Stephen Billing’s Blog

On the plane home the other night the person next to me started laughing as the cabin crew announced the menu in tones of gravitas that would have been right at home in a top fine dining establishment. Sounding for all the world like she was announcing some rare delicacy like wagyu beef with scallops and Beluga caviar, here was the choice: a bikkie or a bag of lollies!

Am I alone in finding the quiz questions Air New Zealand displays on the overhead screens strangely compelling? It really demonstrates the power of a question – once the question is asked, we humans seem to have a reflex desire to find out the answer.

It would be good, however if Air NZ would rotate the questions more frequently – they seem to be the same each time. Once you know the answer the question doesn’t have the same power to attract your attention.
 

This 1.5 minute video explains joint enquiry as a key way that as a change leader you can engage with your people when trying to generate change in your organisation.

The literature exhorts managers to be action oriented, but this leads to little reflection on the nuances of the situations managers face. The result is often action that creates unanticipated consequences that take longer to deal with than the original reflection would have taken.

According to Lominger, one of the common faults that managers have is that as soon as they identify a situation (or are presented with a problem) they go immediately to solution mode. In the same breath that the problem is mentioned (or ‘defined’ as the literature calls it) the solution is also articulated. What’s wrong with that? Well, there is no opportunity to engage brain and that’s what’s wrong with that.

When there is no pause between identifying the problem and coming up with the solution, subtleties in terms of the dynamics of the factors that have brought about the situation are easily missed. Key players (“stakeholders”) may inadvertently be ignored, leading to problems down the track when it comes to implementing the solution.

One of the reasons managers tend to go straight for solutions is actually a result of misdirection in the literature that exhorts managers to be action oriented and places great emphasis on the future. According to this literature, managers are expected to be results-driven but when coupled with being short on time, this leads to an impatience which gets in the way of adequate thinking about the dynamics of the situations you are facing.

In other words, when one of your people raises with you a problem, it seems productive to come up with a solution quickly. Or, if you are thinking about the development of the other person and your own effectiveness as a manager, you may be getting them to come up with a solution quickly. It is commonly thought that managers should be thinking about solutions more than problems.

I beg to differ. I think that we don’t spend enough time reflecting on our situations and the dynamics in which they exist – elements such as power relating, politics, gossip, conflict, emotions and past history. These dynamics all have such a bearing on how people experience the situation, and consequently, how they will respond to the solutions that are proposed and implemented.

If you spend more time reflecting on the dynamics of the situation facing you, particularly the conversations going on that you are part of, or that others tell you about, your actions will be better informed and you won’t have to spend as much time dealing with the unanticipated consequences of your action.
 

Yes, I have a problem with problem solving

I have a problem with the term “problem solving.” Somehow I don’t think of really think of myself as solving problems. Perhaps it’s due to years of being told to see problems as opportunities or challenges and suchlike positive thinking. I find it hard to think of what I am doing when I am problem solving, and yet I can certainly think of how I resolve things I worry about such as deadlines for articles and I can easily think of how I approach challenging situations such as facilitating groups where conflict is present.

Perhaps I am stuck on the implication that every problem, like the Rubik’s cube, has a solution. It makes it sound like where there is a problem there is also its opposite – a solution. “Problem solved.” It sounds so perfect, like something from an ideal world. 

Many of the situations that we face, particularly those involving other people, do not really seem to have solutions in the way that “problem solving” implies. I have a friend with a son who has become addicted to drugs. She cannot have him in her house because he steals from her whenever he is around – the solution in the problem solving sense is some form of rehabilitation programme for the son to reduce his dependence on the drugs and the thoughts and habits associated with the addiction. But in the absence of his willingness to undertake such a programme, this kind of situation does not really have a “solution” as such. For my friend, it has become more about how to survive and how to cope with this situation.

While the situations that you face as a manager are not usually as dramatic as that example, nevertheless difficult situations like people who are constantly late or have bad behaviour, people who are in conflict with others or who are not performing, often are the result of multiple complex factors that defy “solution.” Sometimes it’s about, how will we cope or deal with this, rather than "solving the problem."
 

