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Q 3.3 Which views are being espoused here? (See A, B, C and D.)

A: All staff memo from management team The whole organization is encountering a range of difficult environmental issues, such as increased demand from our customers for faster delivery and higher quality, more legislation in key areas of our work, and rapidly developing competition in significant areas.

Please examine the attached information regarding the above (customer satisfaction data, benchmarking data vs competitors, details of new legislation) and start working in your teams on what this means for you, and how you might respond to these pressures.

The whole company will gather together in October of this year to begin to move forward with our ideas, and to strive for some alignment between different parts of the organization. We will present the management’s vision and decide on some concrete first steps.

B: E-mail from CEO A number of people have spoken to me recently about their discomfort with the way we are tackling our biggest account. This seems to be an important issue for a lot of people. If you are interested in tackling this one, please come to an open discussion session in the Atrium on Tuesday between 10.00 and 12.00 where we will start to explore this area of discomfort. Let Sarah know if you intend to come.

C: E-mail from one manager to another John seems to be in cahoots with Sarah on this issue. If we want their support for our plans we need to reshape our agenda to include their need for extra resource in the operations team. I will have a one-to-one with Sarah to check out her viewpoint. Perhaps you can speak to John.

Our next step should be to talk this through with the key players on the Executive Board and negotiate the necessary investment.

D: Announcement from MD As you may know, consultants have been working with us to design our new objective-setting process, which is now complete. This will be rolled out from 1 May 2011 starting with senior managers and cascading to team members.

The instructions for objective setting are very clear. Answers to frequently asked questions will appear on the company website next week.

This should all be working smoothly by end of May 2011.

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MODELS OF AND APPROACHES TO ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

Now that we have set the backdrop to organizational behaviour and our assumptions about how things really work, let us now examine ways of looking at organizational change as represented by the range of models and approaches developed by the key authors in this field. Table 3.2 links Gareth Morgan’s organizational metaphors with the models of and approaches to change discussed below.

Table 3.2 Models of change and their associated metaphors

Metaphor Model or approach Machine Political system Organism Flux and transformation

Lewin, three-step model ✓ ✓ Bullock and Batten, planned change ✓ Kotter, eight steps ✓ ✓ ✓ Beckhard and Harris, change formula ✓ Nadler and Tushman, congruence model ✓ ✓ William Bridges, managing the transition ✓ ✓ ✓ Carnall, change management model ✓ ✓ Senge, systemic model ✓ ✓ ✓ Stacey and Shaw, complex responsive processes ✓ ✓

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Lewin, three-step model: organism, machine

Kurt Lewin (1951) developed his ideas about organizational change from the perspective of th e organism metaphor. His model of organizational change is well known and much quoted by managers today. Lewin is responsible for introducing force field analysis, which examines the driving and resisting forces in any change situation (see Figure 3.1). The underlying principle is that driving forces must outweigh resisting forces in any situation if change is to happen.

Figure 3.1 Lewin’s force field analysis Source: Lewin (1951)

Using the example illustrated in Figure 3.1, if the desire of a manager is to speed up the executive reporting process, then either the driving forces need to be augmented or the resisting forces decreased. Or even better, both of these must happen. This means, for example, ensuring that those responsible for making the changes to the executive reporting process are aware of how much time it will free up if they are successful, and what benefits this will have for them (augmenting driving force). It might also mean spending some time and effort managing customer expectations and supporting them in coping with the new process (reducing resisting force).

Lewin suggested a way of looking at the overall process of making changes. He proposed that organizational changes have three steps. The first step involves unfreezing the current state of affairs. This means

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defining the current state, surfacing the driving and resisting forces and picturing a desired end state. The second is about moving to a new state through participation and involvement. The third focuses on refreezing and stabilizing the new state of affairs by setting policy, rewarding success and establishing new standards. See Figure 3.2 for the key steps in this process.

Figure 3.2 Lewin’s three-step model Source: Lewin (1951)

Lewin’s three-step model uses the organism metaphor of organizations, which includes the notion of homeostasis (see box). This is the tendency of an organization to maintain its equilibrium in response to disrupting changes. This means that any organization has a natural tendency to adjust itself back to its original steady state. Lewin argued that a new state of equilibrium has to be intentionally moved towards, and then strongly established, so that a change will ‘stick’.

