Stephen Billing’s Blog

My latest white paper Bringing About Change in Mental Health NGOs outlines seven special alert factors that are unique to mental health NGOs.

I have been lucky enough over the last two years to get involved in the mental health sector through my work on change in mental health non-government organisations (NGOs).

I have been very invigorated by this work, which I feel helps people who have been affected by conditions that are not only frightening in themselves for individuals, but are also frequently misunderstood and stigmatised in wider society. As has been pointed out to me, people diagnosed with mental illness are unique in that they can be locked up against their will for indefinite periods without having committed a crime. (more…)

By Theodore Taptiklis

Guest contributor Theodore Taptiklis, author of Unmanaging, who has worked recently in New Zealand, UK, and Denmark argues in his very readable style, that we need to reconnect work and its evaluation back together.   

It seems that there is now an impulse to think again about how public sector quality is evaluated and reported, arising from a deep-seated concern about current approaches. This concern appears even though the practices presently favoured in most Western economies (around performance measurement, outcome evaluation, and key performance indicators) have themselves developed from an era of almost continuous public sector reform. And it is possible to understand the  character of these reforms largely as a product of recent history, undertaken alongside – and heavily influenced by – that most pervasive of late twentieth-century endeavours: the management project.

But it might also be helpful to consider the origins of the present concern from an even longer historical perspective. From earliest times, as soon as labour became specialised, and tasks were undertaken by one person who was paid by another, the question has arisen: What is good work? Manual labour or craft work seems to produce visible results, or things whose functional quality can be observed directly. But even here there are problems. How can we judge the thatcher’s work until there’s a rainstorm? Or until the wind blows from the east, which happens only once or twice in a year? Some aspects of ‘good work’ are not visible to the untrained eye, but are deeply embedded in the tiny details of working practice. (more…)

 What you are comfortable to discuss legitimates topics for your people. Those things you are uncomfortable with quickly go into the "undiscussable" pile.

As regular readers will be aware, I have been advocating that conversations are the means by which change takes place in organisations. This is because organisations can be seen as themes of consistency and novelty that emerge from the myriad conversations that take place amongst many people over periods of time. So, organisations remain the same (and sometimes stay stuck), due to recurrent themes that predominate in the conversations that take place over the course of many interactions. Each of these interactions individually holds the potential for novelty. Think of regular team meetings, project meetings, coffee conversations, board meetings, informal meetings to explore certain topics, progress meetings, and presentation of proposals. Each has the potential for something new, but also has potential to reinforce existing patterns. "It depends." (more…)

Have I found a sports analogy I agree with?

A colleague has recently drawn my attention to a comment by Margaret Moth, who explained her philosophy that, while you have little control over how and when a ball is served to you, you do have control over how you return it.

Margaret Moth is a New Zealand-borm CNN camerawoman who has covered war zones. She was hit by a sniper’s bullet in the face and had extensive surgery.

When I heard Moth’s philosophy expressed this way, I warmed to it immediately. It’s impact was strong – after all, it’s based on tennis, my favourite sport. The ball is served and then you choose how you want to return it. What a great position to be in as a tennis player, having the choice of where and how to return serve.

This is a way of saying that you choose your responses to the situations you are faced with. It gives you a lot of power to place yourself in charge of your life. And I was reminded of organisational change situations and how you cannot control how people will respond, sometimes unexpectedly, to the activities of your change project. (more…)

Do you suffer from the same problems social researchers do – being an outsider in your own business?

Much of what we "know" about leadership is based on research conducted according to social research methodology. The movement towards qualitative research has often been the basis of leadership research, which often involves participants responding to the questions of social researchers. The social researchers are by definition, outsiders. (more…)

"Best practice" ignores the most important factor – the people who are working with the practice or model.

Many managers have fallen for the attractive prospect of "best practice." And many consultants claim to be able to bring best practice to your organisation. What is usually meant by this term is that they bring models or processes they’ve used or developed in the past, which they can implement with new clients.

There is certainly value in the experience consultants have had in other organisations – it can bring a new perspective to what is going on in your organisation.

The idea of best practice goes further than this – it implies that the same outcomes are possible in your organisation using the standardised best practice or models adopted in other successful companies. (more…)

In situations of long-standing conflict, accusations of bullying can be a sign that relationships have broken down to such an extent that one or both of the parties can see no possibility of carrying on working together.

I have noticed when I have been asked to help organisations where people are in deep seated conflict, that the situations are often characterised by each party accusing the other of bullying them. When I mention to a new or potential new client these accusations of bullying in other conflict situations, I am struck by how they say "that happens here as well."

Chris Mowles writes an interesting post in Violence in Organisations on his blog Reflexive Practice that shed light on this for me.

He says that organisational politics consists of the daily exercise of power, involving people negotiating, discussing, being polite or impolite to each other, revealing, concealing, pulling rank, delegating and so on. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, he describes this political process as the proper exercise of power in the public space; as something that leads to the greatest of human civilising achievements. (more…)

Holding contradictory points of view without getting anxious – could this be a core competency for leaders of change?

