The Second Oar

A single scull is one of those narrow boats with one rower, two oars and a hull with barely enough room for the after-effects of a weekend of good food and wine. As long as the blades lie flat on the water, the boat stays fairly steady. Lift them and it starts to wobble. Let go of one and you may soon find yourself in the water.

Each oar drives the boat forwards and makes it turn at the same time. If you only pull on the right, you go round in circles. Pull on both sides at once and the turning effects cancel each other out while the forward forces reinforce each other. You move in a straight line.

And over time, you notice something: the better you keep your balance, the harder you dare to pull. The more smoothly the boat moves, the more stable it feels. So balance makes speed possible and speed makes balance easier. Stroke after stroke, they reinforce each other.

For me, that is the essence of synergetic thinking. Opposing forces can reinforce each other over time, provided you bring them into alignment. That balance is never final or guaranteed. You adjust your course with every stroke, depending on the wind and the waves.

For more than twenty years, I have worked on change and adoption in organisations. In that time, I have seen plenty of initiatives rowing with just one oar. All the effort went into the change: investment in tools, planning, communication and training. Anything that pushed back was immediately given a label: resistance. Something to remove. And then the boat goes round in circles, with a great deal of effort and very little progress.

This essay is about that second oar: what resistance can teach us, what it takes to redesign a solution and the compromise that often takes its place.

Change is full of contradictions

Every change in an organisation brings tensions. They do not disappear once a decision has been made. They remain and need constant attention.

Take speed and buy-in. A new system has to be working by a certain date. At the same time, people need time to understand what is changing, to practise and to make mistakes. Focus only on speed and you meet the deadline but lose the people. Focus only on buy-in and you keep talking while the world moves on.

Or standardisation and local needs. A single way of working across all departments makes things easier to oversee and less expensive. At the same time, each department has its own customers, its own busy periods and its own exceptions.

Or direction from the top and ownership on the ground. An organisation needs direction. People who only carry out what others have devised rarely feel ownership of the result.

There is something valuable on both sides of every tension. Those asking for speed are protecting the organisation’s future. Those asking for time are protecting the quality of the work and the people who do it. Those pursuing standardisation are protecting a clear overview. Those defending local needs are protecting the relationship with the customer.

Yet in practice, one side often becomes ‘the change’ and the other ‘the problem’. One oar gets all the attention and effort, while the other becomes an obstacle. And then the circling begins.

What resistance means

We have a whole vocabulary for it: overcoming resistance, removing resistance, managing resistance. All these expressions assume that resistance stands between the change and its goal.

I have come to see it differently. Resistance often holds knowledge that those designing a change are missing. Knowledge about how the work really happens. About risks that are only visible to those doing it every day. About values people want to protect: care for the customer, professional skill, autonomy. Sometimes it is also about loss: of expertise, of status, of a way of working someone was proud of.

Take a hospital introducing a digital planning system for its nursing wards. After the system goes live, nurses on one ward turn out to be keeping a paper list alongside it. The project team sees resistance. More training follows, then a reminder email and a conversation with the ward manager. The paper list survives all the same.

Until someone spends a few shifts alongside the nurses. Then it becomes clear what is on that list: which patient needs extra monitoring at night, what was said during handover, little things that have no place in the system. There is no computer at the bedside. The list turns out to be a solution to a problem the new system had not recognised.

With that knowledge, the team can adapt the system: a field for handover notes, a tablet at the bedside, a few nurses helping to shape the next version. The list then disappears of its own accord because the system now does what the list did. And the system is better than the original design.

Looking into it is neither difficult nor spectacular: simply observe. Ask what someone is doing and why. Listen to what lies behind ‘it doesn’t work’. Above all, it takes curiosity, just when all you really want is to move ahead.

Desire paths

Anyone who walks through a park knows them. Narrow tracks of trampled grass, cutting diagonally between two laid-out paths. People take the shortest route, even when the designer had a different one in mind.

The park manager has roughly three options. Put up a fence. Put up a sign asking people to keep to the paths and discover that hardly anyone does. Or look at where people walk and lay a path there.

In that third scenario, both sides win. The designer wanted a well-kept park with lovely grass. The walker wanted the shortest route. A fence protects the grass and frustrates the walker, who simply goes around it. A path where the desire path runs gives the walker their route and leaves the surrounding grass intact. The side that first seemed to be a problem makes the design better.

That is what redesign means. First, you explore what each side wants to protect. Then you make it visible, so both sides are acknowledged and nobody has to defend their interests against an opponent. And then you look for a form in which one side strengthens the other.

The paper list in the hospital was a desire path like that. It showed the route the work really took.

The compromise that leaves nobody better off

Redesign takes time. Time is precisely what many change initiatives lack. The deadline is fixed, so is the budget, and discussions have stalled. Then something often happens that seems perfectly reasonable: a compromise is reached.

Take an organisation with three regional offices that wants a single shared customer management system. Head office wants a clear overview and comparable figures. Each office has worked in its own way for years, tailored to its own customers. The launch date draws closer. Then an agreement is reached: one system, with each office also allowed to keep its own Excel file for the exceptions.

On paper, everyone gets something. In practice, staff now work in two systems instead of one. The figures in the central system are incomplete, so head office still lacks the overview it wanted. The regional offices have more work and feel that their way of working has not been taken seriously. Nobody is better off than before.

What was missing was an exploration of why the offices work so differently. Perhaps those differences contain precisely the things the system needs to accommodate. With that knowledge, a system with a shared core and room for what genuinely differs would have been possible.

In a single scull, a compromise looks like this: you pull with both oars, each at half strength. You go neatly forwards in a straight line and barely get anywhere.

The deceptive thing about compromises is that they feel good. Everyone has given a little, peace has been preserved and the project can move on. Meanwhile, the compromise shares the loss between both sides and closes the discussion before anyone has understood what it was really about. Redesign, by contrast, looks for what both sides can gain together.

That does not mean you must never choose. Sometimes there is no design in which both sides reinforce each other. Sometimes the law imposes a requirement, or time really has run out. Then making a choice is more honest than a middle way that serves nobody. Even a rower sometimes lets one oar rest for a moment to adjust course. The difference lies in how you choose: deliberately, after exploring the issue and with an explanation for those who come out worse off.

Taking time to row

In a change initiative, the time you spend on resistance often feels like a delay. Having conversations, observing people at work, discussing a design that is back on the table. All while the schedule is telling you to move on.

Perhaps it helps to see that time as the strokes in which you find your balance. A change built on insights from the people involved needs less fixing, enforcing and explaining afterwards. And an organisation that learns to change in this way will sit more steadily in the boat next time.

Synergetic thinking, then, does not ask for perfect balance. It asks for attention to both oars and a willingness to adjust course together when the water changes.