than complete conversion of the business will fail to deliver results.
I’ve worked in several businesses, the most notable one being a tobacco company, where the strategic memes were almost entirely absent and the tactical memes can best be described an accretion of fads - it was not a happy or well-functioning place.
Why the immune system is a curse
A memetic immune systems preserves the organisation by preventing change. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but mostly it’s not. Strong immune systems stifle innovation and prevent organisations from reacting to external threats such as new technologies, new competitors or changes in the economy.
Large businesses are famously unable to introduce major innovations (as opposed to incremental improvements, which they tend to be good at). Clayton Christensen (1997) characterised this as ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’. This dilemma is caused by the immune system in action: middle management in the engineering, marketing and finance departments rightly spot that the early versions of a new product are more expensive and don’t work as well as the current state-of-the-art, and so they reject the new idea and stick with what they know. But by focusing on efficiency, not innovation, they miss the point that the ‘art’ is about to be utterly redefined and allow a smaller player to run off with the market instead.
And when the market is being redefined by those competitors, an over-active immune system can prevent the business from responding, leading to extinction. Kodak famously failed to see what digital cameras would do to film sales and drifted into bankruptcy, and Microsoft was almost too late to embrace the Internet. The ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome can, in extreme cases, leave the company stubbornly clinging to its memes while the rest of the world moves on around it.
However, the usual cause of extinction from an over-active immune system is not strategic failure but tactical failure. The curse of the successful business is that management is convinced that it are immortal, and they don’t spot a change in the economy fast enough to take action. They continue spending money when they should be cutting costs, or cut costs when they should be investing. Either way, the business is headed the way of the dodo.
As well as stifling innovation and responses to external factors, strong immune systems also prevent beneficial change. The phrase ‘that’s not the way we do things around here’ strikes dread into the heart of anyone trying to improve the way an organisation. The culture of the corporation will fight to prevent any changes to the status quo, even when the change is evidently in its interest.
Organisational forgetting
Avoidance of useless or damaging memes is vital to the success of an organisation and to avoid them, as we have seen, is one of the purposes of the immune system.
But the organisation has to be able to learn to do new things or to do existing things better if it is to keep up with the competition, and here the immune system can be a curse.
There’s been an awful lot written in the business literature on the subject of organisational learning, and a lot of (often poor quality) consultancy sold on the back of it. Little, however, has been written on the equally important subject of organisational forgetting, which is a vital tool to those who want to make major changes to an organisation.
As it learns new ideas, an organisation has to forget old ones.
To fail to forget not only keeps the bad old ideas alive, it can also prevent the new ones from being embedded. This is not a new idea: Prahalad (see Bettis and Prahalad, 1995) identified that forgetting is sometimes necessary to change the dominant logic in a business, and that failure to forget means an inability to change.
That idea has been further developed by Nelson Phillips, Professor of Strategy and Organisational Behaviour at Imperial College, London (see de Holan, Phillips and Lawrence, 2004). Professor Phillips says that organisational memory: consists of sets of knowledge retention devices that collect, store and provide access to the organisation’s experience, independent of the people in the organisation. These knowledge retention devices are assets, routines, practices, structures, and culture.
The knowledge does not reside in people’s heads unless there is some explicit act of transmission [to them]. So not only do we have to change the meme sets sitting in people’s heads, we have to change the memes stored in the various knowledge retention devices in the organisation as well - if we do change them, these retention devices act as part of our immune system, but, if we do not change them, they are reservoirs of re-infection for the bad old way of doing things. This is a form of conscious, directed evolution of the memeplex governing the organisation, pruning out the operational dead wood and encouraging promising new shoots to grow. A taxonomy of amnesia
In an elegant little taxonomy of amnesia, Professor Phillips and his collaborators (see de Holan, Phillips and Lawrence 2004) have identified that organisations can lose track of existing knowledge or fail to learn new information, and that these failures can be accidental or deliberate.
This leads us to four kinds of forgetting, shown in the following table: s
| Intentional Forgetting | Unintentional Forgetting | |
| Existing Information | Unlearning | Memory Decay |
| New Information | Avoiding Bad Habits | Failure to Capture |
Taking these four kinds of forgetting in turn:
Unlearning: Here, information is forgotten through a deliberate act. In order to deliver a culture or process change in an organisation, you have to persuade the corporation and the people in it to ‘unlearn’ existing ways of doing things. In the words of Professor Phillips, ‘unlearning is the foundation for strategic change’.
Avoiding Bad Habits: New information should always be assessed, and discarded if it is either valueless or positively harmful. This avoidance of bad habits usually happens when the filtering mechanisms of the person who is exposed to the new information suppress it, making a positive decision that it is something that the organisation need not know (in this respect, the person is acting as an arm of the corporate immune system, which is acting constructively).
Memory Decay: Of course, entropy affects everything, and existing information can also degrade over time unless it is replicated from system to system or from person to person - this usually happens in cases where the immune system is too weak.
Failure to Capture: Finally, it’s easy to see how good ideas can be created or transferred in from outside, but fail to result in a change in organisational memory. In this case, the organisation’s immune system is acting against its own interest, because it prevents the organisation from encapsulating potentially useful information for later use.
A strong immune system is a mixed blessing: it can delay memory decay by ensuring faithful replication of ideas, and it can fight off bad habits. However, it can preserve outdated ideas and prevent necessary change, and it can block the introduction of new thinking.
This nicely illustrates the dilemma that is the corporate immune system: if it is too weak, then good habits will be lost and bad habits will creep in; but if it is too strong, then there will be no innovation and nothing will ever gets better.