Lewin’s model was designed to enable a process consultant to take a group of people through the unfreeze, move and refreeze stages. For example, if a team of people began to see the need to radically alter their recruitment process, the consultant would work with the team to surface the issues, move to the desired new state and reinforce that new state.

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HOMEOSTASIS IN ACTION

In the 1990s many organizations embarked on TQM (total quality management) initiatives that involved focusing on customer satisfaction (both internally and externally) and process improvement in all areas of the organization. An Economic Intelligence Unit report (Binney, 1992) indicated that two-thirds of these initiatives started well, but failed to keep the momentum going after 18 months. Focus groups were very active to start with, and suggestions from the front line came rolling in. After a while the focus groups stopped meeting and the suggestions dried up. Specific issues had been solved, but a new way of working had not emerged. Things reverted to the original state of affairs.

Our view

Lewin’s ideas provide a useful tool for those considering organizational change. The force field analysis is an excellent way of enabling, for instance, a management team to discuss and agree on the driving and resisting forces that currently exist in any change situation. When this analysis is used in combination with a collaborative definition of the current state versus the desired end state, a team can quickly move to defining the next steps in the change process. These next steps are usually combinations of:

• communicating the gap between the current state and the end state to the key players in the change process;

• working to minimize the resisting forces; • working to maximize or make the most of driving forces; and • agreeing a change plan and a timeline for achieving the end state.

We have observed that this model is sometimes used by managers as a planning tool rather than as an organizational development process. The unfreeze becomes a planning session. The move translates to implementation. The refreeze is a post-implementation review. This approach ignores the fundamental assumption of the organism

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metaphor, which is that groups of people will change only if there is a ‘felt need’ to do so. The change process can then turn into an ill-thought-out plan that does not tackle resistance and fails to harness the energy of the key players. This is rather like the process of blowing up a balloon and forgetting to tie a knot in the end!

Bullock and Batten, planned change: machine

Bullock and Batten’s (1985) phases of planned change draw on the disciplines of project management. There are many similar ‘steps to changing your organization’ models to choose from. We have chosen Bullock and Batten’s:

• exploration; • planning; • action; and • integration.

Exploration involves verifying the need for change, and acquiring any specific resources (such as expertise) necessary for the change to go ahead. Planning is an activity involving key decision makers and technical experts. A diagnosis is completed and actions are sequenced in a change plan. The plan is signed off by management before moving into the action phase. Actions are completed according to plan, with feedback mechanisms that allow some re-planning if things go off track. The final integration phase is started once the change plan has been fully actioned. Integration involves aligning the change with other areas in the organization, and formalizing them in some way via established mechanisms such as policies, rewards and company updates.

This particular approach implies the use of the machine metaphor of organizations. The model assumes that change can be defined and moved towards in a planned way. A project management approach simplifies the change process by isolating one part of the organizational machinery in order to make necessary changes, for example developing leadership skills in middle management, or reorganizing the sales team to give more engine power to key sales accounts.

Our view

This approach implies that the organizational change is a technical problem that can be solved with a definable technical solution. We have

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observed that this approach works well with isolated issues, but works less well when organizations are facing complex, unknowable change that may require those involved to discuss the current situation and possible futures at greater length before deciding on one approach.

For example, we worked with one organization recently which, on receiving a directive from the CEO to ‘go global’, immediately set up four tightly defined projects to address the issue of becoming a global organization. These were labelled ‘global communication’, ‘global values’, ‘global leadership’ and ‘global balanced scorecard’. While on the surface this seems a sensible and structured approach, there was no upfront opportunity for people to build any awareness of current issues, or to talk and think more widely about what needed to change to support this directive. Predictably, the projects ran aground in the ‘action’ stage due to confusion about goals and dwindling motivation within the project teams.

Kotter, eight steps: machine, political, organism

Kotter’s (1995) ‘eight steps to transforming your organization’ goes a little further than the basic machine metaphor. Kotter’s eight-step model derives from analysis of his consulting practice with 100 different organizations going through change. His research highlighted eight key lessons, and he converted these into a useful eight-step model. The model addresses some of the power issues in making change happen, highlights the importance of a ‘felt need’ for change in the organization, and emphasizes the need to communicate the vision and keep communication levels extremely high throughout the process (see box).

