Stephen Billing’s Blog

I am speaking at the HRINZ Wellington Organisation Development Special Interest Group on Organisation Development on Tuesday 17 Feb at 5.30pm – 7pm. Here is the information. Please feel free to come along.

What is OD? The roots of OD stretch back to Lewin’s unfreeze / change / refreeze model of the 50s, the T groups of the 70s, downsizing of the 80s and TQM, BPR and culture change of the 90s. More recently, social movements, social media and social networking are influencing the frontiers of OD practice. Throughout these changing fashions, leadership has remained a constant fascination with OD practitioners, CEOs and General Managers alike.

Chaos theory and its progeny complexity science were also fads of the 90s. And yet there is no doubt that organisations are complex. What can the insights of complexity teach us about OD now that the first flush of enthusiasm and rose-tinted spectacles are both dimmed?

There are only two key properties of complexity that are useful to OD practitioners and CEOs:

• Emergence – global patterns emerge from local interaction without the overall control of a central designer. Any CEO will attest to the lack of control they have over those who work in their organisation

• Novelty emerges only when those interacting are diverse. Without diversity of people interacting, the patterns of interaction remain the same and innovation and creativity are stifled

If our OD initiatives are to be effective, then our thinking about organisations and their development must be relatively congruent with our experience of working in organisations. Unfortunately, for most of us it is not. For all our awareness of informal networks our initiatives concentrate too much on formal lines of communications that take place in staged events, (i.e. the much-maligned ‘cascades’) and not enough on the multitudes of ’shadow’ interactions that take place each and every day, at which the CEO and OD practitioner are not present.

Join us on 17 February to explore an alternative view of OD that takes into account these two key insights of complexity, a radical perspective on human interaction, and recognition of the power relations that are at the heart of all human relating.

Expand your thinking, expand your OD effectiveness!

Level aimed at: All OD practitioners.

Venue:

HRINZ National Office
Level One
11 Chews Lane
Wellington

 Preparing to write a speech, I ponder on what functions belong in organisation development these days.

I am preparing my speech for the HRINZ meeting on 17 February. It is titled "Organisation Development and Complexity" and it has got me thinking about what organisation development is.

Organisation development is such a loose term, and it seems to me that for a number of agencies in the NZ public service, organisation development has come to be a grab bag of homeless HR functions that don’t really seem to have a rightful place in any other part of Human Resources. Is OD a boarding house for the HR functions with nowhere else to go – a rather aimless collection of functions grouped together for adminstrative convenience?

I think it is quite telling to consider whether your organisation has an OD function. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. If it does, is it part of HR or separate from HR?

In my experience it is increasingly common to see OD as part of HR. Which of the following does your OD department cover? If you don’t have an OD department, then where are these functions located – with line managers, with another part of HR, or somewhere else all together?

Here is a list of OD functions I saw advertised in a job ad recently.

• Lominger competencies

• Leadership and management development

• Engagement survey / climate survey

• Recruitment

• Training projects for specific business units

• Organisation design

• Learning and development

• Graduate recruitment and development

• Psychometric testing in relation to recruitment and development of staff

If that is not a grab bag of homeless HR functions, then I don’t know what is. It is a far cry from the humanistic, personal and group development functions originally included in the origins of OD – in t-group training, survey feedback, action research and group analysis.

OD is such an indeterminate and nonspecific term that it is difficult to say what OD is, and it is correspondingly difficult to say what it is not. Any discipline that has been around as long as OD and has morphed into this boarding house of homeless HR functions must have an uncertain future.

 In which I discover the blog of Chris Mowles and appreciate his take on how we might make the best use of time in meetings.

I have just discovered the blog of Chris Mowles called Reflexive Practice, who, like me, is exploring organisations as complex responsive processes. Chris and I did our doctorates together and he is now on the faculty of the Complexity and Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire where we studied together.

Coincidentally, as I have been writing my most recent posts about time seen as the living present (here, here and here), Chris has also been writing about the living present (here) – in his case about how our theories of time affect our meetings.

In his latest blog post, Chris points to how our desire to ‘make good use of the time’ in the meeting can lead to over-planning and attempts to tie things down to the last minute. He makes a good point that it assumes that we can anticipate how things will unfold at a certain time in the future and that our current thinking is adequate for the situation we will encounter when we meet together.

