Stephen Billing’s Blog

In which I conclude that efficiency of communication may well work against effectiveness of communication in organisational change situations.

There is an old saw that says that efficiency (or management) is doing things right, with effectiveness (or leadership) being doing the right things. I am sure you have come across this before.

I’m not enamoured of this simplistic bromide, having wondered before on this blog whether is in fact such a thing as leadership. (Search on "leadership," or click on the "leadership" tags or categories to find the threads).

I started to ponder on what this might mean in relation to communication.

If we took the idea of efficient communication, what would it mean? Email is quite efficient – it’s just a matter of typing it and sending it. Twitter and text messages are even more efficient. In this sense, being efficient equates with being "less effort." And then it occurred to me, that this refers to less effort for the sender of the message.

I have a friend though, who regards a phone call as more efficient than a series of texts or emails, say when trying to schedule a meeting. So after a couple of texts or emails about suitable times, he’ll call, saying it’s easier that way. Perhaps he’s also thinking about the effectiveness of the communication – in a phone call he can get it resolved and get a commitment to a time, coming up with alternatives quickly based on the reaction of the other person.

What about effective communication? What would that be? I guess from the perspective of the sender receiver model of communication, you would say that effective communication would be that in which the receiver gets the same message as the receiver intended. So, effective communication has much more consideration of the receiver than the idea of efficient communication, which seems to be more related to the sender’s convenience.

Thinking about this idea of effective communication, I think it is not so much a matter of the accurate transmission of a message, as it is about understanding the response you have received.

In this way of thinking about it, effective communication would be achieved when the parties were satisfied that they had agreed on the meaning of the gesture and response involved.

In any one interaction, it might take several attempts to reach this point of both parties being satisfied that agreement on the meaning had been reached. Many of our interactions actually never reach this point – for example, I might go away from a fight with my partner convinced that he doesn’t understand me.

I think effective communication requires genuine attempts to understand each other, and so repeating yourself, paraphrasing and summarising are all used in the process of coming to understand the meaning of what you are negotiating. When people are coming to grips with proposals for organisational change, effective communication requires methods like paraphrasing, that employ redundancy or duplication, rather than efficient communicating of a message in the shortest time or least amount of effort possible.

Efficiency of communication and effectiveness of communication are certainly not the same thing in organisational change. Further, quests for efficiency in communication may well work against the effectiveness of your communication about change.

 Five steps to communicating an unpopular decision

How do you communicate something that is likely to be unpopular? For example, how do you tell your team that they are going to have to give something up because of a cost cutting measure that is going to be implemented?

I remember when I was a manager in a large corporate how, in the second half of the financial year we would regularly be told that our travel budget was being reduced by 25%, 50%, or once even 100%.  We got to expect it, and started to build it into our budget at the start of the year. No more travel for the rest of the year, even though you have staff and colleagues in Auckland and you live in Wellington, a 1 hour flight or 700km drive away. How are you supposed to keep a team going in those circumstances?

How do you break the news that there is going to be a review of the organisation’s structure and it may affect many people’s jobs?

How do you tell staff that you need to reduce the number of cars in the fleet, and that the pool cars have to go?

If you have a large number of people to tell, it is tempting to go for efficiency and send out an email – write it down once, send it out, job done.

It is readily apparent that such an approach is not really job done. You have to continue to work with these people, and so you cannot just do anything. You will need them in the future. If they think you’ve done the cowardly equivalent of dumping your girlfriend by text, then it’s likely you’ll get some unanticipated consequences – resistance perhaps, or ignoring the new policy. They decide they can’t trust you, thereby making it difficult to get anything done in future. (more…)

In my last post I highlighted Saras Sarasvathy’s simile of a meal that can be prepared either by designing a menu and then assembling the ingredients to make the meal (which she calls causation) or by looking to see what ingredients are to hand and choosing the dishes based on the ingredients in the cupboard.

I am struck by how many corporate change initiatives focus on the set pieces such as road shows, documents and deadlines. The change team prepares a plan with these events set to occur at certain intervals. This is very similar to preparing a series of three course dinners over the course of the project. (more…)

Suggestions for team meetings

Looking at the whole context of your group’s dynamics over a month or so can help you to identify the natural flows of interaction and how your team meetings can best contribute to and shape it.

