Stephen Billing’s Blog

What is reification and why on earth should I care?

You may or may not have come across this term before, and if not, then welcome to the arcane aspects of complexity science and organisation theory.

However, as a leader it is important to understand the tendency we have to treat organisations and other abstract concepts like culture or organisations as though they were actual physical things that respond to natural laws. Why? Because it affects how you approach making changes to your culture or wider organisation.

Organisations and other social objects respond to processes of human interaction, but they do not respond to universal laws the way that physical objects such as balls (speed, direction) or pot plants (colour, mass). Even though pot plants are living, and organisations are dynamic and so seem to have some qualities of living things, organisations are not living systems like pot plants. (By the way, do you like the pot plants shown in our front entrance? I am quite proud of them.) (more…)

Self-organisation is in no way a bottom up process. All humans are involved in interaction, and the results that emerge are the results of self-organising processes, whether you are a top manager or lower in the hierarchical ranks.

It is not very accurate to call self-organising a "bottom up" approach or process. To me, a bottom up process is where there is activity amongst those lower in the hierarchy or closer to the front line who feed ideas or a new process up through the hierarchy. A bottom up process can happen because it’s been designed by the top managers e.g. a series of facilitated focus groups, or it can happen more informally e.g. where a problem is solved or a new process is established at one site and then the results are seen by those higher in the hierarchy and the new process is implemented at other sites. (more…)

The concept of self-organisation is a very misunderstood topic when it comes to applying it to organisations.

Bas Reus is exploring what it means to say that humans are self-organising, over at http://basreus.nl/2009/07/27/self-organization-defined/#comment-51. His post outlines the development of his thinking in attempting to define self-orgnisation.

Arising from the study of complexity, the important thing about self-organisation is that the ordering of society (or people in organisations) occurs through local interaction in the absence of an overall blueprint or plan. As any top manager will tell you, you can’t just make a plan, tell others and then confidently expect that the plan will be followed. Instead, all sorts of unexpected things happen – people interpret things differently, they react to things in surprising ways and there are unintended consequences. This is what is meant by saying there is no overall blueprint or plan. (more…)

In my last post I took my first hesitant step at questioning whether there is such a thing as organisational culture. In this post, I will assume there is such a thing as organisational culture, but I argue that if there is such a thing as organisational culture, then organisations do not have ONE culture, but many.

It is rather common to assume that organisations are coherent, and that all organisational members share a similar kind of values. When you consider the likes of an insurance company, with its actuaries busy calculating risk tables, and sales people busy talking up the benefits of various policies, it does not take much to appreciate that in fact there are multiple groups in organisations and they do not share the same values necessarily. (more…)

In which I make hesitant steps to grapple with the concept of organisational culture. I want to conclude that there is no such thing as organisational culture. Can I succeed?

Although I started out back in the 90s believing in the construct of company culture as a way of explaining common themes of behaviour in organisations, now I am not so sure.

It seems to me that many people in an organisation interact with one another and these myriad interactions make up the organisation.  Tools, buildings, assets and property are utilised in the service of these interactions. These interactions are characterised by themes that are familiar, perhaps repetitive and perhaps even stuck, such as great new ideas coming from brainstorming meetings, or consistent bagging of management – these are both examples of themes emerging from multiple interactions. (more…)

Have you seen this blog post by Tiffany Monhollon called "How to Talk About Change at Work" that recently caught my eye?

For the last five months the author has had what is described as a seismic shift every 30 days. That amounts to five of these seismic shifts in five months. So, lots of change, by any standards.

Tiffany goes on to give a very personalised account of what she has learnt through these frequent and rapid changes in her organisation, and some survival tips that I think are very practical, and revealing of political processes. Essentially Tiffany’s tips amount to "how to be a good management recipient of change."

First of all she suggests figuring out what the change means, and recommends talking to a group of trusted others as a way of working out what it’s all about. (more…)

Think of change participants, not change recipients. Those who are your targets of change actively reinterpret your change initiatives in the light of their own background, expectations and work tasks.

Recent posts have been critical of the standard planned change "n-step" approaches (e.g. here and here).

What are the alternatives to planned change? Recent interest has been growing in thinking of change as a process or processes, emerging from myriad local interactions.

The process view is interested in exploring change as a continuous (rather than episodic) and unpredictable process, without any clear beginning or end. Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that this means that organisational change is seen as a result of a variety of operational and administrative decisions made on a daily basis. These decisions are quite ordinary and are made in the process of adjusting to political struggles, shifts in power differentials, and adapting to changes in the priorities of others. (more…)

Planned change models (so-called "n-step models" of which Kotter’s 8 step model is the most well known) assume that change can be controlled. By carrying out the steps the desired change will be manifested in the organisation. Because change is seen as predictable, the key lies in detailed planning.

Alvesson and Sveningsson in their book "Changing Organizational Culture" say that while this logic might explain the popularity of these approaches, these planned change models reveal little about how change emerges from interactions between those involved in the organisation. These models pay little attention to how people interpret the change efforts, nor how they relate to these based on their interests, backgrounds, jobs and how they will be affected by the change. (more…)

My last two posts were about the group dynamics and systems thinking approaches to change. Why was this? Because they both lead to thinking of change as a sequential process. Kotter in his book Leading Change has the most widely known example with his eight stage process for creating major change:

1. Establishing a sense of urgency.
2. Creating the guiding coalition.
3. Developing a vision and strategy.
4. Communicatin the change vision.
5. Empowering broad-based action.
6. Generating short-term wins.
7. Consolidating gains and producing more change.
8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture. (more…)

"Approaches to leadership and management are still dominated by prescriptions – usually claimed as scientific – for top executives to choose the future direction of their organization. The global financial recession and the collapse of investment capitalism (surely not planned by anyone) make it quite clear that top executives are simply not able to choose future directions. Despite this, current management literature mostly continues to avoid the obvious – management’s inability to predict or control what will happen in the future. The key question now must be how we are to think about management if we take the uncertainty of organizational life seriously" – Ralph Stacey

The above lines from Ralph highlight a major disconnect between management literature’s formulaic attempts to provide prescriptions and recipes for controlling the future, and the reality that this is actually an impossible and fruitless pursuit. This blog is an attempt to help us to understand how to act when the future is uncertain and unpredictable. Acknowledging the unpredictability of the future is not a signal to be depressed. Rather it is a provocation to become aware of how you are thinking about the tasks of management and leadership in organisations so that your approaches and ways of thinking are more congruent with this reality.

Recipe attempts to control the future prevent you from seeing clearly what is going on around you, and mean that your responses to the uncertain world in which you work and live will be less effective.

Footnote: The quote above is taken from the "blurb" for the paperback version of Ralph Stacey’s latest book which has just been released. The book is called Complexity and Organizational Reality: Uncertainty and the Need to Rethink Management after the Collapse of Investment Capitalism. It’s not available on Amazon yet but you can get more info or the book itself here (thanks to Chris Rodgers for alerting me to this).