Stephen Billing’s Blog

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…)

Sports are like business only in certain superficial ways. The differences are far greater than the similarities, and bear strong warning for any leader of change.

The other day I participated in a group discussing leadership. It was apparent that to many people, that lessons from sport were highly applicable to leadership and business, and further, that it was taken for granted that there are strong similarities between business and sports.

I think that the use of "lessons" from sport highlights certain apparent similarities, such as having winners and losers, a game plan, tactics, coach and so on.

At the same, the highlighting of these similarities disguises some very crucial differences between sport and business: (more…)

It is commonly agreed that personality instruments can be implemented well, and they can be implemented poorly. My question is, is it actually possible to measure what personality instruments claim to measure?

The predominant way of thinking of humans is that thought comes before action, based on Descartes (I think therefore I am). So we see ourselves as being minds (or souls) inhabiting and having supremacy over our bodies.

Personality profiles and tarot cards alike offer the promise of articulating and measuring this inner essence that is your mind or your soul.

Psychological approaches such as profiles also offer the additional promise of the potential to measure this inner essence, and by implication, to manage it in the service of the organisation. After all, what can be measured, can be managed. For example, I have been told not once, but twice after completing Myers-Briggs questionnaires during recruitment processes for consulting companies (I got both jobs, by the way) that the test was just to "make sure I wasn’t an axe murderer". Two completely different people administering this instrument both came up with the same line – I guess this implies that there must be a specific Myers-Briggs profile that fits an axe murderer. (more…)

Personality profiles and new age methods are like tarot cards, or astrology. Seems to me they are trying to do the same thing – explain the hidden structure of personality or the self. Personality profiles have allied themselves to rational approaches to "prove" their scientific validity, in a corporate world which values such science. New age methods have not and are correspondingly less valued. But when boiled down, I wonder, what is the difference?

Personality profiles seem to me to be attempts to reveal or make explicit the underlying hidden structures of your personality, or sense of self.

As humans, we each experience a sense of self which is relatively stable although it can change over time. And we experience others as also being similarly stable. Personality profiles, I think (and perhaps they cannot all be bundled into the same category) seem to me to be attempts to measure and articulate the underlying structure of the personality. (more…)

What is reification and why on earth should I care?

You may or may not have come across this term before, and if not, then welcome to the arcane aspects of complexity science and organisation theory.

However, as a leader it is important to understand the tendency we have to treat organisations and other abstract concepts like culture or organisations as though they were actual physical things that respond to natural laws. Why? Because it affects how you approach making changes to your culture or wider organisation.

Organisations and other social objects respond to processes of human interaction, but they do not respond to universal laws the way that physical objects such as balls (speed, direction) or pot plants (colour, mass). Even though pot plants are living, and organisations are dynamic and so seem to have some qualities of living things, organisations are not living systems like pot plants. (By the way, do you like the pot plants shown in our front entrance? I am quite proud of them.) (more…)

Self-organisation is in no way a bottom up process. All humans are involved in interaction, and the results that emerge are the results of self-organising processes, whether you are a top manager or lower in the hierarchical ranks.

It is not very accurate to call self-organising a "bottom up" approach or process. To me, a bottom up process is where there is activity amongst those lower in the hierarchy or closer to the front line who feed ideas or a new process up through the hierarchy. A bottom up process can happen because it’s been designed by the top managers e.g. a series of facilitated focus groups, or it can happen more informally e.g. where a problem is solved or a new process is established at one site and then the results are seen by those higher in the hierarchy and the new process is implemented at other sites. (more…)

The concept of self-organisation is a very misunderstood topic when it comes to applying it to organisations.

Bas Reus is exploring what it means to say that humans are self-organising, over at http://basreus.nl/2009/07/27/self-organization-defined/#comment-51. His post outlines the development of his thinking in attempting to define self-orgnisation.

Arising from the study of complexity, the important thing about self-organisation is that the ordering of society (or people in organisations) occurs through local interaction in the absence of an overall blueprint or plan. As any top manager will tell you, you can’t just make a plan, tell others and then confidently expect that the plan will be followed. Instead, all sorts of unexpected things happen – people interpret things differently, they react to things in surprising ways and there are unintended consequences. This is what is meant by saying there is no overall blueprint or plan. (more…)

Have you seen this blog post by Tiffany Monhollon called "How to Talk About Change at Work" that recently caught my eye?

For the last five months the author has had what is described as a seismic shift every 30 days. That amounts to five of these seismic shifts in five months. So, lots of change, by any standards.

Tiffany goes on to give a very personalised account of what she has learnt through these frequent and rapid changes in her organisation, and some survival tips that I think are very practical, and revealing of political processes. Essentially Tiffany’s tips amount to "how to be a good management recipient of change."

First of all she suggests figuring out what the change means, and recommends talking to a group of trusted others as a way of working out what it’s all about. (more…)

Think of change participants, not change recipients. Those who are your targets of change actively reinterpret your change initiatives in the light of their own background, expectations and work tasks.

Recent posts have been critical of the standard planned change "n-step" approaches (e.g. here and here).

What are the alternatives to planned change? Recent interest has been growing in thinking of change as a process or processes, emerging from myriad local interactions.

The process view is interested in exploring change as a continuous (rather than episodic) and unpredictable process, without any clear beginning or end. Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that this means that organisational change is seen as a result of a variety of operational and administrative decisions made on a daily basis. These decisions are quite ordinary and are made in the process of adjusting to political struggles, shifts in power differentials, and adapting to changes in the priorities of others. (more…)

Planned change models (so-called "n-step models" of which Kotter’s 8 step model is the most well known) assume that change can be controlled. By carrying out the steps the desired change will be manifested in the organisation. Because change is seen as predictable, the key lies in detailed planning.

Alvesson and Sveningsson in their book "Changing Organizational Culture" say that while this logic might explain the popularity of these approaches, these planned change models reveal little about how change emerges from interactions between those involved in the organisation. These models pay little attention to how people interpret the change efforts, nor how they relate to these based on their interests, backgrounds, jobs and how they will be affected by the change. (more…)