What kinds of interaction does your team need? in a month? Most teams need opportunities for the following:

• Understanding what is going on in the organisation that may affect their work.
• Working on ideas for improving your operation.
• Catching up on new developments or information that affects the team.
• Knowing how the team is performing.
• Acknowledging / celebrating success.
• Letting off steam.

Some team meetings rather unrealistically try to achieve all these things in one session – no wonder no one ends up being satisfied! Please don’t think that the team meeting has to accomplish all these things. Think of the other avenues you have for the different kinds of interaction that are required.

For example, do you have Friday night drinks, or a regular day when you have morning or afternoon tea together? If so, then that can provide an opportunity for people to let off steam. You can couple that with acknowledging success. One company I know puts up their wins for the week on a whiteboard at their Friday night drinks – this practice began when they were first starting out. Facing some tough times they decided to use this as a way of focusing on some of the positive things that tended to get buried during a difficult period.

In one group I know, everyone comes to work 30 minutes early (not because they’re super-motivated – it’s so they can get a carpark) and this time before work is where they catch up on how things are going in their personal lives, let off steam and develop their informal relationships with each other.

Even if you don’t have this kind of opportunity for informal group dynamics to take place, you could consider having an ‘informal’ meeting every second time you meet, where there is a much more informal agenda.

Or you could allocate a section of the meeting for informal checking in, perhaps at the start for example. There will always be new developments in your organisation and so it’s good if you can keep this on the regular agenda.

As far as team performance goes, if you are reporting monthly, then you could include this as part of your meeting once a month around reporting time, so it doesn’t have to be on every agenda.

The thing with team meetings is to consider the overall flow of your team’s work and how the team meetings can assist in facilitating the group dynamics your team requires to accomplish its work.

In which I begin contemplating that common bug bear of working groups: team meetings

Recently clients, friends and participants in my management development workshops alike have all been talking with me about team meetings. What are yours like? How frequent? Do you and your team look forward to them? Or are they in the category of “necessary (or unnecessary) evil”. 

When it comes to making team meetings more productive, there is plenty of advice out there about improving team meetings by tightening up control of the meeting.

The following, for example, are all ways of attempting to gain control of the meeting in order to make it more productive:

• Having a preset agenda. 
• Rotating the chairing of the meeting.
• Establishing ground rules.
• Assigning strict amounts of time to each topic.

Of course, these are all attempts by the facilitator to control the meeting in the interests of achieving the predetermined outcomes.

Needless to say I have a different approach.

I think it is useful to consider team meetings in the context of the overall patterns and flows of communication throughout the course of a week or a month.

What do I mean by that? More about this in my next post.

This article was published in the Changing Organisations Newsletter ISSN 1174-5576 Num 4: May 2009.

Informal communications – for example gossip over coffee – are what make or break change efforts. A rumour or a concern can so easily be fanned through informal communication into a wildfire of suspicion and resistance. And yet change leaders often concentrate on formal communications (e.g. written) at the expense of informal channels of communications.

My scientific survey tells me that 75% of projects concentrate on formal communications and ignore informal. 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 and business unit managers have a big problem on their 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 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 (a concept invented as a way of measuring progress towards the desired outcomes, 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. Unfortunately, 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 are seldom influenced 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, programme managers and steering groups.

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 often seen as the whole story. In reality they 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, and 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 failure rate for change projects is reputed to be so high.

Six myths about organisational change arise from thinking about change that is not congruent with the experience of actually working in organisations.

An excerpt from this article was published in the Changing Organisations Newsletter ISSN 1174-5576 Num 2: March 2009.

I think we have a problem with the way we think about change. The problem is that our managerialist thinking about organisations and how they change is not congruent with our experience of actually working in organisations.

Myth 1

In the world of managerialism, a scientific gap analysis will allow managers to create a vision detailing how the future will be for all the people in the organisation, measure the gap between that desired future and current reality, and plan how to close that gap.