Chris comes to the conclusion that our meetings never unfold in a linear fashion but emerge as we struggle with each other over what we think we are doing and who we are. Skillful discussants then will allow for episodes of reflection, be alert to suggestions and conflict, be tolerant of ambiguity and and have an expectation that important and unplanned things may arise as a consequence.

I have written in a similar vein from the point of view of facilitation that tolerates and encourages this reflection and ambiguity.

Thanks Chris, I am looking forward to reading more of your provocative work.

Our experience of the past is not simply a recall from long term memory. And this affects how people respond to organisational change.

When consultants start to talk about stories I usually switch off because to me, stories = fairy stories or fiction. To me, stories are made up, and don’t have much to do with my experience working in organisations.

If I translate the word ’story’ to the word ‘narrative’  I can better get my head around how we have narratives about the past that represent past events, and these narratives become the present day experience we have of those past events.

The term ‘narrative’ doesn’t seem so ‘made up’ as the word ’story.’ To me, the term ‘narrative’ has continuity – plot line that continues over time, and this is more relevant to our organisational experiences, rather than ’story’ which to me is in the realm of fantasy.

I want to argue in this post that we develop narratives about the past that we retell to others, each time with slight changes or embellishments. In this way, our experience of the past is constantly changing, even though the past events themselves only happened the one time.

As Stacey points out, we do not simply recall from long term memory what actually happened, like a computer. Rather, we tell a narrative of the past to ourselves or to others, and these narratives are always changing, even if only in minute ways.

So we are constantly in the present moment creating our expectations of the future based on our experience of the past. In this way our narratives about the past subtly change and these subtle changes affect our expectations of the future and our experience in the present. For example, your narrative might be quite critical of your boss’s actions when talking to your colleagues, but when talking to your boss it can change its timbre. Your boss may then give you information which enriches your understanding and perspective of the events, and this can then change the narrative you have when talking to your colleagues the next time. In other words, the narrative about a certain event in the past changes its tone in subsequent retellings, in response to events of the more recent past. This is the process of making sense of our world.

It is a wishful thought that “when this current uncertain period is over life will go back to normal.” The current uncertain period is actually life as per normal, and it is always going to be uncertain. Organisational life is always full of uncertainty and unpredictability.

So, don’t take people’s initial reactions (e.g. "this sucks, I want redundancy") to your change proposal as a final one. In the ongoing narrative of organisational life, as people talk to each other and make sense of what is going on, their reactions can change. The key is to keep engaged with them through this changing process of reaction.

Then you will know how best to respond.

In my last post I noted how we experience the present moment as the fruition of the events of the past and at the same time it is influenced by our expectations for the future. It is the same for your staff when they are facing change. They also experience the present moment as a culmination of past events which have also coloured their expectations for the future.

In this post I explore how humans view the past. In the process, discovering that narrative and stories are very important, more important than you might think.

The past happened only once, but how do we experience the past? I recently worked on a restructure with an organisation that had restructured 10 years ago. Apparently, after extensive consultation leading to an agreed new structure, the decision was made by senior managers to implement a completely different structure from what had been consulted on. The fall out from this had lasted 10 years and we had to address this explicitly when it came to making any changes to the current structure. 

Another organisation I worked with had experienced the sacking of a CEO and industrial action as a result of a previous restructuring initiative. Again we had to take this into account in formulating our plans.

In both situations I was an external consultant. How did I get to find out about these events? From what I was told by those working in the organisation. In other words, they told me stories of the past, and in doing so, they joined me in to the organisation’s history and past experiences.

I don’t know exactly what happened in full in either of these situations, and neither did those who told me about them. Even those who were present at the time only had limited roles to play and hence did not have the full picture, even if they were active participants. We pieced the picture together through a number of iterative conversations. While the past happened only once, it lives on in our memories through the narrative or stories we tell others, and ourselves.

This is how it is for your people too – they are piecing together the picture from the information they have.

This article comes from the Changing Organisations Newsletter ISSN 1174-5576 Num 1: February 2009. 

It provides practical advice for dealing with a key individual who is resistant to change. They may be holding out alone, or perhaps they are negatively influencing others.

The great insight from social constructionism is that we are not independent isolates, our reality is constructed with others as a social phenomenon.

