Stephen Billing’s Blog

"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…)

It’s a convoluted path from objective questionnaire instruments that only make sense in the subjective reality of respondents. Why not just enquire directly into the subjective reality of managers and staff in organisations, and bypass the "objective" instruments?

I am delighted that Tom Gibbons has joined the discussion and debate on this blog about the place of instruments in organisations (here) as well as other topics such as self organisation. Tom is Managing Director at TMS Americas, which is the organisation that represents the well-known Margerison and McCann Team Management Profile and associated instruments, so Tom is an expert on profiling. TMS is also well represented in NZ by TMS Ltd and I certainly like the profile well enough to have become accredited in administering it.

In a comment on my previous post on reification (what’s that?) Tom explained how he uses the profile as a vehicle for starting conversations that would not otherwise be possible. I think this is an admirable use for a profile, because I think that it is important in organisational change to foster new conversations. After all, people gain insights from filling in a questionnaire and then receiving feedback from someone on how they stack up in terms of the criteria of the instrument.

My comments in this post are not related only to the Team Management Profile, but to all psychological profiles, and I have experience of many. It is commonly understood that the participants in the instrument do not know what the criteria are at the time they fill in the instrument, and this is seen as an enhancement to the objectivity of the instrument. Many instruments are designed to obscure the criteria through, amongst other things, the format of the questions and through asking the same question in a number of different ways, for example through forced choice between two criteria. So, participants are told that they can’t fool the computer programme. For some instruments, the delivery of the feedback via computer programme is also seen as making the feedback more objective. (more…)

In which I ponder on why I haven’t used instruments and profiles in my consulting work in leadership development or helping organisations to bring about change (the post is after the light hearted questionnaire below).

A recent post on this blog was on how we often treat concepts or ideas as physical things and attribute the properties of physical things to them, such as thinking we can manipulate and manage culture as though it were a physical thing (here). In the comments on that post, a discussion has begun in a spontaneous way about the place of instruments (assessments or questionnaires) in dealing with complex processes of interaction in organisations.

Like many consultants, I am accredited to administer and facilitate workshops based on the Team Management Profile offered by TMS.

I have to confess though that I haven’t used the profile in my consulting work, even though I like it enough to have become accredited to run it. I have plenty of experience of other profiles as well (e.g. Myers-Briggs, Lominger competency profiles, Gallup Strengths Finder, Gallup Engagement Survey, 15FQ+, LSI, HBDI, AVI, Belbin, EQ, 360 degree and others) and I haven’t used them much either. And yet all of them have something to offer, certain compelling points of difference in the way they are presented, in what they claim to measure and in what insights they offer.

I’ve been pondering on why it is that I am not now drawn to profiles. In fact I seem not to be finding them helpful to my clients, even though I have been able to help clients to make sense of different profiles they have bought or undertaken. At times I have helped them to make decisions about how (or whether) to roll these instruments out across their organisation.

When I started out as a consultant in independent practice, I thought that it was important that if a client needed a profile, I should be accredited to provide one, otherwise I might miss out on work. I am aware of other consultants who have the same idea. Somehow, in the five years since I have been in operation, I myself have never found a client who needed a profile, and I’ve been busy with client work. During that period, other consultants have done dozens and hundreds of administrations of such instruments – in fact it’s a staple part of business for a number of consultants.

After a couple of years I realised that this was at least partly because I didn’t see my client’s issues as things that could be resolved by reference to profiles.

I am conscious that sometimes clients want someone to implement "xyz profile" and that there are consultants who do this. Often clients have a particular solution in mind when they talk to a consultant. If they don’t, they certainly have a business problem when they ask a consultant for help.

I have come to realise that how the consultant frames up the solution has a big influence on the solution they offer. If a consultant has a profile, then they will very quickly see in client situations, applications for that profile. I suppose this a variation of "If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything will appear like it’s a nail." And you will have no option but to try banging it with your hammer. Shame if it’s not a nail but a rather painful blister.

But I think it’s more subtle than that, in spite of the joke questionnaire at the top of this post, courtesy of flickr.com. Perhaps it is partly a factor of "I have a solution, now let’s find someone I can flog it to." But I suspect that most consultants do not think this is what they are doing.

I think it’s more that becoming experienced in the profile does give you a certain way of looking at the world, a certain vocabulary, a certain theory about what is going on.  A certain habitus as Pierre Bordieu and my colleague Chris Mowles would say. If that’s your theory and vocabulary, then you will see organisational situations in terms of that theory and vocabulary. And no doubt you will also be able to convince clients to try out your solutions.

In my work with my clients I have become more interested in exploring "How are we looking at the world?" Our conversations are rooted in the present world of experience. When abstractions come up I bring the conversation back to what is currently happening. Perhaps that is why I am not feeling the need for instruments at the moment.

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…)

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…)