Reality 1

In the real world the future unfolds as the interweaving of the intentions of many people involved in the organisation. The gap analysis helps to develop a plan. The plan represents the intentions of those involved in the project. Those intentions interplay with the intentions of others in the organisation. It is useful to have a plan, but the plan will change a lot on the way. It does not map out exactly what will happen, and it does not take into account insights and further thinking that will occur in the future. So you have to pay careful attention to the intentions of others and how the interweaving of these intentions is playing out, a reality that is ignored in the gap analysis approach.

Myth 2

In the world of managerialism, change happens in stages (e.g. see this post). People will go through stages such as a grief cycle (e.g. SARAH – Shock, Anger, Resistance, Acceptance, Help) By implication, change happens when managers intend it to happen.

Reality 2

In the real world, change is taking place all the time, whether or not managers will it to. Change occurs in the conversations that take place in the lunch rooms, in the smoking areas, in the corridors and around the water cooler. It does not take place in stages, even if the project is planned in stages. Most project plans ignore what is going on in the lunch rooms, in the smoking areas, in the corridors and around the water cooler.

Myth 3

In the world of managerialism, you capture hearts and minds with inspirational statements on the intranet, workshop sessions with interesting visuals / posters, and well crafted communications.

Reality 3

People have consciousness and choice. Most current change approaches have gone beyond trying to force people to change, instead seeking to persuade people with compelling arguments. But as you no doubt know from experience, compelling arguments do not persuade everybody. For example, you don’t know whether or not people are going to be inspired by your carefully crafted video or email. It is my view that effective change practitioners are able to articulate their views about human consciousness and choice so that they have effective ways of dealing with the variable responses people have to the persuasive messages.

Myth 4

In the world of managerialism, communication happens in cascades.

Reality 4

See Reality 2. Cascades ignore the informal channels of communication.

Myth 5

In the world of managerialism, you use psychology, rewards and sanctions to change behaviour, neutralize resistance and exult champions, early adopters, change agents and other agreeable individuals.

Reality 5

In the real world, this is manipulation. Adults see through and resent these kinds of behavioural tactics that attempt to use behavioural and social sanctions, but concentrate on the formal and ignore the informal social processes that take place in the ’shadows’ – those places where most managers fear to tread.

Myth 6

In the world of managerialism, the present is a point between the past and the future on the timeline that tells us what stages and activities we should be up to now.

Reality 6

In the real world, people take action in the present based on their experience of the past and their expectations for the future. For example, people make decisions about their investments in the present, not knowing what is in the future, but having expectations, for example about what the real estate market or perhaps finance companies will do in the future. We are currently seeing a move of contractors into permanent positions. One job recently attracted 55 candidates – when it was advertised 18 months ago it attracted only two candidates. Contractors are making these decisions based on their expectations for the future – when these expectations for the future are different, for example if they are more optimistic about contracting, then they take different action, they make different decisions in the present.

Past experience is relevant too – most people in organisations have now experienced change initiatives. I was approached by one person recently who told me that his wife had a high powered job in HR in a big organisation. He had showed her the material we had put out – it was being compared with not only his previous experience but also that of his wife.

Conclusion

Most thinking about change does not match up with the lived experience of working in organisations. It privileges formal channels of communication and does not pay enough attention to the ’shadows,’ to the informal communication that takes place in organisations, which is where change initiatives are undermined. No wonder 75% of change initiatives are reputed to fail.

Is Organisation Development part of Human Resources? Is Human Resources part of Organisation Development? Do they have no reporting relationship at all?

During my recent talk to the HR Institute, we discussed Organisation Development and how its reporting line relates to the HR function. In an earlier post, I suggested that Organisation Development in NZ at the moment tends to house a range of HR functions that have no other convenient home, such as Lominger competencies, Leadership and management development, engagement survey and others.

None of the participants worked in organisations with an Organisation Development function that was separate from Human Resources. I do think though that a lot of change projects are undertaken by project offices that may have change expertise in the project team. These are usually managed quite separate from the Human Resources function.

One of the things that emerged from my unscientific poll of the room through show of hands, was that quite a few organisations have Human Resources reporting to Organisation Development.

I think this is one of the problems facing Organisation Development. It has become such a vague and imprecise term that as many people think it is a subset of Human Resources as think that Human Resources is a subset of Organisation Development.

And then you’ve got the likes of me who think it is multi-disciplinary and therefore fits neither category.

