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.

In an interesting post "On Models and Scaling Up," Chris Mowles makes the point that the effectiveness of any model is due in part to the quality of the model and in part to the people working together with it, and so you can’t really separate out the contextual from the generalisable. This is the problem with ‘n-step’ approaches to change – the claim is that by following an 8 step or a U turn model, you will successfully implement change.

It is significant that the people working together with the model are just as much a part of the effectiveness as the model itself. In fact I think the people involved are much more important, and most managers are aware of this too, which is why they know that picking the right team is so important.

And yet best practice and its forebear benchmarking both divert attention from the people and the context, focusing entirely on the disembodied prescription or model, as though it can be implemented anywhere and get the same successful result.

Note that the process of naming something as "this" simultaneously names everything else as "that." So if I call something a circle, then I am also calling everything outside that circle "not circle." So by naming "circle" I have actually created two categories, ("circle" and "not circle") even though I am only focusing attention on one category – the one I have named. The other category becomes almost invisible in this process. So if in talking about "best practice" we are making the "people working together with the practice" almost invisible.

The emphasis is, in fact, on the least important factor – the model or the best practice itself. Concentrating on "best practice" risks leading to a selective interpretation of social facts – an interpretation seen only in terms of the "best practice." According to Axel Honneth, this can significantly reduce your attentiveness to meaningful circumstances in a given situation.

Instead of looking at best practice, focus your attention on the particularities of your situation, trying to understand all the factors at work, not just those prescribed in your model or best practice. Reflect on how your own participation is affecting, and is affected by, the way these factors are playing out in your organisation. That way you can help to make sure your attention is on what really matters so much more than a best practice or model – how you and others are interacting with each other and influencing each other in the process of getting the work done.

Photography by Ruby Cumming

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.

On two occasions, as part of (successful) applications for jobs (in different consulting firms!), I completed the Myers Briggs profile and the feedback I gained from the recruiters was that the test was just to make sure that "I was not an axe murderer." As if the Myers Briggs profile could tell a recruiter whether or not I would kill someone, and also whether or not I would choose an axe as my modus operandi. Perhaps it is no coincidence that neither of those firms are still operational. (Or perhaps the fact I joined them is why they are no longer operational!).

Perhaps you can dismiss my experience as as poor practice from those administering the profiles. Nevertheless, the same feedback from both about being an axe murderer? Why couldn’t one recruiter at least have chosen a different means of perpetration?

Getting back to my point, it’s interesting to me that the feedback from the "objective" computer (which after all was programmed by a person) is seen as more useful, the closer it is to the experience of the respondent. In other words, the more I can recognise my own personal (subjective) experience in the feedback from the instrument, the more "real" (or objective) the feedback seems to be.

In workshops, respondents are commonly asked a question such as "What is there in the profile that you recognise as you?" I know because I’ve done this myself in the past.

In other words, the result of these instruments is that those implementing them ask their respondents to consider their own subjective reality, to then turn it into an abstraction from their experienced reality by answering generic questions interpreted by a computer. This abstraction (i.e. you are an ABCD, or a swinger-expressive, or a chimp, or a triangle) is then fed back to the person and they are asked to identify with this abstraction. In order for the person to feel this diagnosis (your "type" or "preference") which is an abstraction is valid, it needs to be as close to the experience of the person as possible. Areas that don’t fit are conveniently explained away, or perhaps peer pressure plays its part in having everyone agree to the diagnosis.

What I have described is the following process of completing these instruments:

• Taking subjective experience of the participant (what the participant thinks their experience is).
   
• Asking questions that interpret the subjective experience of the participant in terms of the framework of the researcher (a person) who designed the questionnaire. This is what I mean by abstracting from this subjective experience.
   
• Feeding back the abstraction of the researcher to the participant in the form of the diagnosis (of which type / profile you are). Often the feedback in written form is the output of a computer programme (originally programmed by the researcher).   
   

• The participant makes sense of the diagnosis (which is an abstraction) in terms of the experience of the participant.
   
• The diagnosis (abstaction) is given value by the participant depending on the degree to which is matches the participant’s subjective experience.

I can’t help but wonder if we’d be better to enquire into experience directly, with direct questions about the subjective experience of the participants. Which is what I find myself doing in my own consulting practice.

When we use questionnaires and suchlike instruments we are going to the abstraction of questions designed into an instrument, which by definition have to be designed so as to cover as many situations as possible, then we only believe the results if they are congruent with our own experience. Why not just bypass the abstract instruments, and explore together the reality of what is going on around us?

Do we need such instruments in order to start conversations that otherwise would not take place?

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.

