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Senge et al: systemic model: political, organism, flux and transformation If you are interested in sustainable change, then the ideas and concepts in Senge et al (1999) will be of interest to you. This excellent book, The Dance of Change, seeks to help ‘those who care deeply about building new types of organizations’ to understand the challenges ahead.
Senge et al observe that many change initiatives fail to achieve hoped-for results. They reflect on why this might be so, commenting, ‘To understand why sustaining significant change is so elusive, we need to think less like managers and more like biologists.’ Senge et al talk about the myriad of ‘balancing processes’ or forces of homeostasis that act to preserve the status quo in any organization.
HOMEOSTASIS IN ACTION We wanted to move to a matrix structure for managing projects. There was significant investment of time and effort in this initiative as we anticipated pay-off in terms of utilization of staff and ability to meet project deadlines. This approach would allow staff to be freed up when they were not fully utilized, so that they could work on a variety of projects.
Consultants worked with us to design the new structure. Job specs were rewritten. People understood their new roles. For a couple of months, it seemed to be working. But after four months, we discovered that the project managers were just carrying on working in the old way, as if they still owned the technical staff. They would even lie about utilization, just to stop other project managers from getting hold of their people.
I don’t think we have moved on very much at all. Business Unit Manager, Research Projects Department
Senge et al say:
Most serious change initiatives eventually come up against issues embedded in our prevailing system of management. These include managers’ commitment to change as long as it doesn’t affect them; ‘undiscussable’ topics that feel risky to talk about; and the ingrained habit of attacking symptoms and ignoring deeper systemic causes of problems.
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Their guidelines are:
• start small; • grow steadily; • don’t plan the whole thing; • expect challenges – it will not go smoothly!
Senge et al use the principles of environmental systems to illustrate how organizations operate and to enhance our understanding of what forces are at play. Senge says in his book, The Fifth Discipline (1993):
Business and other human endeavours are also systems. They too are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it’s doubly hard to see the whole patterns of change. Instead we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the systems, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved.
The approach taken by Senge et al is noticeably different from much of the other work on change, which focuses on the early stages such as creating a vision, planning, finding energy to move forward and deciding on first steps. They look at the longer-term issues of sustaining and renewing organizational change. They examine the challenges of first initiating, second sustaining and third redesigning and rethinking change. The book does not give formulaic solutions, or ‘how to’ approaches, but rather gives ideas and suggestions for dealing with the balancing forces of equilibrium in organizational systems (resistance).
What are the balancing forces that those involved in change need to look out for? Senge et al say that the key challenges of initiating change are the balancing forces that arise when any group of people starts to do things differently:
• ‘We don’t have time for this stuff!’ People working on change initiatives will need extra time outside of the day-to-day to devote to change efforts, otherwise there will be push back.
• ‘We have no help!’ There will be new skills and mindsets to develop. People will need coaching and support to develop new capabilities.
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‘This stuff isn’t relevant!’ Unless people are convinced of the need for effort to be invested, it will not happen.
• ‘They’re not walking the talk!’ People look for reinforcement of the new values or new behaviours from management. If this is not in place, there will be resistance to progress.
They go on to say that the challenges of sustaining change come to the fore when the pilot group (those who start the change) becomes successful and the change begins to touch the rest of the organization:
• ‘This stuff is _____!’ This challenge concerns the discomfort felt by individuals when they feel exposed or fearful about changes. This may be expressed in a number of different ways such as, ‘This stuff is taking our eye off the ball’ or, ‘This stuff is more trouble than it’s worth.’
• ‘This stuff isn’t working!’ People outside the pilot group, and some of those within it, may be impatient for positive results. Traditional ways of measuring success do not always apply, and may end up giving a skewed view of progress.
• ‘We have the right way!’/‘They don’t understand us!’ The pilot group members become evangelists for the change, setting up a reaction from the ‘outsiders’.
The challenges of redesigning and rethinking change appear when the change achieves some visible measure of success and starts to impact on ingrained organizational habits:
• ‘Who’s in charge of this stuff?’ This challenge is about the conflicts that can arise between successful pilot groups, who start to want to do more, and those who see themselves as the governing body of the organization.
• ‘We keep reinventing the wheel!’ The challenge of spreading knowledge of new ideas and processes around the organization is a tough one. People who are distant from the changes may not receive good quality information about what is going on.
• ‘Where are we going and what are we here for?’ Senge says: ‘engaging people around deep questions of purpose and strategy is fraught with challenges because it opens the door to a traditionally closed inner sanctum of top management’.
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Our view
We like the ideas of Senge et al very much. They are thought-provoking and highly perceptive. If we can persuade clients to read their book, we will. However, in the current climate of time pressure and the need for fast results, these ideas are often a bitter pill for managers struggling to make change happen despite massive odds.