What the hell IS organisation development?

Over the last few days I have had fun writing my speech and thinking about story vs narrative. I want to return to the question about what OD is. In my last post about this (here), I suggested that OD is in danger of becoming an assortment of HR functions that don’t fit anywhere else. And this is a long way from the roots of OD in humanistic values and behavioural science.

Not that I’m enamoured of either humanistic values and behavioural science – while these were great breakthroughs in thinking at the time and created the field of OD, I feel that we are building on these foundations and that new insights, e.g. complexity science and in particular the complex responsive process thinking of Ralph Stacey enable us to radically develop the thinking that originally started OD as a discipline.

While OD seems to have become subsumed under human resources in many organisations, I have been thinking about the skill sets that it takes to do the difficult work of organisational change and development. A deep understanding of people in organisations is required, along with project management skills and the ability to communicate internally – which often means with large numbers of people in short time frames. A view of leadership seems to me to be important (is there such a thing as leadership? – see this guest post by Russell Ness) because it will inform how you work with the leaders of the organisation.

The internal communications part of OD is often downplayed, if not missing from the OD literature and I notice that PR people see this as their space. And yet in the past I have often written "communications strategies" that are very similar to those I have seen written by PR people.

As a discipline, PR sees internal communication as a logical extension of its work with external stakeholders. In fact if you see employees as another stakeholder group, it makes perfect sense to give PR the internal communications portfolio for your projects.

Unfortunately so many PR and communications people spend their time on the production of artifacts – being so concerned about production values, key messages and award-winning design that the actual point of the communication (making meaning of what’s going on) gets lost. However, OD people also fall into this trap, so this is not an indictment on PR and communications professionals alone, more a comment on the way PR, HR and OD people are thinking about their work in organisations. The tools and artifiacts are elevated in status and importance above regular interaction.

I am indebted to my colleague Robyn Hogg for her idea of working in the ‘white space’ on the organisation chart. She says that the white space is ONE of the places you can work in when ‘doing’ OD which she sees as working to develop an organisation’s health and functioning. She observes that this ‘white space’ is not on the  radar of many people, suggesting that this is because there are no recipes and you need experience to be able to pick up the cues.

This resonates with my own view that OD and its HR relatives pay too much attention to the formal organisation chart and communication lines and not enough to the informal. Robyn further points out that to be able to get into the ‘white space’ the OD practitioner needs a wide brief in which to operate, time for scanning and close enough relationships (which requires the ability to establish credibility) to fish out the good oil from people.

I love Robyn’s idea of the ‘white space’ because it is a graphic way of highlighting the informal rather than the typical formal communications that OD, PR and HR people usually focus on.

While we all know that there are informal networks as well as formal channels in any organisation, the disciplines of OD, PR and HR mostly concentrate on the formal channels. I think we can improve our effectiveness, no matter what discipline we come from, if we focus our attention deliberately more on the informal channels – if we pay more attention to the "white space."

Thanks Robyn.

 In which I discover the blog of Chris Mowles and appreciate his take on how we might make the best use of time in meetings.

I have just discovered the blog of Chris Mowles called Reflexive Practice, who, like me, is exploring organisations as complex responsive processes. Chris and I did our doctorates together and he is now on the faculty of the Complexity and Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire where we studied together.

Coincidentally, as I have been writing my most recent posts about time seen as the living present (here, here and here), Chris has also been writing about the living present (here) – in his case about how our theories of time affect our meetings.

In his latest blog post, Chris points to how our desire to ‘make good use of the time’ in the meeting can lead to over-planning and attempts to tie things down to the last minute. He makes a good point that it assumes that we can anticipate how things will unfold at a certain time in the future and that our current thinking is adequate for the situation we will encounter when we meet together.

Chris comes to the conclusion that our meetings never unfold in a linear fashion but emerge as we struggle with each other over what we think we are doing and who we are. Skillful discussants then will allow for episodes of reflection, be alert to suggestions and conflict, be tolerant of ambiguity and and have an expectation that important and unplanned things may arise as a consequence.

I have written in a similar vein from the point of view of facilitation that tolerates and encourages this reflection and ambiguity.

Thanks Chris, I am looking forward to reading more of your provocative work.