When you think about it, it is fairly obvious that there can be no "I" without we, you (singular), he, she, you (plural) and they. "I" can only be thought of as "I and relationships with others." "I" cannot be thought of as a stand alone individual in isolation from others. You could think of "I" as meaning "interdependent I."

You can distinguish between interdependent I and others, but you cannot separate them – interdependent I only exists in relationship to other people. (more…)

This article appeared in the October 2009 edition of our monthly newsletter, ChangingOrganisations.

The other day I was in a group that was discussing leadership, including the similarities between business and sports. No doubt you’ve seen similar comparisons before – business and sports both have winners and losers, a game plan, scouting out the competition, reading the game and changing tactics accordingly, playing within rules, a coach and many other similarities.

The basic assumption is that business is like rugby, chess or my own favourite game, tennis, in which one player or team is playing another player or team.

But in such a game of two players, if one player is much stronger than the other, then that player can pretty much determine the outcome of the game, and will be able to compel to some extent the moves of the other player.

Nevertheless the stronger player still has to take the moves of the weaker player into account even though they have overall dominance of the game. You could say that both players have some power over each other. In this sense, power is not an absolute but a ratio between the two players, a ratio that favours the stronger player. If the players were more equally matched, then the power ratio would be more even and neither player would be able to dominate the course of the game, nor compel the other player to make certain moves.

But business is not like a game of two players like rugby, chess or tennis. It is not even as though one person is simultaneously playing a number of others individually like in simultaneous chess. Nor is one person playing a number of people who are united against him or her. In both of these cases, a player who is much stronger than the others could dominate the course of the game and moves of the others.

Business is not like these games.

It’s Not One on One

Business is more like a game for many many players, playing against each other, not one on one like tennis or chess. Individual players then have to wait longer and longer to make their moves. As the number of players increases it becomes more and more difficult for one player to have a mental picture of the overall flow of play, the direction and development of the game. The ability of one player to control the game or compel the moves of others becomes diluted, even for a relatively strong player. From the point of view of an individual player, the network of other players and the moves they make will eventually seem to take on a life of its own as they wait for their turn and try to work out what is happening.

This is what it is like to be a participant in a change initiative, particularly in a large organisation, especially as a member of the group of “targets” of change. From the perspective of an individual involved, the moves (or actions) available to that person have to take into account the moves (or actions) of others, and in this way the people involved have to be responsive to the actions they see happening, and the overall patterns of behaviour, power, politics, and ideology that they discern. Individuals involved, even powerful ones, cannot completely dominate the course of the project and the actions of others.

The Number of Players is Always Increasing

Returning to the game of many players, imagine that the numbers of players keeps increasing. As individuals find themselves less and less able to obtain favourable outcomes, different groupings of players will form and reform as players seek to gain an advantage. Strong players will group together and attempt to attract other players to their groupings. From the interplay of the various groupings, you could end up with a two tier game – a game in which players are still interdependent but no longer play directly with each other. Rather, the function of playing directly is taken up by a tier of leaders, delegates, representatives, governments, focus groups, steering groups or other specially designated functionaries. This first tier of representatives / leaders plays directly with each other, on behalf of the mass of people in the second tier, who now do not play directly with each other. There can be no first tier without the second tier. So the representatives / leaders in the first tier are bound up with the second mass group in one way or another. The first tier cannot exist without the second tier.

Let’s assume the first tier is very powerful indeed. In fact, like a senior management team or a change project team, only they can play at the decision making levels – they have a monopoly on access to the game. Every player in that tier can play, pretty much like in a single tier game, being able to see the pattern of the game, decide strategy, make moves directly and follow the influence of his or her moves on the later moves of others. Even though the game is complex through the interdependence of tier one with the mass of people in tier two, the game appears more or less transparent to those players in the top tier.

This transparency is only an illusion however. The two tier game is much more complex than a simple two player game like rugby, chess or tennis, where one strong player is able to dominate the moves of the other player and the course of the game. Because of their interdependence with those in the less powerful tier, no individual in the two tier game, no matter how powerful, has anything like the power of the player in the two person game to guide the game in the direction of his or her desires and wishes.

Sports Analogies Trap You into One on One Thinking

Sports analogies, though, make it appear that those involved in powerful positions in business are like players in the simple one on one games like tennis. These sports analogies ignore the interdependence of each group with the other, the presence of many other groups as well who might not be playing directly, and the complex relationships that are therefore involved.

This is why it is more effective for you as a leader, and also for those involved in change projects, to think of your organisation as a constantly shifting set of ever-changing groupings, rather than being a sport in which the objective is to beat the other team. If you think you are in a simple one on one contest, then you will focus on goals, strategy and tactics. If you think you are part of interdependent groupings with shifting power balances, you will be paying more attention to what is going on around you, to the shifting ratios of power and to the quality of your responses within the framework of your overall intention.

Which is far more effective. So, stop yourself when you find yourself using a sports comparison to describe situations in your organisation. It will be hiding the interdependence of groupings the people you are talking to are part of. Are you aware of what these interdependencies are in your organisation?

Note: These thoughts were inspired by the remarkable ideas of Norbert Elias in “What is Sociology,” 1978, New York: Columbia University Press.

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