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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Positive Psychology and Change explores how areas of positive psychology such as strengths, flow, and psychological capital can be applied to the everyday challenges of leading a dynamic and adaptive work community, and how collaborative group approaches to transformational change can be combined with a positive mindset to maintain optimism and motivation in an unpredictable working environment.
- Articulates a unique vision for organizational leadership in the 21st century that combines positive psychology, Appreciative Inquiry (AI), and collaborative group technologies
- Focuses on four specific co-creative approaches (Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, World Café and SimuReal) and the ways in which they surpass traditional methods for organizational change
- Explains the latest theory, research, and practice, and translates it into concrete, actionable ideas for meeting the day-to-day challenges of effective and adaptive leadership and management
- Includes learning features such as boxed text, short case studies, stories, and cartoons
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Seitenzahl: 445
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
About the Author
Foreword by David L. Cooperrider
What Will the Future of Organization Development and Change Look Like?
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 The Legacy of Twentieth-Century Ideas about Organizational Change
Introduction
A Changing World
The Roots of Many Change Models
Legacy Thinking about Organizational Change
The Legacy Beliefs of Lewin and Taylor in Our Understanding of Organizational Change
Conclusion
2 The Challenge of Leadership
Introduction
Should Decisiveness Be the Priority in Leaders?
The Need to Make a Difference
What Does Shifting the Organizational Metaphor Mean for Leaders?
New Definition of Leadership
Doing Leadership Differently
Characteristics of a New Leadership Style
Conclusion
3 Helping People Engage Positively with Imposed Change
Introduction
Typical Experience of Imposed Change
Unintended Consequences of Imposed Change
Understanding the Psychological Impact of Imposed Change on People
Accessing Psychological Resources to Increase Efficacy and Resilience
Conclusion
4 A Different Approach to Organizations and Change
Introduction
Key Factors that Create Living Human System Learning and Change
Distinctive Features of Co-creative Approaches to Change
Principles of Practice for Achieving Change in Living Human Systems
Conclusion
5 Using Positive Psychology to Achieve Change at the Team and Individual Level
Introduction
Principles
Positive and Appreciative Practices
Conclusion
6 Appreciative Inquiry
Introduction
Process
Purpose
Recommended Use
Key Ideas
Critical Success Factors
Key Skills
Origins of the Methodology
When to Use and Counter-indications
Conclusion
7 World Café
Introduction
The Process
Purpose
Recommended Use
Key Ideas
Critical Success Factors
Key Skills
Origins of the Methodology
Conclusion
8 Open Space
Introduction
Purpose
The Process
Recommended Use
Key Ideas
Critical Success Factors
Key Skills
Origins of the Methodology
Conclusion
9 Simu-Real
Introduction
Purpose
The Process
Recommended Use
Key Ideas
Critical Success Factors
Key Skills
Origins of the Methodology
Long-Term Effects
When to Use and When Not to
Conclusion
10 Pulling It All Together
Introduction
Rise of Planned Change Approaches
Co-creative Approaches to Change
Features of Co-created Change
Linking Theory, Research, and Practice
Time for Something Different
Bringing Emergent Change Insights to Planned Change Projects
POSITIVE: The Whole Strengths Spectrum Approach to Change
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 01
Table 1.1 How the world has changed.
List of Illustrations
Chapter 06
Figure 6.1 The 5D model.
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 How it all holds together.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Positive Psychology and Change
How Leadership, Collaboration, and Appreciative Inquiry Create Transformational Results
Sarah Lewis
This edition first published 2016© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
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Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data applied for
HB ISBN: 9781118788844
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Getty/klublu
To Jem, Jordan, and Rhia.who enrich my life beyond measure
About the Author
Sarah Lewis is a chartered psychologist, an Associated Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and a founder and Principal Member of the Association of Business Psychologists. She holds a master’s degree in occupational and organizational psychology, attained with distinction, and a certificate in systemic consultation. She is a specialist Appreciative Inquiry practitioner and an expert at facilitating large group events.
She is the managing director of Appreciating Change and is an experienced organizational consultant and facilitator who has been actively involved in helping people and organizations change their behavior for over 25 years. Her clients include local government, central government, not-for-profit organizations, and private sector clients, particularly in the manufacturing, financial, and educational sectors.
When positive psychology burst onto the scene, Sarah quickly realized that work in this area both chimed with her practice and offered robust theoretical support to Appreciative Inquiry as an approach to organizational change. She integrates these two approaches in her work and is delighted to be able to extend, explore, and share this connection in this book.
Sarah has lectured at postgraduate level and continues to be a regular conference presenter in the United Kingdom and internationally. She writes regularly for publication, is the lead author of Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management: Using AI to Facilitate Organizational Development (2007), and is author of Positive Psychology at Work, published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2011.
