Stephen Billing’s Blog

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…)

My last two posts were about the group dynamics and systems thinking approaches to change. Why was this? Because they both lead to thinking of change as a sequential process. Kotter in his book Leading Change has the most widely known example with his eight stage process for creating major change:

1. Establishing a sense of urgency.
2. Creating the guiding coalition.
3. Developing a vision and strategy.
4. Communicatin the change vision.
5. Empowering broad-based action.
6. Generating short-term wins.
7. Consolidating gains and producing more change.
8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture. (more…)

"Approaches to leadership and management are still dominated by prescriptions – usually claimed as scientific – for top executives to choose the future direction of their organization. The global financial recession and the collapse of investment capitalism (surely not planned by anyone) make it quite clear that top executives are simply not able to choose future directions. Despite this, current management literature mostly continues to avoid the obvious – management’s inability to predict or control what will happen in the future. The key question now must be how we are to think about management if we take the uncertainty of organizational life seriously" – Ralph Stacey

The above lines from Ralph highlight a major disconnect between management literature’s formulaic attempts to provide prescriptions and recipes for controlling the future, and the reality that this is actually an impossible and fruitless pursuit. This blog is an attempt to help us to understand how to act when the future is uncertain and unpredictable. Acknowledging the unpredictability of the future is not a signal to be depressed. Rather it is a provocation to become aware of how you are thinking about the tasks of management and leadership in organisations so that your approaches and ways of thinking are more congruent with this reality.

Recipe attempts to control the future prevent you from seeing clearly what is going on around you, and mean that your responses to the uncertain world in which you work and live will be less effective.

Footnote: The quote above is taken from the "blurb" for the paperback version of Ralph Stacey’s latest book which has just been released. The book is called Complexity and Organizational Reality: Uncertainty and the Need to Rethink Management after the Collapse of Investment Capitalism. It’s not available on Amazon yet but you can get more info or the book itself here (thanks to Chris Rodgers for alerting me to this).

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…)

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…)

How do you get away from the deficit way of thinking?

In my last post I suggested that the quest for the ideal future diverts people’s attention from what is going on around them in the present moment. Always paying attention to the deficit between where they are now and the ideal where they would like to be, they miss the possibilities of the present.

Again drawing on Patricia Benner’s The Primacy of Caring, here are three questions she suggests that can open up possibility:

• "What can be done now, in the meantime (before the ideal can be realised)?"
   
• "Is there another way to achive the same end?"
   
• "Is the end in sight the most worthy?"

In looking for the possibility inherent in the current situation there is still the notion of desire or some good to be achieved.

Benner suggests that decreasing your reliance on a preconceived end or means of getting there can offer a new point of departure for new possibilities that were not previously available. To me, this applies as much to individuals in their personal lives as much as it does to people in organisations.

The gap analysis perspective can divert your attention from noticing what is going on around you at this very moment.

It is common for many people to see the world as an ideal contrasted with a reality. People are measured against an ideal standard and are diagnosed in relation to that standard. The gap analysis is the classic example – where do you want to be compared to where you are now. There is a deficit and the solution is to work out a plan to close the gap.

Patricia Benner in The Primacy of Caring points out that this orientation towards some future ideal state has some cost. The price people pay for having this mindset is that they become blinded to the possibilities in their current situation. Because their focus is on the future and the gap, it is not on what is going on around them at the present moment.

This reminds me of the acres of diamonds story – I think I heard it from Brian Tracy and it may well be apocryphal. It concerns a farmer who sold up his farm and went off to another country to hunt for diamonds. Years later, he died, penniless and alone. In the meantime, on his farm that he had sold years earlier, guess what they found? Some very very large diamonds.

I think that the focus on an ideal future and the deficit compared to the current state stops people in organisations from seeing the possibilities in what is going on around them. It stops them from seeing the acres of diamonds that are present right now.

In your organisation where are the areas in which you are talking about what should be in the future at the expense of noticing what is going on around you at this very moment?

In which I claim change is not a journey but rather is a shifting in the patterning of human relating.

I have been hearing recently the common reference to change as a journey. I have written elsewhere about this, but organisational change is not a movement from a current state to a predetermined future state. If it were it might be more legitimate to talk about change as a journey.

Think about what organisational change actually is. It is change in the patterning of the human relating of those who constitute the organisation. From this perspective it makes no sense to talk about change as a journey.

The metaphor of organisational change as a journey is implies that the organisation can be moved by the coalition of the powerful from the current point to a predetermined future destination, B. When you understand organisations as the patterning of human relationships it makes no sense to think of these patterns as on a journey. They are shifting and changing as the relating between human beings changes, in response to aspects such as ideology, power, gossip, intentions and social expectations.

When people refer to the journey of change, they are often contrasting this with the destination, "where we want to be," or the where we are now, the current situation. Where we are now is not a point in time separating the past and the future, but is a story of the present moment, informed by our stories about the past and our expectations for the future.

The metaphor of the journey of change is referring to the processes of change. These processes are processes of human interaction. Processes of human interaction can hardly be said to be on a journey. I think it is relevant to talk about processes of change, but the metaphor of change as a journey is strictly limited and not at all accurate.