At large, complex business organizations, you can outlive almost any big initiative that pops up.

Sure, the suits at the corporate office will announce a grand “centralization” scheme, in which “corporate” will take over almost all important decision making, because the regional offices don’t see the “big picture.”

Wait them out. Before long, the new initiative will be “decentralization,” where the corporate office will shrink to the CEO, his secretary, and a chef to feed them both. You see, the decentralized decision makers will be “closer to the customer.”

The I.T. department will shrink, grow, or be outsourced to the far ends of India – all in the period of your career, if you hang on long enough. Research and development will gobble up every available dollar, to fund “exciting” new projects, until a decision is made to shovel all available money toward stock repurchases, instead. Just hang on; you’ll see it all.

Bank branch expansions are either an important branding strategy or a silly waste of resources, depending on how long you hang on at a particular banking enterprise. You’ll see both ideas come and go.

Public-sector employees have understood the game for decades. Mayors come, mayors go. City Councils from a few years past are a distant memory – as are most of the odd ideas they championed. But, the Civil Service boys and girls are still there, patiently waiting out the next round of “reforms.”

The process of cranking out “new” ideas that have the life expectancy of a chipmunk isn’t, on the face of it, good or bad. The case is often made that in a “dynamic economy,” or in a “robust democracy,” initiatives will come and go, not because the purveyors of those ideas are shallow or inept, but because, well, “things change.”

The Kids Aren’t Alright

Perhaps no enterprises, public or private, have seen more “reform” or “renewal” or erratic tinkering over the decades than state and county “child protection” agencies. The “clients,” who range from erratic moms to crazy boyfriends to troubled children to amoral criminals, do not easily suggest a perfect roadmap for success – thus, barely an hour goes by without a new idea taking hold.

In Massachusetts, the latest proposal from Gov. Deval Patrick is to merge the two agencies that sort of come together, in one big, sloppy, unhappy alliance, to service families and children in trouble. The Department of Children and Families, which handles foster care; and the Department of Youth Services, which handles the madness that is legal proceedings involving kids; would become the Department of Children, Youth and Families and a Partridge in a Pear Tree. The merger is based on the reasonable theory that many of the kids and families in question have onerous, nutty contact with both agencies – and it would be somewhat more efficient if the aimless and confused could be serviced by something approaching a streamlined protection and enforcement operation.

Government child protection is subject to all manner of periodic tinkering, not so much on the reorganizing end, but on the ideological piece of the puzzle. Depending on who is in charge at any particular moment; and depending on whether there has been a horrific killing of a child under state “protection;” the major back-and-forth tends to center on whether “intact families” are the order of the day – or whether the kids get yanked out of a problem home within five seconds of the first sign of trouble.

Invariably, agencies across the country suffer the “investigation” and “litigation” cha-cha, in which they are accused of being stupid and lazy and reckless and indifferent. On occasion, some of the protection agencies are placed under court supervision – which prompts even more changes – until the court monitor goes away and things return to normal.

In 2009, the commissioner of the “children and families” agency in Massachusetts suffered through one of those “no confidence” votes by his union employees – a rather regular occurrence in such agencies across the country, where coddling the staff and caring for the crazy kids often create an unusual tension.

The governor’s proposed reorganization shuffle may be one of those changes that survives more than a year or two, until, of course, a proposal emerges to separate the department into two different agencies. Who would have thought?