Whenever possible we encourage clients to be realistic in their quest for change, and to notice and protect areas where examples of the right sort of behaviours already exist. The messages we carry with us resulting from Senge et al’s thoughts are:
• consider running a pilot for any large-scale organizational change; • keep your change process goals realistic, especially when it comes to timescales and securing
resources; • understand your role in staying close to change efforts beyond the kick-off; • recognize and reward activities that are already going the right way; • be as open as you can about the purpose and mission of your enterprise.
There are no standard ‘one size fits all’ answers in the book, but plenty of thought-provoking ideas and suggestions, and a thoroughly inspirational reframing of traditional ways of looking at change. However, those interested in rapid large-scale organizational change are unlikely to find any reassurance or support in Senge et al’s book. The advice is, start small.
STOP AND THINK!
Q 3.6 Reflect on an organizational change in which you were involved that failed to achieve hoped-for results. What were the balancing forces that acted against the change? Use Senge et al’s ideas to prompt your thinking.
Stacey and Shaw, complex responsive processes: political, flux and transformation
There is yet another school of thought represented by people such as Ralph Stacey (2001) and Patricia Shaw (2002). These writers use the metaphor of flux and transformation to view organizations. The implications
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of this mode of thinking for those interested in managing and enabling change are significant:
• Change, or a new order of things, will emerge naturally from clean communication, conflict and tension (not too much).
• As a manager, you are not outside of the system, controlling it, or planning to alter it: you are part of the whole environment.
In Patricia Shaw’s book Changing Conversations in Organizations, rather than address the traditional question of ‘How do we manage change?’ she addresses the question: ‘How do we participate in the ways things change over time?’ This writing deals bravely with the paradox that ‘our interaction, no matter how considered or passionate, is always evolving in ways that we cannot control or predict in the longer term, no matter how sophisticated our planning tools’.
Our view
This can be disturbing stuff, and a paradox that sets up some anxiety in managers and consultants who are disquieted by the suggestion that our intellectual strivings to collectively diagnose problems and design futures may be missing the point. Shaw says: ‘I want to help us appreciate ourselves as fellow improvisers in ensemble work, constantly constructing the future and our part in it.’ Stacey says of traditional views of organizations as systems: ‘This is not to say that systems thinking has no use at all. It clearly does if one is trying to understand, and even more, trying to design interactions of a repetitive kind to achieve kinds of performance that are known in advance.’
Ralph Stacey and Patricia Shaw have both written about complexity and change. Managers, and particularly consultants, often find this difficult reading because on first viewing it appears to take away the rational powers we have traditionally endowed upon our managers, change agents and consultants. Patricia Shaw says of the traditional view of the process consultant:
I would say that [the] ideal of the reflective practitioner [who can surface subconscious needs so that groups of people can consciously create a directed form of change] is the one that mostly continues to grip our imaginations and shape our aspirations to be effective and competent individual practitioners engaged in lifelong learning. Instead, I have been asking what happens when spontaneity, unpredictability and our capacity to be surprised by ourselves are not explained away but kept at the very heart [of our work].
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In contrast, those working in hugely complex environments such as the health sector or government have told us that they find the ideas in this area to be a tremendous relief. The notion that change cannot be managed reflects their own experiences of trying to manage change; the overwhelming feeling they have of constantly trying to push heavy weights uphill.
But how can managers and consultants use these ideas in real situations? We have distilled some ground rules for those working with complex change processes, although the literature we have researched studiously avoids any type of prescription for action.
In complex change, the leader’s role is to:
• decide what business the organization is in, and stretch people’s thinking on how to get there; • ensure that there is a high level of connectivity between different parts of the organization,
encouraging feedback, optimizing information flow, enabling learning; • focus people’s attention on important differences: between current and desired performance,
between styles of working, between past and present results.
(See Chapters 10 and 11 for more insights and tips in the areas of complex change and leading through uncertainty.)
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
• It is useful to understand our own assumptions about managing change, in order to challenge them and examine the possibilities offered by different assumptions. It is useful to compare our own assumptions with the assumptions of others with whom we work. This increased understanding can often reduce frustration.
• Gareth Morgan’s work on organizational metaphors provides a useful way of looking at the range of assumptions that exist about how organizations work.
• The four most commonly used organizational metaphors are: – the machine metaphor; – the political metaphor; –
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the organism metaphor;
– the flux and transformation metaphor. • The machine metaphor is deeply ingrained in our ideas about how organizations run, so it tends
to inform many of the well-known approaches to organizational change, particularly project management and planning-oriented approaches.
