Desiring machines

How hard is it to turn a culture around? Harder than you think.

We like to think of organizations in terms of rational outputs: finance, marketing, manufacturing. But each work stream is made up of individuals responding to internal cultural influences. Each component of an organization is working toward an end, and sometimes changing that end mid-stream is like trying to get a river to run a different direction.

The philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari described it as desire, and talked about the productive and destructive forces of “desiring machines.”

We better understand the task of change as daunting when we think of it as stopping a machine from what it desires.

Persuasion then becomes not just a tool in change management’s toolkit, but a necessary part of changing organizational desire. Transformation is the act of collectively wanting different things.