Stephen Billing’s Blog

Alvesson and Sveningsson have a useful potted summary of open systems thinking which I will briefly explain in this post. It is useful because this thinking is so strongly embedded in most thinking about organisational change. And this thinking is, in my opinion, largely responsible for the reported widespread failure of organisational change projects.

Organisations as Systems

The open systems way of thinking emphasises the organisation-wide view rather than just what is going on in work groups. Organisations are seen as a set of systems and sub-systems that are interconnected. In a well-functioning organisation there is fit and harmony between these sub-systems. (more…)

Alvesson and Sveningsson’s useful potted summary of group dynamics thinking illuminates the roots of assumptions we now take for granted in working with change.

Group Dynamics in Organisations

The Group Dynamics school in the 1950s targeted change at the group level as leading thinkers realised that most people in organisations work in smaller work groups. They assumed that individual behaviour was governed by group norms, roles and values.

Kurt Lewin was a leading proponent and his three step model of unfreezing, change and refreezing is a well known classic approach. Unfreezing is about destabilising the status quo or group norms and values through means such as inspiring talk, education or projects to convince people of the necessity of the change. The second stage is making the change to move towards the desired state. The third stage is to stabilise the new state and prevent it from regressing back to the old state. The idea is to reduce the barriers to change rather than increasing the forces in favour of change, through knowledge, learning and commitment. (more…)

Four dimensions of change that are considered in the mainstream literature on change.

According to Alvesson and Sveningsson’s excellent new book Changing Organizational Culture, key dimensions of change that are common in the literature include:

1. The scale of change
2. The sources of change
3. The content of change
4. The politics of change

The Scale of Change

Change is often characterised in terms of two extremes as revolutionary or evolutionary. Revolutionary change refers to changes that affect several aspects of the organisation simultaneously, such as culture, resources, performance management systems, strategy, technology, market positioning. Evolutionary change refers to operational change that affects part of the organisation within existing strategy and resources.

The following scales are also used to characterise organisational change:

• revolutionary vs evolutionary
• discontinuous vs continuous
• episodic vs continuing flow
• transformational vs transactional
• strategic vs operational
• total system vs local option

Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that these labels and distinctions often mean roughly the same. (more…)

In which I seek to shed some light on the early history of organisational culture so that we can see where our ideas about the problematic concept of culture have come from.

Changing your organisation is often thought of as meaning changing organisational culture. The term "organizational cultures" first was used by Pettigrew in 1979 in an article titled "On Studying Organizational Cultures" in the scholarly journal Administrative Science Quarterly.

To me it is quite significant that he used the plural, denoting that there are many cultures within an organisation. It is a more recent thing to talk about an organisation as having one culture only (a "corporate culture"). I think it is more accurate to think of there being multiple cultures within an organisation, as there are many groups that people in your organisation belong to, and people are included and excluded from these groups as they are in all social groupings. (more…)

CEO of Air New Zealand, Rob Fyfe, is not a fan of vision, mission and values. Welcome to the club! 

In the April edition of North and South magazine, Rob Fyfe, the CEO of Air New Zealand, is interviewed. Towards the end of the portrait of a man highly regarded by his peers who certainly has an excellent track record to date, he comments on vision and values.

"One of the first things I did as CEO was outlaw things like ‘mission’ and ‘vision’ and ‘values,’ because I don’t see those concepts as really connecting with people at the front line. A vision is a personal thing; you can’t have it imposed on you, or articulated to you by someone else." Hear hear.

The interview goes on to say that instead, Fyfe asked a single question: "Who are we?"

I’m loving this. Let’s not get caught up in abstractions like vision and values and the associated semantics. Instead, let’s notice and reflect on what’s going on around us right now ("Who are we?").

The concept of the organisation as a social object is helpful for change leaders.

An object is, in general terms, a physical thing. There are many aspects of organisational life that are treated as though they were also things, even though they are not really physical objects. For example, an organisation itself is not a physical object, because although physical things are involved, such as buildings, computers and other equipment, the organisation itself is not limited just to these things. There are also the myriad interactions among people, with certain distributions of resources, financial constraints, relationships, power imbalances, and an interweaving of the different intentions of all the people involved. (more…)

I was at a client function the other night and one of the managers approached me saying that he was a trustee of another organisation and they’d like to talk to me about how I could help them. This kind of serendipity makes the world go round, in all aspects of life, not just business.