• Models of organizations as open, interconnected, interdependent sub-systems sit within the organism metaphor. This model is very prevalent in the human resource world, as it underpins much of the thinking that drove the creation of the HR function in organizations. The organism metaphor views change as a process of adapting to changes in the environment. The focus is on designing interventions to decrease resistance to change and increase the forces for change.
• The political map of organizational life is recognized by many of the key writers on organizational change as highly significant.
• The metaphor of flux and transformation appears to model the true complexity of how change really happens. If we use this lens to view organizational life it does not lead to neat formulae, or concise how-to approaches. There is less certainty to inform our actions. This can be on the one hand a great relief, and on the other quite frustrating.
• There are many approaches to managing and understanding change to choose from, none of which appears to tell the whole story, but most of which are convincing up to a point. See Table 3.3 for a summary of our conclusions for each model.
Table 3.3 Our conclusions about each model of change
Model Conclusions
Lewin, three-step model Lewin’s ideas are valuable when analysing the change process at the start of an initiative. His force-field analysis and current state/end state discussions are extremely useful tools. However, the model loses its worth when it is confused with the mechanistic approach, and the three steps become ‘plan, implement, review’.
Bullock and Batten, planned change The planned change approach is good for tackling isolated, less complex issues. It is not good when used to over-simplify organizational changes, as it ignores resistance and overlooks interdependencies between business units or sub-systems. Kotter’s eight steps are an excellent starting point for those interested in making large or small-scale organizational change. The model places most emphasis on getting the early steps right: building coalition and setting the vision rather than later steps of empowerment and consolidation. Change is seen as linear rather than cyclical, which implies that a pre- designed aim can be reached rather than iterated towards.
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Model Conclusions
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Kotter, eight steps
Beckhard and Harris, change formula The change formula is simple but highly effective. It can be used at any point in the change process to analyse what is going on. It is useful for sharing with the whole team to illuminate barriers to change.
Nadler and Tushman, congruence model
The congruence model provides a memorable checklist for the change process, although we think the seven ‘S’ model gives a more rounded approach to the same problem of examining interdependent organizational sub-systems. Both are also useful for doing a post-change analysis of what went wrong! Both encourage a problem focus rather than enabling a vision-setting process.
William Bridges, managing the transition
Bridges’ model of endings, neutral zone and beginnings is good for tackling inevitable changes such as redundancy, merger or acquisition. It is less good for understanding change grown from within, where endings and beginnings are less distinct.
Carnall, change management model Carnall’s model combines a number of key elements of organizational change together in a neat process. Useful checklist.
Senge, systemic model Senge challenges the notion of top-down, large-scale organizational change. He provides a hefty dose of realism for those facing organizational change: start small, grow steadily, don’t plan the whole thing. However, this advice is hard to follow in today’s climate of fast pace, quick results and maximum effectiveness.
Stacey and Shaw, complex responsive processes
The complex responsive process school of thought is new, exciting and challenging; however it is not for the faint-hearted. There are no easy solutions (if any at all), the leader’s role is hard to distinguish and the literature on the subject tends to be almost completely non-prescriptive.
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To be an effective manager or consultant we need to be able flexibly to select appropriate models and approaches for particular situations. See the illustrations of different approaches in Part Two.
STOP AND THINK!
Q 3.7 Which model of organizational change would help you to move forward with each of the following changes:
• Combining two well-respected universities to form one excellent seat of learning. • Turning the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra into the Boston Improvisational Jazz Band. • Evolving a group of mature MBA students into a networked organization of management
consultants.
Q 3.8 A fast food organization introduced a set of values recently which were well communicated and enthusiastically welcomed. The senior management team publicly endorsed the values and said: ‘This is where we want to be in 12 months’ time so that we are ready for industry consolidation. You will all be measured on achieving these values in your day-to-day work.’
The values were put together by a consultancy, which put a great deal of effort into interviewing a broad range of people in the organization. People at all levels liked the look of the values, but the situation three months later is that activity and conversations on the values are diminishing. A lot of people are saying: ‘We are doing this already.’ There is still some enthusiasm, but people are now getting scared that they will fall short of the values somehow, and are starting to resent them. What needs to happen now?
Q 3.9 If Stacey and Shaw have ‘got it right’ with their ideas about how change emerges naturally, does that make books such as this one redundant? Answers on a postcard!
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4
Leading change
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter we look at the leader’s role in the change process. The objectives of the chapter are to:
• enable leaders of change to explore the different roles they and their colleagues need to play in a change process;
• explore the range of skills and qualities that leaders need to ensure success; • identify how leaders of change can adapt their style and focus to the different phases of the
change process; • emphasize the importance of self-knowledge and inner resources in any leadership role.
The chapter is divided into six sections:
1. visionary leadership; 2. roles that leaders play;
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