Involving people in change

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Involving people in change

• Demystification of leadership and change
  management
• Getting to know what it is that we already know
  about change

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(No Transcript)
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Complex
Complicated
Simple
From - Plsek, P. Complexity, culture and large
systems change presentation
Source Brenda Zimmerman, PhD
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Questions? (after Chapman, 2004)

• Are we spending too much time trying to apply
  complicated solutions to complex problems?
• What approach would we adopt if we accepted that
  systems cannot be controlled nor its behaviour
  predicted?
• What might we need to do differently?

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Questions? (after Chapman, 2004)

• How do we get to know what other perspectives
  there are on this issue and how do we understand
  them?
• How can we learn what is most effective here for
  ourselves? How would we know?
• What relationships are key to moving forward and
  how can we nurture them?

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Build collective understanding of what working in
complex systems really means

• Small changes can have big effects
• ..and big changes very little effect
• Emergence- the whole is greater than the sum of
  the parts
• tolerance of uncertainty and flexibility
• Embracing the futility of control
• Avoiding reliance on push and exhortation

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The problem of Big Planning

• Long term planning and the rigid structures,
  precise task definitions and elaborate rules that
  often accompany it, may be positively dangerous,
  fixing an organisation in pursuit of a
  particular vision when an uncertain world
  requires flexible responses.
• Hudson, 2006
• May need holding frameworks for relevant
  subsystems to keep direction and coherence

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Policy output in a complex world

• Should be as non-prescriptive about means as
  possible a minimalist specification that
• establishes the direction of the change required
• sets boundaries that may not be crossed by any
  implementation strategy
• allocates resources but without specifying how
  they must be deployed, and for a sufficiently
  long period for a novel approach to be explored
• grants permissions explicitly specifies the
  areas of discretion in which localities can
  exercise innovation and choice.
• Chapman, 2004 (cited in Hudson)

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Leonardo da Vinci once said..

• Those who take for their standard anyone but
  nature- the mistress of all masters- weary
  themselves in vain

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As Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana puts it

• Every movement is being inhibited as it occurs.
  This is natures way. We can either work with it
  or against it
• (Senge et al, 1999, p.10).

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The pointlessness of controlfrom Jenny Rogers
Influencing Skills

• You cant force people to work effectively on
  something they disagree with.
• Organisations are so complex and subject to so
  many diverse influences that it is pointless
  trying to control them.
• Distance from most senior to most junior makes it
  unlikely that control can be exercised over that
  stretch
• Much control is unnecessary -where there is
  openess and willingness to give feedback
• Control reduces risk taking- a necessary
  precondition for the innovation on which
  organisations depend
• Its exhausting and your time can be better spent!

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Limits due to light, insects, pollution
Limits of water, nutrients, space, warmth
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What implications of more ecological thinking?

• Those responsible for leading change should
  particularly understand and focus on those
  limiting processes that slow or stop change, as
  well as the reinforcing growth processes that
  promote it.
• Push and exhortation is not enough.
• Change needs to happen bottom-up but the right
  conditions need to be created.

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Working with complexity values

• Multiple perspectives
• Focussing on HOW you do things not just what you
  do and the output/outcome.
• Multiple approaches that make effective use of
  experience, experimentation, freedom to innovate
  and working at the edge of knowledge and
  experience.

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• on the whole, although I have in a sense failed
  in everything I set out to achieve, I do believe
  that history will not blame me for that and I
  dont regard my public life as a failure.

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• ..Success is the ability to go from one failure
  to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
• Winston S Churchill

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Stacey, R.D. 1996, Complexity and Creativity in
Organisations. San Francisco Berret-Kohler.
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Life in the zones- Stacey (1996)

• stable zone risks ossification
• Unstable zone of chaos risks disintegration
• Living at the edge of chaos is characterised by
  spontaneous processes of self-organisation and
  innovative patterns.

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Working with complexity values

• Allowing solutions to emerge by
• Encouraging rich interaction, removing barriers
  and oppressive controls
• giving space and time,
• not overspecifying means
• focussing bottom-up rather than top down

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Cultivation as a metaphor for improvement
Let a thousand flowers bloom offers an apt
metaphor for innovation and change. Innovations,
like flowers, start from tiny seeds and have to
be nurtured carefully until they blossom then
their essence has to be carried elsewhere for the
flowers to spread They can grow wild, springing
up weed-like despite unfavourable circumstances,
but they can also be cultivated, blossoming under
favourable conditions. If we understand what
makes innovations grow the microprocesses by
which they unfold we can see why some
macro-conditions are better for their
cultivation. Rosabeth Kanter When a thousand
flowers bloom structural, collective and social
conditions for innovation in organisation,
(1988)
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What implications of more ecological thinking?

• A belief in hero-leaders inhibits the development
  of leadership capacity within the organisation.
• Teamwork is about building that capacity
• Leadership and management is needed to build
  effective teams.

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Bensons inter-organisational approach

• describes eight components that together
  constitute a holistic perspective on any
  specific problem or domain
• proposes that these components are inter-related
  changes in one will have effects upon the others.

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Dimensions of Bensons inter-organisational
network approach as captured by Hudson, 2006