I serendipitously came across an article (subscription only) in the latest edition of Organization Studies by Professor Nicholas Dew of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, USA, in which discusses the role of serendipity in entrepreneurship. (more…)

Three reasons: practising managers are vague about leadership, ideology about leadership is pervasive and research methods can be misleading.

Alvesson and Sveningsson in their article about the disappearance of leadership summarise two main means by which ideas about leadership break down. One is that common definitions of leadership do not correspond to the accounts of leadership produced by people in leadership positions in organisations.

The second is that their initial claim about what is important in leadership is contradicted by their efforts to show what this means when they are applying it in their daily work.

To me, this is very interesting. But there is more.

Reviewing the literature about leadership, the main common aspect amongst various leadership definitions seems to be that leadership is an influence process. Unfortunately this is not enough distinction because you could also say that selling is an influence process. You can probably think of other influence processes such as political lobbying.

What is the difference between leadership and, say, selling or lobbying? Well, one difference is in the context of an asymmetrical organisational relationship. What this is referring to is that the leader/manager has more power and is attempting to influence what those reporting to him or her do. A salesperson or lobbyist is operating in a different context, where there is not the same asymmetrical power relationship.

Alvesson and Sveningsson come to three conclusions in their highly interesting article.

First, highly intelligent managers have rather vague and contradictory notions of leadership, which are only discovered by taking an open ended research approach (questionnaires would not discover this).

Secondly, there are strong ideological overtones to the views people have about leadership, and so the leadership industry should be careful about the extent to which its ideological perspective enables the easy production of leadership as something distinct and robust without adequate questioning. From this study, the phenomenon of leadership seems to be much more fragile than is commonly assumed.

Thirdly, while the researchers do not want to kill leadership off, they do want to make sure that there is clear understanding of the research methods used to draw conclusions about leadership. Do the methods used to research leadership generate the views about leadership that they report on, rather than reporting on observations about leadership?

Ultimately, I think that Alvesson and Sveningsson’s research points to the need to ask of any leadership research what the method was, so that you can decide whether or not the study has avoided the tendency to impose its own leadership ideology, thus creating the leadership phenomenon it intends to report on.

Research that claims that leadership disappears when it is examined. This disappearing act raises the question as to whether there is such a things as leadership at all.

Alvesson and Sveningsson conduct leadership research in which they attempt to avoid the problem of constructing leadership through the process of developing a questionnaire and then getting respondents to answer it.

What they do instead is interview managers/leaders using open questions and ask the managers to describe their leadership in their own terms.

In their article The Great Disappearing Act: Difficulties in Doing "Leadership," Alvesson and Sveningsson’s analysis of the responses is illuminating. The main thing that the responses have in common is the confusing and incoherent picture they paint of what it is they consider leadership to be.

Each manager starts with a statement of what they consider important in leadership, and, perhaps not surprisingly, these statements reflect current fashions in leadership – maintaining the vision, promoting the team, working with key team members, harnessing the energy and so on. One manager who appears to be relatively sophisticated even says leadership is about managing meaning. Although he then says that he is rarely able to find the time to spend with his people because operational issues tend to take priority.

Managers I speak often reflect the same concerns, saying they don’t have time to do the leadership aspects of their roles.

After each manager/leader had said what they considered important (vision/values/team etc) a curious thing happened when the researchers then asked them to describe the most important leadership activities in more detail.  This is where the responses started to get confusing and incoherent.

The researchers described this as being the disappearance of leadership. They identified the following tactics that leaders used in explaining leadership, the result being that leadership undergoes a disappearing act.

• Pointing at what they saw as the crucial issue in leadership, and then being vague and contradictory about how to tackle it.
• Stating the obvious as a uniting vision (e.g. where the vision is simply the function of the business unit such as "providing infrastructure")  and then living the vision through improving social relations.
• Limiting one’s role to presenting ideas and then letting the others decide. The researchers call this minimilastic influencing.
• Stating one leadership principle is crucial and then contradicting it in practice.
• Doing primarily things other than those stated as being crucial, and largely being absent from influencing.