Sarah’s work can be viewed on her website (www.acukltd.com) and she can be contacted on ++ 44 (0)7973 782715 or by emailing [email protected]
Foreword by David L. Cooperrider
What Will the Future of Organization Development and Change Look Like?
The future is here—in this book.
Beginning in the 1980’s one could sense it, that is, the urge to create a positive revolution in change. First there were theoretical and conceptual calls questioning the inherently awkward logic—or illogic—of wanting to rally and “inspire” people to change by focusing the field’s most powerful deficit-analytic tools on a person or system’s weaknesses, dysfunctions, and root causes of failure? Really?1
Remember, for example, the era in Organization Development (OD) of sophisticated and statistically refined low morale surveys: first would come the documentation on a scale of 1-7 of morale among employees, and then the cascading feedback, endless meetings, and subsequent interventions designed to remove the root causes of usually the lowest levels of morale. It was like attempting to remedy a dark room by focusing on darkness.2
Well it never, ever worked to inspire and motivate in the sense that people clearly learned tons about the causes of low morale—because that’s what the diagnostic process set out to document—but the analysis or search rarely if ever surfaced any kind of substantive (and inspiring) new knowledge, for example, about surprising “hot teams” or extraordinary times of “enterprise flourishing” or times when people were so turned on and called by a powerful purpose greater than themselves that they would contribute far beyond their job descriptions. Even if those exceptional moments were fleeting and rare, it still never occurred to the field of OD and change management that layered into the narratives of those positive deviations were the most natural and most consistently powerful cognitive, positive emotional, imaginative, and supercooperative seeds of human system change available. If there were debilitating patterns of problematic dysfunctions and breakdowns in an organization, of what possible use could it possibly be to go off on a tangential search of times of peak performance, positive deviance, or a deep dive analysis into the positive core of all past, present and future capacity in a system? It was as if this material—this universe of strengths and understanding of history as positive possibility—was irrelevant and of little use for human system development, change, and elevationary transformation.
Paradigms are like that. They are stubborn. They can blind us. Perhaps that's why we still thrill to it, that is, Einstein’s often-quoted words when he said:
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. We must learn to see the world anew.”
—Albert Einstein
Sarah Lewis, in this volume, not only helps leaders and managers, change agents, and even parents and coaches, to see the world anew but she helps us to see change anew—in and through a vibrant and vast integration of the new OD. The new OD, as it is illuminated here, is one that serves systemically to bring out the best version of a person or organization most naturally, easily, and consistently and yes, all of this, in the service of pressing, totally real, and complex change. Years ago Sarah sighted it all, a sea change—from the earliest writings in Appreciative Inquiry (AI) to the strengths revolution in management, and also from the new sciences of complexity and dialogic construction to the positive psychology of human flourishing—and then she began to mix and resonate all of it like a maestro. The result: Sarah Lewis brings together the strongest streams of an entire revolution into a one integral and remarkable portrait of the new OD—what it is, how to do it, and why its so powerful – better than any other evidence-based book I’ve seen.
The signature of this volume rests upon Sarah’s rich and real storytelling from the frontline of organizational and leadership life, and how she draws us into both the evidence based research findings—for example what good are positive emotions such as hope, inspiration, and the joy of design-thinking and co-creation—while brilliantly illustrating practices, principles, and tools you can use. And the insight that I will never forget from this book is that people actually love change. They don’t resist change. Think of the infant in the crib and, if you were lucky enough to be there and see it, think about what you saw the moment the infant took hold of the railing for the very first time, lifting his or her own little body to an upright position all at once. What you likely saw was a beaming smile, a sparkle in the eyes, and the squealing sound of delight. Human beings love change—for example in rites and rituals of moving from childhood to adulthood, when being elevated to a new job, or in pushing oneself into some never before used maneuver while kayaking in wild whitewater—in these situations resistance to change is not the hallmark.
People don't resist change. They resist being changed—always have and always will—until when? Its that special moment where being changed is transformed into being charged, being commissioned, being called authentically into co-creation. Sarah’s call, complete with how to do it, is unmistakable.
What this book is about is creating the leaderful company, in ways that serve to heal “the scar tissues” or eras past—where people were treated as machines; where what managers mostly attended to was breakdown and disrepair; and where change was a push-and-imposed type, not a co-created positive emotional attractor where people will unmistakably see and experience their signature in it.
I’ve used every method in this book in my own work with organizations, communities, cities, whole industries, and UN level world summits.3 And what’s been my experience? In a word: it’s all about the power of hope.4 My hope about what we are capable as human beings has gone up and up, every time for example that we’ve used the World Café method of dialogue, or the life-centric and strengths-inspired philosophy of Appreciative Inquiry, or have tapped into the magic of macro—where we do planning, strength-finding, and designing in whole system configurations of strengths in groups of 300 or more internal and external stakeholders. Sound impossible? Read this wonderful book carefully.