I have just received notification that the Changing Organizations monthly newsletter has been rated one of the top 50 for the last 30 days by bestezines.com.

While I don’t worry about such ratings, the founder of bestezines.com, Christopher Knight and his site ezinearticles.com are both in the top ten of all twitter search terms, according to www.compete.com’s blog. www.compete.com/2009/03/13/twitter-search/. So perhaps it means something.

Hmmm. Not bad for a niche subject like Changing Organizations. Time for a celebratory chocolate fish. Yum.

Presenting to the Human Resources Institute of New Zealand, Wellington Branch Special Interest Group on Organization Development

This three minute video extracted from the above presentation explains a client result and how we had to take one action, evaluate and then act again based on the response we got.

In which Chris Rodgers expresses my perspective on organizational politics better than I could myself, and I conclude that politics is inevitable in all human and organizational relating.

In my previous post on organizational politics I pointed out that politics is seen as bad. Then Chris Rodgers commented on that post, making the same point most brilliantly I thought, referring to Beverley Stone’s “Confronting Company Politics,” that “The term ‘company politics refers to all the game-playing, snide, ‘them and us’ aggressive, sabotaging, negative, blaming, ‘win-lose’, withholding, non-cooperative behaviour that goes on in hundreds of interactions everyday in your organisation.” Yes, I thought, what a succinct quote that sums up how politics is seen.

Further shooting home this point, Chris mentions Samuel Culbert’s observation in “Mindset Management” that “It’s almost as if people treat organizational politics as a low-grade virus infection, hoping that if they ignore it and think positively it will go away.”

It is as if there is some requirement that for responsible members of the organization, "playing politics" should be beneath them. Comparing organizational politics to an inconvenient virus is particularly apt in this respect.

Chris then goes on to point out that that savvy political behaviour makes a big contribution to successful organizational change and that acting politically in a skillful way always includes the requirement to provide, post-event, a rational description of what happened, a description of what happened in which the political elements disappear. (more…)

A summary of conventional thinking about politics in organisations… the jury rules that organisational politics is guilty of diverting resources and energy from the real work

I am sure that all of us have felt at times in our careers that we have been on the losing end of a political situation. In one project I worked on I didn’t realise the close relationship between the manager and another key team member and ended up being excluded from interesting and useful work. Sometimes it seems that certain people are developing exclusive relationships, or we are not included in the decision making, or you agree one thing and then suddenly another option is on the table.

"Organisational politics is often equated with the devious, the underhand, the cunning, and the manipulative,” say Buchanan and Badham, 1999 in "Politics and Organizational Change: The Lived Experience" in the journal Human Relations (subscription required).

According to Mayes and Allen in their 1977 article entitled Toward A Definition of Organizational Politics, in the Academy of Management Review, (no link, subscription required) political behaviour is based on using influence without organisational sanction for either the means used or the ends being pursued.

Drory and Romm in The Definition Of Organizational Politics: A Review, published in Human Relations, 1990, (again subscription required) suggest that organisational politics occurs when people seek to achieve goals by informal means in the face of conflict. These self serving goals work against the organisational purposes, using covert non-job-related means to achieve concealed motives in situations characterised by conflict and uncertainty. Many change situations seem to involve conflict, or at least tension between different points of view.

In a very interesting study, Eisenhardt and Bourgeois in their 1988 Academy of Management Journal article "The Politics Of Strategic Decision Making In High-Velocity Environments: Toward A Midrange Theory," define politics as “the observable, but often covert, actions by which executives enhance their power to influence a decision”.

They identify political behaviours as being:

behind-the-scenes coalition formation, offline lobbying and cooptation attempts, withholding information, and controlling agendas… Politics contrast with the straightforward influence tactics of open and forthright discussion, with full sharing of information, in settings open to all decision makers (p738).

Their study found that these political actions are actually a feature of conflictual situations where power is centralised around a dominating chief executive rather than being associated with decentralised power. They argue that the greater the centralisation of power in an organisation, the greater the use of politics within a top management team. They also found that politics were not fluid, but became entrenched in stable alliances which were often based on characteristics such as office location or age. They concluded that politics were associated with poor organisation performance because they restrict the flow of information and are time-consuming.