 These things are very different from what most authors on leadership would advocate – typically, an active person trying ambitiously to exercise influence within an asymmetric relation.

Conclusion

As part of my consulting practice I am often concerned with leadership in organisations. This study certainly reinforces my own experience of discussing leadership with those in formal and informal leadership positions.

Leaders always find it difficult to pinpoint what it is that they do that can be classified as "leadership." I find myself in the same boat, wrestling with the question of how to describe what my own practice is, a practice that includes leadership. 

Is it the inadequacy of words to describe the concept of leadership, or is it that there really is no such thing as leadership after all? Or is there some other explanation?

In 1989, Yukl pointed out that the numerous definitions of leadership seem to have little in common other than that leadership involves an influence practice. While Yukl thinks this is a problem, Alvesson and Sveningsson on the other hand doubt that a common definition of leadership is possible, that it would not be very helpful if it were possible, and that it may obstruct new ideas about leadership.  They also note that two thirds of leadership texts do not define leadership at all, and this may well support the view that leadership is indeed difficult to pin down.

Part of the problem may be the requirement for these definitions and insights into leadership to be applicable across such a wide range of contexts – managerial, sports and formally designated leadership, upwards, and peer, for example. A definition broad enough to cover all these situations may well be too general to be useful in specific situations. The problem with defining leadership as some kind of influencing process is that you could then interchange "leadership" with all sorts of other terms associated also with influencing, such as "culture," "strategy," "organisation structure," or other concepts. You have to be able to distinguish one from the other or else you do not actually have a clearly defined concept you can work with.

One of the common conceptions of leadership is based around the idea of the hero’s journey. The hero that is omnipresent in humanity’s various mythologies leaves (perhaps being expelled from) family and comfort, undergoes a series of trials culminating in the achievement of some mighty quest, eventually returning home, bringing an offering and transformed by the process.

In what Meindl et al call the Romance of Leadership, (subscription only, unfortunately) they say that there is a tendency to ascribe leadership to complex and ambiguous organisational events, even though it can be highly uncertain as to whether leadership actually had anything to do with those events or not. In other words, we seek a heroic journey

In other words, in the absence of any unambiguous information about cause and effect, leadership is used as an interpretive device to explain the events that took place. Just because leadership is frequently used to explain an organisation’s success does not mean that this is necessarily so.

It is important to remember that in any study that produces data, the data itself is constructed through the theory held by the researcher. Much research obscures or hides the point of view of the researcher, and so readers who are interpreting the research sometimes have to ask themselves what might the theory of the researcher be. In the case of much leadership research, the built in theory is that leadership exists and the very methodology used by the researchers actually produces the phenomenon of leadership, the phenomenon which the research is seeking to investigate.

How does this occur? In order to reduce the ambiguity of responses to make them easier to process, respondents in leadership research are often asked multichoice questions. This makes coding the answers much easier. At the same time it also has the effect of producing leadership in the frame of reference of the researcher, even if the respondents were not thinking of leadership in that way prior to answering the questionnaire.

A simple test would be to ask "If there were no such thing as leadership, would this research tell us so?" Research in which participants respond to questionnaires would mostly fail this test, because the questions have been framed in line with the researchers’ hypotheses about leadership. If respondents are asked, for example, to indicate which aspects of leadership are most important, then the very process of indicating "clarity of vision" or "feedback on performance" ignores the possibility that there may not actually be such a thing as leadership. Through this process the survey actually creates the phenomenon of leadership. This is an example of a method that could not possibly give the result that there is no such thing as leadership.

So, it is a problem that ambiguity has been neglected in the interests of producing a survey that is easily processed. The rich diversity of experience is rendered invisible (suppressed) in order to make generalisable theory possible. This involves a distortion of social reality in that it privileges certainty and order at the expense of ambiguity and unknown-ness, even though ambiguity and unknown-ness are what we experience in so much of our day to day organisational life in our practice as leaders.

There is much to question about the findings of the leadership research that is presented to us.