Take for example any of the classic organisational battles between groups such as sales and marketing, R & D and marketing, sales and finance, HR and line managers and it becomes very evident that not everyone in the organisation shares the same values or culture.

Organisations are characterised by rather complex differentiation of work tasks, departments and hierarchical levels and this differentiation fosters strong differences in meanings, values and symbols. The variety of generations, classes, occupational groups and genders tends to produce and sustain variety and fragmentation of cultures rather than unity of ONE culture in the organisation (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2008).

Perhaps the concept of corporate culture refers to the beliefs of the senior managers about what the culture should be. The beliefs of top managers can marginalise the beliefs of others in the organisation.

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.

The patterns emerging from the myriad interactions that take place in organisations have the quality of there being large numbers of small perturbations in the organisation and small numbers of large perturbations. What I mean by this is that over the many interactions that occur, there are lots that have small implications for the company and for the relationships between the people – these are the normal kind of interactions that might result in comradeship, antagonism, or in enabling normal work to be done. From time to time, there will be (relatively rare) occasions when certain interactions stir up a widespread response, such as New Zealand’s current anti-smacking law, by which the theme of the desirability of smacking children as part of discipline has been questioned in a national referendum. Such widespread take up of themes is relatively rare, however.

This phenomenon of large numbers of small perturbations and small numbers of large perturbations ilustrates a defining quality of complexity. (Note that elsewhere I have argued that organisations are not systems, not even complex systems). You could look at it this way – imagine a landscape with lots of small hills and a few large mountains. That is the kind of pattern you see in the disturbances and ripples of the impact of many interactions between people in an organisation over time.

Even the most powerful people such as CEOs are interacting with a relatively small number of other people. Some of those interactions have major impacts, perhaps through greater symbolic meaning such as on a road show or in an important meeting with the Board, management team or a crucial customer, while a much greater number of them have "ordinary" impact. Not every interaction results in revolutionary insight, most result in a pattern of sensemaking amongst those involved.

These population-wide patterns that emerge from many interactions, are, I think, what have typically been referred to as company culture. The company is made up of the members interacting in "local" ways, by which I mean that they interact with a relatively small number of others, and there is no overall blueprint or plan for those myriad interactions. At the same time as the members make up the organisation, so the organisation as a group collective influences the make up of the group.

Company culture is a term that refers to the impact that the company has on the individuals concerned. I have increasingly come to doubt whether there is such a thing as company culture. You may not be convinced yet and I will return to this theme in future posts. Perhaps I am just concerned about the idea that corporate culture is something (i.e. is a physical "thing" or something with properties similar to a physical thing)  that can be managed in the service of the most powerful managers.

If culture is a phenomenon that emerges from myriad interactions amongst organisational members, then it cannot be managed from outside as a whole. Instead, the top managers can only influence culture from within their own participation in interactions with others. Senior managers cannot design the culture that they want, nor can they engage other specialists to design the desired culture. They can only influence culture through their interactions with others.

No wonder leaders say that communication is so important.

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.

The organisation is seen as an open system, in interaction with the wider environment in which it exists, which is itself a larger system. Change in the macro environment system causes change in the organisational system and sub-systems.

The soft elements of people, culture and values need to be aligned to the harder elements of technology, strategy and structure. In fact, the term "alignment" is a giveaway that the person speaking is coming from a systems perspective. Common aspects that are said to need to be aligned include people, process and systems.

Respected organisation development pioneer Noel Tichy, for example, identified in his TPC model three mutually dependent systems: technological, political and cultural. McKinsey’s popular "7S" model is another example where they formulate organisations as the interdepedency of seven systems each of which begins with the letter "S."

A change in any one of these will also involve a change in the others because they are interdependent. Systems thinking emphasises understanding the linkages between the different sub-systems.

In systems thinking, an organisation is seen as a system.

In a further evolution of systems thinking, organisations came to be seen as living systems, in other words, as organisms. In this metaphor, organisations are seen as being like biological life forms, having the ability to think (head), ability to feel emotion (heart) and the ability to take action (hands). In this way of thinking, actions taken should be determined by rational thought (of the top managers or "head"), carried out by the workers ("hands"), with passion. If any of these are missing, then projects are initiated to capture the hearts and minds of staff.

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.

Organisations are taken to be in equilibrium of forces for change and forces for stabilisation. A common technique is to analyse the forces for and against change, mapping them to show this equilibrium graphically.

This approach gives rise to the classic cascade where the desired change is determined by top managers and is then rolled out through the hierarchical levels of the organisation. The following values underpin this approach, according to Alvesson and Sveningsson:

1. Empowering employee to act.
2. Creating openness in communications.
3. Facilitating ownership of the change process and its outcomes.
4. Promoting a culture of collaboration.
5. Promoting continuous learning.