All of this illustrates the poor regard in which the concept of politics is held. Do you agree?

In one way, all of this seems pretty common sense, and I think we take it for granted that politics is bad and has negative impact on real results. You don’t have to look very far to find advice that "you should not get involved in the politics," whether you are senior manager, middle manager, team leader, front line worker, technician, consultant, contractor or general dogsbody.

As you can probably guess, I want to challenge this dominant thinking about politics.

Watch for a post on this soon…

Footnote: The image depicts the Beehive, which is the building that houses the offices of the Prime Minister, cabinet and Ministers – it is an iconic building in New Zealand politics. For the US the equivalent icon would be the White House, for the UK it would be the Houses of Parliament.

Informal communications – for example gossip over coffee – are what make or break change efforts. So often, change leaders concentrate on formal communications and have not considered how they will engage informal channels of communications.

75% of change efforts are reputed to fail. You do the maths.

I really think that sponsors of change projects, project managers of change projects, those involved in change project teams, business unit managers, and consultants like me all have a big problem on our hands.

Even though you may plan the project well, sign off on the risk and issues registers, conduct steering group meetings that are efficient and get through everything on the agenda, deliver the deliverables on time and within budget, and give progress reports to senior and line managers, these are all inputs, not outcomes.

Of most importance to you as a sponsor of a change project are the outcomes. Line managers are most concerned about the impact of the project on their operations and what they will have to do to make it work (i.e. outcomes for their business unit). Project managers and their teams, by contrast, become more concerned about deliverables, which are inputs. Project management structure and planning drives them in this direction – to have all the papers ready for a steering group meeting, for example.

Immediately you can see the dilemma of inputs versus outcomes. Deliverables (this concept was invented as a way of measuring progress towards the goal, i.e. to measure progress of inputs, especially useful for long term projects) include things like project plans, reports on progress, strategy documents, databases, people recruited, leases secured, and equipment purchased. The problem is that success in these things is then taken to equate to the success of the project overall.

Project sponsors, through their close alliances with project managers and their teams, also run the risk of being seduced into prioritising deliverables at the expense of outcomes. By contrast, line managers seldom are seduced this way, perhaps because they often don’t develop the same close associations with these project teams. 

From a project sponsor’s point of view however, outcomes can only be measured after the change project is implemented. At the same time, project sponsors play a pivotal part in whether the outcomes of the project are achieved or not. They are the ones with relationships with their senior level peers, who secure and commit resources and who provide real world guidance to their project and programme managers.

Your project management effectiveness is one component of the solution. And you surely do need good project management, make no mistake. You also need the right mix of technical skills on the team. But good project management and good technical skills are only part of the mix. In order to achieve the outcomes you desire, you also need to make sure that the right range of views have been incorporated into the decision making, that the shadow conversations have been taken into account.

So one thing that you can do as sponsor of a change project is to keep in touch (perhaps informally, and definitely with an open mind) with the line managers. Project managers would also do well to adopt the same approach.

The grave danger I am warning you of, is that initiatives live or die in the shadow conversations – over the coffee machines, in the smoking rooms, in the cafeteria, in the corridors, at staff drinks, around the water cooler. And project sponsors, project managers, project teams, and human resources people, typically do not spend their time in those places. Blinding flash of the obvious – if informal communications are so critical to the success of change initiatives, why are all the communications efforts concentrated solely on the formal communications channels?

No wonder the standard statistic is that 75% of change projects are reputed to fail.

In which we mark the posting of our one hundredth item.

This is a special day for the blog because we have now done 100 posts.

Strangely enough, this milestone occurs at the same time as I have some new things planned for the blog. I have just spent time in the video editing studio with Jim Greenhough of Execam, videographer extraordinaire. We have been editing my first video post, which will be going up as soon as it is ready – in the next week or so. Actually Jim has been editing it, I was rather fascinated with his amazing software!

So, having been here for 100 posts, I am looking forward to the next 100, as this blog continues to uncover the realities of what goes on in our organisations, and to provide more provocation about our ways of understanding the thinking and taken-for-granted assumptions behind a wide range of aspects of organisational life.

Thank you for being part of it.