What serves to make it all possible are the conditions that bring out the best in human systems. It’s when we bring together expertise and emergence; it’s when we bring together positive discovery mindsets and design-prototyping; it’s when curiosity velocity and the search for the true, the good, the better and the possible is at least a 5:1 ratio over dogmatic answers; and it’s when we actually love bringing people out of silos, separations, and stereotypes into moments of supercooperation.
Two comments from CEO’s stand out in my memory bank as I’ve approached change just as Sarah illuminates here. The first, from a company in the Netherlands, is “What was all the fuss about” said the CEO, “we’ve got such good people here why were we so afraid?” and then the second was a President of a major telecommunications company who used the appreciative methodologies and said, “This has implications for every aspect of our business, everything we do as a company (long pause)… but I only wish now I’d heard of these ideas when I was raising my children.”
This book is a doorway into generative, strengths-inspired and solutions-focused change. It gives leaders the gift of new eyes and teaches how humility might just be a leaders greatest strength. It brings front and center the joy of high quality connections—and the sustainable effectiveness of it all—back into the field organization development. And it reminds us all that we can create conditions—the evidence base is there—to confirm our deepest conviction: that human beings are good.
And this book shares the wisdom into why and when this is nearly always true: it’s when we bring the best versions of ourselves, our communities, and our organizations to the task of co-creating our better future. As for the how? That too is simple: just start turning the pages of this book!
David L. Cooperrider, PhD
Honorary Chair, The David L. Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry
Stiller School of Business Champlain College
Fairmount Santrol Professor of Appreciative Inquiry
Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University
David L. Cooperrider
David is the Fairmount | David L. Cooperrider Professor of Appreciative Inquiry at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University where he is faculty chair of the Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit and Co-director of the Strategy Innovation Lab. David is best known for his original theory on Appreciative Inquiry (“Ai”) with his mentor Suresh Srivastva, and has served as advisor to senior executives in business and societal leadership roles, including projects with five Presidents and Nobel Laureates such as William Jefferson Clinton, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Kofi Annan and others. David has served as strategic advisor to a wide variety of organizations including Apple, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson, the Boeing Corporation, National Grid, Smuckers, Sloan-Kettering, Fairmount Minerals, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, McKinsey, Parker Hannifin, Sherwin Williams, Dealer Tire, Wal-Mart as well as American Red Cross, American Hospital Association, Cleveland Clinic, and United Way. The United Nations called on the Appreciative Inquiry large group method of planning to grow the UN Global Compact to over 8,000 of the world’s largest corporations advancing the global goals: eradicating extreme poverty through business and creating a bright green energy future.
David has published over 20 books and authored over 100 articles and book chapters and served as editor of both the Journal of Corporate Citizenship with Ron Fry and the current research series for Advances for Appreciative Inquiry, with Michel Avital. In 2010 David was awarded the Peter F. Drucker Distinguished Fellow by the Drucker School of Management—a designation recognizing his contribution to management thought. His books include Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change (with Diana Whitney); The Organization Dimensions of Global Change (with Jane Dutton); Organizational Courage and Executive Wisdom (with Suresh Srivastva) and the 4-volume research series Advances in Appreciative Inquiry. In 2010 David was awarded the Peter F. Drucker Distinguished Fellow by the Drucker School of Management—a designation recognizing his contribution to management thought.
Most recently, Champlain College, with the support Bob Stiller, the Founder and former Ceo of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, honored David with an academic center in his name. It is called the David L. Cooperrider for Appreciative Inquiry. For the center’s dedication Marty Seligman wrote: “David Cooperrider is a giant: a giant of discovery, a giant of dissemination, and a giant of generosity” while Harvard’s Jane Nelson at the Kennedy School of Leadership said: “David Cooperrider is one of the outstanding scholar-practitioners of our generation.”
1
Cooperrider, D. L., & Srivastva, S. (1987). Appreciative inquiry in organizational life. In
Research in Organization Development and Change
, Pasmore, W., Woodman, R. (Eds.), (Vol.1). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
2
For the first articulation of
Appreciative Inquiry: Toward an Applied Science of Social Innovation
, see the Cooperrider Ph.D dissertation defended in 1985. Download the pdf:
http://www.davidcooperrider.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Dissertation-Cooperriders-1985.pdf
www.david.cooperrider.com
search for the blog post “Rare Admiration” June 18, 2013.
3
Cooperrider, D. 2012. The Concentration Effect of Strengths,
Organizational Dynamics
, Vol. 42, No. 2, April-May 2012, p. 21–32.
4
Cooperrider, D. (2013) A Contemporary Commentary on Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life. In Cooperrider, D.L
et al
. (2013)
Organizational Generativity: The Appreciative Inquiry Summit and a Scholarship of Transformation
. Volume #4 in
Advances in Appreciative Inquiry
. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Preface
When meeting an organization interested in commissioning some work, an interesting question to pose is, “Why this now? Why is the now the moment at which you have decided to invest time and money in this?” I thought I might ask the same question to shape this preface. Why this book now?