KOTTER’S EIGHT-STEP MODEL 1. Establish a sense of urgency. Discussing today’s competitive realities, looking at potential future

scenarios. Increasing the ‘felt-need’ for change. 2. Form a powerful guiding coalition. Assembling a powerful group of people who can work well together. 3. Create a vision. Building a vision to guide the change effort together with strategies for achieving this. 4. Communicate the vision. Kotter emphasizes the need to communicate at least 10 times the amount you

expect to have to communicate. The vision and accompanying strategies and new behaviours need to

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be communicated in a variety of different ways. The guiding coalition should be the first to role model new behaviours.

5. Empower others to act on the vision. This step includes getting rid of obstacles to change such as unhelpful structures or systems. Allow people to experiment.

6. Plan for and create short-term wins. Look for and advertise short-term visible improvements. Plan these in and reward people publicly for improvements.

7. Consolidate improvements and produce still more change. Promote and reward those able to promote and work towards the vision. Energize the process of change with new projects, resources, change agents.

8. Institutionalize new approaches. Ensure that everyone understands that the new behaviours lead to corporate success.

Source: Kotter (1995)

Our view

This eight-step model is one that appeals to many managers with whom we have worked. However, what it appears to encourage is an early burst of energy, followed by delegation and distance. The eight steps do not really emphasize the need for managers to follow through with as much energy on Steps 7 and 8 as was necessary at the start. Kotter peaks early, using forceful concepts such as ‘urgency’, ‘power’ and ‘vision’. Then after Step 5, words like ‘plan’, ‘consolidate’ and ‘institutionalize’ seem to imply a rather straightforward process that can be managed by others lower down the hierarchy. In our experience the change process is challenging, exciting and difficult all the way through.

When we work as change consultants, we use our own model of organizational change (see Figure 3.3), which is based on our experiences of change, but has close parallels with Kotter’s eight steps. We prefer to model the change process as a continuous cycle rather than as a linear progression, and in our consultancy work we emphasize the importance of management attention through all phases of the process.

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Figure 3.3 Cycle of change Source: Cameron Change Consultancy Ltd

STOP AND THINK!

Q 3.4 Reflect on an organizational change in which you were involved. How much planning was done at the start? What contribution did this make to the success or otherwise of the change?

Beckhard and Harris, change formula: organism

Figure 3.4 Beckhard’s formula

Beckhard and Harris (1987) developed their change formula from some original work by Gleicher (1969). The change formula is a concise way of capturing the process of change and identifying the factors that need to be strongly in place for change to happen. Beckhard and Harris say:

Factors A, B, and D must outweigh the perceived costs [X] for the change to occur. If any person or group whose commitment is needed is not sufficiently dissatisfied with the present state of affairs [A], eager to achieve the proposed end state [B] and convinced of the feasibility of the change [D], then the cost [X] of changing is too high, and that person will resist the change.

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… resistance is normal and to be expected in any change effort. Resistance to change takes many forms; change managers need to analyze the type of resistance in order to work with it, reduce it, and secure the need for commitment from the resistant party.

The formula is sometimes written (A × B × D) > X. This adds something useful to the original formula. The multiplication implies that if any one factor is zero or near zero, the product will also be zero or near zero and the resistance to change will not be overcome. This means that if the vision is not clear, or dissatisfaction with the current state is not felt, or the plan is obscure, the likelihood of change is severely reduced. These factors (A, B, D) do not compensate for each other if one is low. All factors need to have weight.

This model comes from the organism metaphor of organizations, although it has been adopted by those working with a planned change approach to target management effort. Beckhard and Harris emphasized the need to design interventions that allow these three factors to surface in the organization.

Our view

This change formula is deceptively simple but extremely useful. It can be brought into play at any point in a change process to analyse how things are going. When the formula is shared with all parties involved in the change, it helps to illuminate what various parties need to do to make progress. This can highlight several of the following problem areas:

• staff are not experiencing dissatisfaction with the status quo; • the proposed end state has not been clearly communicated to key people; • the proposed end state is not desirable to the change implementers; • the tasks being given to those implementing the change are too complicated or ill-defined.

We have noticed that depending on the metaphor in use, distinct differences in approach result from using this formula as a starting point. For instance, one public sector organization successfully used this formula to inform a highly consultative approach to organizational change. The vision was built and shared at a large-scale event involving hundreds of people. Dissatisfaction was captured using an employee survey that

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