It can be very helpful to keep this in mind when you are dealing with people who are (or seem to be) resistant to change. In order to dissolve the resistance, it is necessary not for the other person to change, but for the relationship between you and the resistant person (or people) to change. In our socially constructed world, if you change your relationship with that person, their resistant attitude will also change. As you’ll appreciate, this is quite different from the standard change rhetoric which advocates persuasive communication to change the other person’s point of view.

Here’s what to do. Invite the person to talk with you on neutral ground. Over a coffee away from the workplace is a good start. The purpose is to enter into what I call a ‘joint enquiry’ with the other person.

‘Joint enquiry’ means that you have a perspective on the situation, and you recognise that so does the other person. By hearing the other person’s perspective and by expressing your own, and being open to changing your own views, you will reach a new understanding of the situation, and with this shift in understanding comes a shift in the resistance.

Here is a four-point action plan for a ‘joint enquiry’ into the situation that will change the resistance of the other person.

• Ask what their point of view is. Then summarise it back to them. If you have already heard their point of view previously, summarise your understanding of their point of view.

  Lawyers and debaters often do this when they are rehearsing their arguments. The powerful key here for dissolving resistance to change is to express it in non-judgmental and non-personal terms. Don’t say “You did not support the improvement to the quality system because you are not a team player,” Instead say either “You did not support the improvement to the quality system because you were concerned about the impact on overtime,” or “You did not support the improvement to the quality system and I do not understand why not. Can you please tell me?” Then summarise back to them what they have said to you.
   

• Ask the other person if you have understood the situation accurately from their point of view. Allow them to make any corrections they think are needed.
   
• Given what you have heard, explain your (amended) point of view, again using non-judgmental language. Keep your explanations free of value judgments as much as possible. Point out aspects of how your viewpoint has similarities as well as differences.
   
• Agree next steps – some specific actions that you will each take, or something you are each committed to change in relation to each other. For example, “I will tell you if you do something that I don’t agree with.”

You may not need to go to step three, as steps one and two are so powerful.

How we experience the present moment is very different from how we normally think about time – as a point on a line separating the past from the future. Although most leaders are not consciously thinking of this, it has important implications for how to deal with people experiencing organisational change.

I have written here about how we think of change as being a movement from one equilibrium state to another. We have come to think this way because our thinking privileges static states over moving process (more on this here).

This has a lot to do with how we think of time. Not so much how we manage time, but the difference between how we think of time, and how we experience time.

This is a useful distinction to understand because it helps to explain why people respond to change the way they do, and it helps leaders of change to make productive responses to their people when they’re going through change.

The most common way of thinking of the present moment is as a point on a continuum moving from past through to the future. The present separates the past from the future. The present is a point in time, distinct from the past and distinct from the future, although ever moving towards the future.

As Ralph Stacey points out, in this view of time the ‘here-and-now’ is distinguished from the ‘there-and-then’. Seeing time as a point on a line is useful in business because it allows you to make project plans that help you to get your projects done effectively. So far, so good.

But consider for a moment how you actually experience the present moment. As you are dealing with important budget decisions or people issues, you do not experience your present thoughts and options as an arbitrary point that somehow occurred all on its own, divorced from the past. In fact, the present arises as the results of the events of the past. Past budget discussions influence your present experience of your budget challenges and decisions you make. Likewise, your past interactions with your staff affect what you decide to do next in relation to a particular performance problem or issue with one of your team.

The present moment has arrived as a result of myriad events of the past. You could say that the present is the inevitable result of the events of the past. If the events in the past were different, the present moment would also be somehow different – for both parties. For example, your past experience of your boss and your thoughts about the future will influence how you respond to the news that there will be a review of your business unit. Ditto for your team.

The experience of the present moment is informed by past experience and also by your expectations about the future.

I think this helps to explain why it is so powerful in change settings, to give priority to allowing people to voice their experience of the past and their expectations of the future. People experiencing change in their work settings are responding to that change based on their past experiences and their future expectations. In many cases they may not even have articulated these in their own minds.

It is certainly unlikely that you know enough about their past experiences and future expectations to be able to interpret their responses accurately without paying them some attention.

And you will not find out what they think if you are hell-bent on delivering key messages via power point slides in mass auditoriums.