Brenda Zimmerman would have called the Canadian election results a snap-back.

I have been thinking about her for the last few weeks. She was killed a year ago in one of those unexplainable and senseless road accidents. She was visiting friends in the country and two cars suddenly collided on a minor rural road: she died immediately.

Brenda Zimmerman was one of a kind, an associate professor at the Schulich School of Business, York University, who talked in innovative and easily-understood language about how big organizations actually function. She was an expert in complex adaptive systems and how organizations could successfully negotiate change to perform better and more efficiently.

Snap-back was Brenda’s description of what happened when the organization turned on the change you were trying to make, and snapped back to its old ways of doing things. Every organization has a dominant culture that is powerful and influences what people within it can accomplish - or not. Some think that by training people to perform their jobs better or by the organization adopting a new strategic plan, then the systems within the organization will begin to work well.

Not Brenda. She believed in Peter Drucker’s concise statement, `Culture eats strategies for breakfast.’ Strategies and training are weak reeds in the face of the culture that a group of people working together have created. Many people realize this about police forces: the police culture is so strong that it seems to defeat almost any attempt at change.

As I learned under Brenda’s tutelage, hospitals aren’t much different. Unless one clearly decides to tackle the cultural aspects of how things work, the organization will snap-back when change threatens it, and the dominant culture will prevail. Brenda knew that making a new strategic plan was often just avoiding the problem.  

Usually snap-backs are seen as something which is negative: you are trying to make something better, the snap-back happens, and you are defeated. It’s frustrating, but it bears out Brenda’s belief that understanding an organization’s culture is critical to successfully making change.

But as I reflect about Brenda’s legacy and how much she taught me in my own work, I realize that if we were lunching together today, she would probably say paradoxically of course, that the federal election was a good example of snap-back.  Stephen Harper tried to change things for a decade, but Canada’s dominant culture snapped back on October 19.

The snap-back wasn’t just electing Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party. It was re-establishing a culture that had been expressed in the past by a number of Liberal leaders as well as by Red Tories such as Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, and New Democratic Party leaders such as Ed Broadbent and David Lewis.

She would love the idea that Canada has such a dominant culture that when a leader like Mr. Harper came forward to change it, it snapped back. I’m sure she’d haul out the examples of welcoming refugees, re-asserting the role of science and knowledge in decision-making, working with the Aboriginal community as Paul Martin tried to do, reaffirming public participation and a reasonable legislative process, and so.

Sadly Brenda, who wrote numerous articles and several books about complexity and the nature of transformation of organizations, and became the founding director of the Health Industry Management program at Schulich, never wrote about snap-backs. It surfaces only in a talk she gave in 2014, and it was something she mentioned to me when we were working together on hospital change.

She surely could have written about it more compellingly than I can. She was a person who was fun, witty, wickedly smart, and had a real sparkle about her. She could see patterns in events and organizations long before anyone else - she was like Jane Jacobs in that regard – and she understood what those patterns meant. That foresight she had endeared her to her students, and of course to people like me. But she never pretended to be a teacher, instead treating others as her peer.

Today my very fond memories of Brenda focus on the snap-back we have seen in Canada in recent months, and makes me realize how much I miss her and her clear perspective on the world.

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Brenda Zimmerman died December 16, 2014. She was 58.

Liz Rykert is the Principle at Meta Strategies based in Toronto, and has a practice concerning culture change in large organizations among other pursuits.