Constructivism and Organizational Change (Part 1)

In this episode, organizational expert Heather Stephens explores how constructivism and systems thinking can transform modern corporate leadership. She challenges the traditional view of businesses as predictable machines, arguing instead that organizations are emergent social realities existing primarily through human interaction and collective perception. Heather emphasizes the significant role of randomness and environmental conditions in achieving success and advices against the reliance on "silver bullet" frameworks.

By fostering epistemic humility, leaders can stop viewing employee resistance as a personal threat and instead treat it as valuable information to act on. Ultimately, the discussion advocates for a move away from rigid, top-down design toward a collaborative process that acknowledges the historical context and unique perspectives of the members of the organization.

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I thoroughly enjoyed the insightful conversation with Heather Stephens, whose path to Tech was anything but traditional. Coming from a background in political science and international relations, Heather brings a refreshing, theory-backed lens to the often chaotic world of software development and organizational change.

We didn't just talk about Agile or OKRs. Instead, we dove deep into constructivism, the role of randomness, and why "resistance" is actually the most valuable information a leader can get. Here are the key insights and my reflections from our conversation…

One of the hardest pills for successful executives to swallow is the role of randomness. In our industry, we love to attribute success to grit, genius, and perfect strategy. However, Heather pointed out that we fundamentally fail to acknowledge the role of randomness.

She cited the "theory of external enablement," which explains how societal crises can trigger massive outlier growth for specific companies. Think about Zoom during the pandemic. They had a niche product and access to capital, but their explosive success was largely due to being placed at exactly the right moment during a global crisis - a set of conditions impossible to replicate.

For leaders, this requires checking our egos. We often cling to "silver bullets" and context-free frameworks, believing that if we just copy the operating model of a unicorn, we will get the same results. But as Heather notes, you cannot operationalize luck. Recognizing this brings a necessary humility to management, preventing the destructive disruption that comes from trying to force-fit a "recipe for success" that was actually just a roll of the dice.

To understand why organizations behave the way they do, Heather introduced the concept of constructivism. In the world of international relations, this is the idea that our shared social reality is emergent—it is constructed by our interactions and experiences rather than being an objective truth we can observe from the outside.

We do the same thing in business. We assume things like "people are rational actors" are objective truths (like physics), when they are actually "social facts"- ideas predicated on specific cultural and historical experiences. When we copy-paste a framework like the "Spotify Model" or self-management practices from a Dutch company like Buurtzorg, we often strip them of the specific regulatory, historical, and cultural soil that allowed them to grow.

If an organization isn't a machine, what is it? Heather argues that your organization only truly exists inside people's heads. It is not the building you go to; it is the collective ongoing interactions between people.

She shared a fascinating exercise she uses in workshops where she asks employees to "draw the organization". The results are telling. People draw the parts closest to them with high fidelity, while distant departments are foggy or abstract. Everyone’s drawing is different.

This destroys the "God-like view" many executives believe they possess. There is no singular, perfect view of the organization. If we accept that the org is just a collection of differing perspectives, we realize that designing change behind closed doors is doomed to fail. You cannot impose a new design on a reality that is being socially constructed by employees every day; you have to include them in the construction process.

Checkout her insightful blogpost on this topic.

This leads to perhaps the most practical takeaway for anyone leading a transformation: Resistance is valuable information.

When employees push back against a new tool or process, executives often take it personally or view it as a behavioral problem to be managed. But Heather suggests we should view resistance as a signal. It usually means the change we are proposing clashes with the reality of the employee's context - perhaps it creates more work or breaks a workflow we didn't know existed.

I’ve seen this personally in the friction between security teams and developers. It is easy for security to mandate checks that slow down production, and for devs to resist. In the past, I’ve actually hired developers into the security team to bridge this gap and create win-win situations. By integrating their perspective, we moved from resistance to co-creation.

As Heather put it, we need epistemic humility. Instead of getting angry that people aren't following the plan, we should ask: "What does this resistance tell us about the flaws in our design?".

The machine metaphor - the idea that we can pull levers and "design" outcomes - is pervasive, even in our language (e.g., "operating models," "re-engineering"). But if we view organizations through a constructivist lens, we see them as complex responsive processes as elegantly articulated by Ralph Stacey.

Checkout the full podcast for more details.

That’s it for this week. Stay tuned for Part 2 next week.