Why sticking with ‘it’s how we do things’ is a recipe for disaster

My observation over three decades working as a CEO, Big Four bank CIO and management consultant is that most organisations have a strong inbuilt default to maintaining their traditional ways of doing things.

This isn’t surprising because I imagine we’ve all heard stories about how difficult it is to truly transform an established organisation, and like me, you’ve probably also seen ambitious programs start enthusiastically, and then over time fail to build momentum, or slowly die on the vine.

There’s a simple reason for this embodied in Year 7 physics. Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion dictates how the universe (including our organisations) actually works, and his law states that “a body organisation continues in its state of rest, or in uniform motion in a straight line, unless a force transformation project acts on it”.

In broad terms, this means that nothing happens unless action is taken, otherwise, the status quo remains in place.