I remember countless times sitting in the back of my parents’ mid-70’s Audi Fox enduring the many discomforts of long-distance travel.

• hot leather seats with no A/C – Dad’s solution to everything was “open the window.”
• sitting on “the hump” – I was the youngest of three, so I took the cards I was dealt
• The only person with knowledge about our destination had his hands on the steering wheel. And odds are, he was fuming.

The first two are probably vestiges of a by-gone era, but the third item on this list is something most of us feeling when our employer is embroiled in long-term change.

Your organization may not be fuming, but their attention is somewhere other than, “How can I communicate this change initiative to this guy?” More likely, they are considering the appeal to all constituencies, knowing that they won’t please everybody, they are calculating the likelihood of success or what partial success might look like (and how to spin partial success as overwhelming success), and how this change might affect the culture of the organization as a whole.

They are not considering your personal opinion.

“But wait, I’m a trusted thought leader in my…”

Stop, they are not considering your personal opinion.

“Yeah, but I’m a veteran of this organization with 43 years of…”

Eh-eh-eh. Stop. They are not considering your personal opinion.

“Ok, hot shot. I’ve got my whole department under my thumb. So if they don’t listen to me I’m gonna…”

No, no, no. Sorry. They are not considering your personal opinion.

Nor should they.

For the life of me, I cannot remember who offered up this idea, but it came from a conversation about organizational change, and I’m going to botch the quote, but here goes:

An organization is a not a collection of individuals. It is a third thing, a combination of the self, of individuals, which creates a third entity out of the emergence of the same. It is one plus one equaling three. And that’s why organizations are so complex.