Stephen Billing’s Blog

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.

There are many other approaches to change along similar lines. Patrick Dawson in his book Understanding Organizational Change summarises these as having five aspects in common (according to Alvesson and Sveningsson).

1. Identifying a need for change.
2. Selecting an intervention technique.
3. Gaining top management support.
4. Overcoming resistance to change.
5. Evaluating the change process.

It is relatively easy to see these five aspects of many change projects of the last 15 years or so, reflecting how this way of thinking has become so dominant.

Alvesson and Sveningsson call these approaches "n-step" change models, characterised by a number of sequential steps, depending on which author or consultant you are talking to.The sports analogy is that this is like a relay race, where at each step, the baton is passed on to someone else to carry out. For example, top management identify the need for change. They hire (i.e. pass the baton to) a consultant to come up with the method / intervention that will be used. The consultant trains (i.e. passes the baton to) middle and senior managers to run workshops. The senior managers then expect (i.e. pass the baton to) their people to change their behaviour and actions according to the desired new culture.

Of course I am describing a typical cascade approach, and in Alvesson and Sveningsson’s book they describe a case in which it becomes exceedingly obvious that the organisation concerned is acting as though their organisational change really is like a relay race. The managers don’t actually use those words, but when you observe the way they expect each step of the change intervention to be carried out by different people, it becomes evident that they are acting as though it were a relay in which you can pass the baton on to the next person for them to do their bit, and your bit is finished.

I have seen several initiatives like this and I’m sure you have too.

The relay race metaphor relies on what Latour calls a diffusion model, which is based on the idea that ideas originate in the supposedly autonomous mind of the scientist and then spread, more or less by themselves, by virtue of their truth value. In other words, a change plan or desired new vision will spread and move acording to its initial force and its intrinsic truth value. It might meet with friction (e.g. bad communication) or resistance such as opposition which will slow down the initial force. This, as you can see, is a view based on Newtonian physics, that social forces are like physical forces, with resistance in the world of humans being like friction in the world of physics. The top manager makes the decision and the other managers react like billiard balls, pushed in irreversible directions. Subordinates are, by implication, passive receivers of the new initiative, passing it on to others as a mechanical execution of predefined tasks. People are transmitting a force and meaning according to its original definition.

Latour’s alternative to the diffusion model is the translation model. In Latour’s translation model people are active interpreters of the ideas, and in the process of interpretation or translation, they modify, distory and transform the meaning of the ideas they are supposed to carry, as anyone who has played "Chinese whispers" can attest. In the translation model, the movement of the ideas is dependent on how the ideas are transformed as people make sense of them.

People are doing something active with the change plans, rather than passively transmitting them.

Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that what happens in a planned change programme is that it gets constantly renewed energy by people who do something with it as they make sense of it and interact with others, a bit like the interaction between rugby players with a rugby ball, the initial force of the first in the chain cannot be said to be any more important than that of the subsequent others.

If this is the case then, as a manager of change you need to be paying attention to the daily translations of meaning that are going on in your organisation on a moment by moment basis – your key messages are not being passed on from one person to another, they are being translated and revitalised. So you need to track what meaning they are taking on as this translation process takes place.

Your organisational change is not a relay race where you can pass the baton on to others and watch them bring it on home to the finish line.