These will all sound very familiar to any of you who have dealt with consultants or HR people in change projects. No doubt these will also reflect some of your own principles, which shows how ingrained these values have become in managerial and organisational change work.

This group dynamics way of thinking started off originally focused on work-group level evolutionary change and has developed more into organisation-wide approaches and towards cultural, strategic and revolutionary change, which has made it more similar to the Open Systems school, covered in the next post.

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.

The Sources of Change

The sources of change can vary – hence a distinction between planned change and emergent change. In planned change, the intentions of top managers are central, and in emergent change, the source is those outside top management. Emergent change emphasises the messy nature of change. Planned change includes the grand change projects often involving HR staff and consultants, including re-engineering, TQM, new technology, mergers and acquisitions, restructuring and so on.

The Politics of Change

Strategy is the result of political processes where bargaining, negotiating, lobbying and power relations are used to further the interests of top managers. The political dimension of change is often downplayed, perhaps by being framed in rational and analytically accepted terms which are useful especially when change is challenged.

The Content of Change

The content refers to the specifics of the change, whether it’s restructuring, re-engineering, strategy, customer orientation, new production systems or whatever. Often many aspects of the content are related to each other, for example a culture change is often seen as affecting aspects such as management control systems, strategy and structure.

Conclusion

Alvesson and Sveningsson go on to point out that these categories are not so neat and tidy as they might first appear. Depending on your position in the organisation, the scale of change might look quite different. What appears as minor and incremental to a senior person might be seen as radical and revolutionary by someone else. Personal interests, background, education, hierarchical position and other factors all influence how you see and categorise the change.

There are plenty of examples where change that is seen as major by the top managers is disregarded by the troops. The converse is also common, where the troops see a change as far more significant than the managers; many cases of industrial unrest and strikes reflect this different perception.

These views of change are also affected by whether you see organisational change as discontinuous and episodic or as continuous. Major planned change initiatives are often implemented on the assumption that change occurs from time to time and the organisation reverts back to stability or equilibrium in between. Seen at a distance organisations can appear quite stable (episodic change), but looked at closely they can appear to be constantly changing as people leave, customers and suppliers change and new products are developed (continuous change).

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.

Pettigrew brought concepts from anthropology and sociology to his studies of organisations. He was interested in studying organisations over time through continuous processes ("longitudinal" or "processual" studies). In particular, he wanted to link the history and future of the organisation to the present (other discussions of this can be found here, here, and here).  Pettigrew studied the birth and evolution of a boarding school from 1934 to 1972, and he came to see this history as a series of what he called social dramas (I might call them narratives), anchored by the reigns of three particular headmasters and a structural change that altered the school’s population.

Pettigrew saw culture as the source of a family of concepts – symbols, language, ideology, belief, ritual and myth.

The concept of organisational culture is thus relatively recent (since 1979) and went through its faddish period where everything was seen as being about culture.

From the way the knowledge management and IT people talk, it seems that nowadays, the concept of organisational culture still retains some mystery about it and is seen as difficult to change. It is common in my experience for knowledge management and IT people to articulate elegant technical solutions and then to wrap up all the reasons why these lovely technical solutions don’t or might not work as the human element of "culture," quite outside their expertise to address.

It wasn’t long before Peters and Waterman in "In Search of Excellence" were claiming that shared values represented the core of corporate culture. The empirical work (i.e. quantitative research) of Hofstede et al in "Measuring Organizational Cultures" showed that, to the contrary, it was shared perceptions of daily practices that were the core of culture. This reinforces my constant catch cry to reflect on your practices and those of the others in your organisation if you want to change your organisation.

Hofstede et al identified six characteristics of the corporate culture construct:

• Culture is holistic – it involves a group and cannot be reduced to single individuals.
   
• Culture is historically determined – it emerges over time and is manifest in traditions and customs.
   
• Antropological terms such as "myth," "ritual," "symbols" are commonly used to describe culture.
   
• Culture is socially constructed, meaning that it arises from processes of interaction of different people – not from any universal characteristics of human beings (hence different groups can be said to have different cultures).
   
• Culture is soft – difficult to catch hold of and difficult to measure.
   
• Culture is inert and difficult to change. People tend to hold on to their values and traditions.

It didn’t take long before organisational culture was seen as something that could be managed and subjected to the wills of the domininat coalitions of the organisation. The articulation of the concept of organisational culture meant that it soon came to be seen as something that could be manipulated in service of the organisation’s objectives.