Reference reading
Rigidity
Letting an inherited method outlive the reasons that made it useful.
Habitual unwillingness to revise a view or method when relevant reasons call for reconsideration.
Imagine this: The conditions have changed, but the familiar procedure retains its authority merely because it is familiar.
How the pattern works
The old key may have served well before the lock changed. Its history does not make it fit the present opening. Rigidity gives an established view or procedure authority independent of the relevant circumstances it was meant to address.
Organizations need continuity: a process cannot be redesigned after every inconvenience. The problem arises when experience can no longer supply a reason for revision. A new condition is treated as an awkward exception, and people must keep translating their work into a form that no longer answers the question. Compliance with the method becomes easier to recognize than service to its purpose.
What it costs the work
The organization can spend considerable effort maintaining a system whose useful assumptions have expired. Staff develop informal workarounds, leaving the official account less accurate. The executive may then interpret those workarounds solely as a need for stricter compliance.
A distinction worth keeping
An ethical boundary, a justified standard or declining an unconvincing proposal is not Rigidity. Open-mindedness does not require change for its own sake. Complacency sees little reason to examine adequacy; Rigidity resists reconsideration when relevant reasons have appeared. Inconstancy abandons commitments without adequate reason; a reasoned revision is different from both.
What a useful response can change
Identify the purpose and assumptions the procedure serves. Which of them still hold, and what observation suggests that an assumption has changed?
Examine the workarounds as information before deciding that they are merely misconduct. A workaround can be inappropriate and still reveal a defect in the official route.
Explain a justified change and its limits. Revision can preserve the underlying commitment while altering the means used to honor it.
Questions for reflection
- Which part of this procedure is being defended by its age rather than its present purpose?
- What would justify a revision, and has that condition already occurred?
Other perspectives
It is scarcely a digression to note his way of dealing with flowers, which, moreover, gives us an apt illustration of that change without thought of beauty, change for the sake of change, which has played such a great part in the degradation of art in all times.
William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art · Read the source
Morris is criticizing changes made to cultivated flowers without regard for their beauty. His example supplies a counterweight: novelty alone does not establish that a revision improves its object.
Bad custom, consolidated into habit, is such a tyrant that men sometimes cling to vices even while they curse them.
Samuel Smiles · Character · Read the source
Smiles describes the grip a harmful custom can acquire. This concerns attachment to a recognized problem; an established method can still deserve retention when its reasons remain sound.