"Leave it better than you found it!"

As I've mentioned before (see for example my post, "Leadership Aphorisms I", "Stick to the Code", and "Fatherly Leadership"), I was a Boy Scout throughout my childhood and adolescence.  One of the lasting lessons that has stayed with me today is a concept that was first articulated by Robert Baden-Powell, a British army officer, writer, and original founder of the Boy Scouts.  Baden-Powell said, "Try and leave this world a little better than you found it, and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate, you have not wasted your time but have done your best."  I've even incorporated this concept into my personal mission, vision, and values.

We were always taught as Boy Scouts to "leave it better than you found it" when it came to the outdoors, which has has evolved over time into the "Leave No Trace" conservation movement.  Whenever we went camping, we always made certain that we cleaned up the campsite to the point where the area was even better than when we had arrived.  But consider Baden-Powell's quote - he wasn't just speaking about the environmental movement or conservation.  He was speaking more generally about life itself.  We should be making an impact so that we leave the world a better place for future generations.

I've been thinking a lot about Baden-Powell's quote lately in the context of change in organizations.  As a matter of record, change is quite difficult.  And leading the kind of change required for an organizational transformation is exceedingly so.  Perhaps the best that any leader can hope for when it comes to organizational transformation is to "leave it better than you found it."  

Oday Kamal wrote an article about leading organizational transformation for the World Economic Forum (see "Organizational change is tough. Here are three rules to help get it right").  Kamal referenced the 19th century French chemist Henry Louis Le Chatelier who described a fundamental principle about systems in general that can be applied to organizations.  Kamal explained this principle as follows:

Every stable system will respond to change by trying to restore its original condition. Put another way, he deduced that any system will favor the least disruptive path.  This fundamental principle changed the course of chemistry in the 19th century. But it is not limited to the laws of thermodynamics. It describes how systems, organizations, and teams can learn to change.

In my own experience, I have found that organizations respond to change by trying to restore back to their original default mode.  The consulting firm, McKinsey, once cited a statistic that over 70% of all organizational transformation efforts fail.  While that is probably true, I've found that most consulting firms have failed to improve upon this statistic.  Change is hard.  Transformation takes time.  And many leaders don't have enough time to see the transformation to the end.  So I am left with the following conclusion - we can (and should) aim high as leaders, but perhaps the best that we can ever achieve is to "leave the organization better than we found it."