Apathy is transformation’s greatest enemy; wholeheartedness its greatest friend

There are many abandoned projects in the world. If you Google ‘abandoned projects’ you will mostly come up with examples of construction projects: buildings that have never been finished, that are never going to be finished, and now haunt their environments as shells and echoes of their original intent. When such a project goes wrong, the results are plainly visible.

For those of us who work in enterprise technology, or who try to transform companies, the remnants of our abandoned projects are not so visible. When we walk around our offices we do not see the millions of lines of code that were written but never made it into production, the packages that we bought but never implemented, or the process and culture changes that didn’t stick. Our false starts and u-turns are largely invisible to the eye. But they are visible to our memories: anyone who has been working in enterprise technology or transformation for some time has their mental store of abandoned projects.

There are many reasons to abandon transformation projects: sometimes they are a genuine mistake, and sometimes they suffer a change in circumstances which invalidate their goals. Unfortunately, however, I think that one of the greatest reasons for abandonment is apathy. Genuine transformation is hard, and, if you are doing it right, you will run into many obstacles, challenges and opportunities to give up. The temptation to stop the project and live with the status quo is often overwhelming: after all, the enterprise runs today, so is it so bad to claim a few victories and let it run as it always has?

We often recognise that launching a transformation project requires a high activation energy: the energy required to get the reaction going and make it self-sustaining. We sometimes fail to spot that every challenge to progress saps this activation energy and increases the attraction of the status quo.

Maybe we should take an example from one of the famous buildings that always crops up - albeit erroneously - when you search for ‘abandoned projects’: the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. It would be better to describe the Sagrada Familia as an ‘unfinished project’, and to adopt Antoni Gaudi and the generations of architects and builders who have worked on the building as role models of vision and persistence.

I am sure that you have already heard of the Sagrada Familia and have seen pictures of it (like the one at the top of this article). But if you haven’t, it’s worth going and doing some Googling before reading further (try an image search). If you have never seen the Sagrada Familia in person, then now might be the time to add it to your list of destinations for when we can travel again. (And it’s a good excuse to visit Barcelona.)

Gaudi took over the project in 1883, and worked on it throughout the remainder of his life. He poured all of the ideas, techniques and experience of his Catalan Modernist style into the building, and, even though less than 25% was completed in his lifetime, he created a distinctive vision that is instantly recognisable and is unforgettable once seen or visited. When asked about the lengthy construction period - which is still not complete nearly 140 years later - he is said to have remarked, ‘My client is not in a hurry.’

We can admire Gaudi for his artistic vision, for his virtuosity, or for his technique. But I think that those of us who attempt transformation should admire him especially for his wholeheartedness. He put the whole of himself into creating something that he believed in, and refused to regard challenges as reasons to give up - even when he must have known that the project would never be completed in his lifetime.

Finding the activation energy for transformation, overcoming inertia, beating apathy and keeping on beating apathy is much easier to talk about than to do - but it is one of the many hard things we must do if we attempt transformation. In my next blog post I will attempt to offer some ideas about how to do this.

(Views in this article are my own.)