I have been a psychologist for 30 years, for 10 years as a social worker and for 20 years as an organizational consultant, and it’s all about change. Life is about change. We are expert at change, we are the most adaptable species on the planet and yet it causes endless problems and challenges in organizational life. Many books have been written about how to successfully change things in organizations. Many of them are very good. Fewer have really called on the psychology of people and groups to explain why the plans don’t always work out quite as, well, planned, or to explain how our very humanness is our greatest asset when it comes to working together to influence our own futures.
I am moved to put the time and effort into writing this book now because I believe that positive psychology, combined with co-creative participatory approaches to change such as Appreciative Inquiry, offers very effective ways of helping organizations and people to change. Having said that, all change initiatives take place in a context, and that context is all-important in influencing how any change activity is interpreted by those involved. So this book doesn’t present a “recipe” for achieving more successful change as many change books do. It is more about the processes that can help with change. It is about how the context and history of an organization affect how the announcement of change initiatives is experienced. It is about working with big action events and tiny micro-moments to help achieve change. It is about applying some of the latest thinking and practice from positive psychology and dialogue-based organizational development to the age-old organizational challenges of performance, culture, and working practices to make change as positive an experience as possible for all involved.
I am not an academic. I am not affiliated to a university. I don’t do original research. Instead, I try to put the work of others to the test, in practice, in the field. A book like this is an attempt to create a mosaic drawn from the best of the brilliant work of others. It is a labour of love, intended as homage to those who painstakingly do the research or generously spell out their practice in detail. The researching and writing of this book was challenging, rewarding, engrossing, thought-provoking, and fun. I hope you find reading it to be a similar experience.
I have written two previous books about positive psychology and Appreciative Inquiry. I have tried on the whole not to repeat myself here. I have tried to balance the possible frustration of those for whom some concepts are new and are not fully explored here against the possible sense of déjà vu for those who came across these ideas in depth in previous books. I wanted to take the opportunity to more fully explain concepts that didn’t make it into the last book. My intention is that the books stand alone, yet are complementary.
This is a book of two halves. The first five chapters are focused on ideas, concepts, and theory in positive psychology and organizational development. The second half of the book gives much practical guidance, although you will notice a high degree of overlap. This means that sometimes practices get mentioned before they are explained in full; for example, Appreciative Inquiry is explained fully in Chapter 6, and yet mentioned in probably every chapter.
Along with the core content are some added extras. A highlight of the book is my husband’s kindly donated cartoons to “lighten things up a bit.” They make me laugh, which is always good for the soul, and I hope they do you too. I have included stories from my personal experience to try to illuminate the practices I am talking about. I hope they also break up the density of the text from time to time. Your privilege as a reader is to skip those bits that don’t “do it for you.” I encourage you to do so.
As ever, choices have to be made when putting a book together. The most challenging, I find, is that of referencing. I know that references in a text can trip up those not used to them, although I assure you that with a little practice your eye will learn to gloss over them and you will hardly notice them. On the other hand, I get frustrated if a reference isn’t readily available when I want it. I like to know on what basis an assertion is being made. I want a reference to hand, not buried in a footnote linked by a miniscule number somewhere in the text, nor at the end of the chapter that I have to flick back and forth to locate, but in the text right next to the relevant information and easily accessible in a combined reference section at the back of the book. So that’s what I have provided for you.
I wrote in the preface to the last book, “I can only hope that you buy this pristine volume and rapidly deface it with underlining, exclamation marks, question marks, comments, dog ears and coffee stains. Such, to me, are the signs of a useful book.” Some people were kind enough to contact me to tell me just how coffee bespattered their book had become. I was thrilled, and I can’t better this as my wish to you.
Acknowledgements
A book doesn’t come out of thin air. The invitation to write this book came from Darren Reed and Karen Shield of Wiley-Blackwell following the modest success of the first book we produced together. I was delighted to oblige. It has taken a year longer than we originally hoped, and their response when I had to divert my attention to various family matters was so graciously supportive that I truly felt I could take the time it took.
This book is built on the work of so many other people: people I’ve read, people I’ve talked to, and people I’ve worked with. I have made every effort to acknowledge the original researchers and practitioners whose work I have called upon. On the other hand, I have granted my clients the cloak of anonymity in an attempt to protect their reputation, if not my own, and so trust that they are only recognizable to themselves. That they allow me and people like me to come into their organizations and workplaces and “do creative things” with their people is a wonderful privilege and I am eternally grateful to them all. Practitioners, like trainee doctors, have to start somewhere, and so even further back in the midst of time are all my earliest clients from whom I learnt so much about the art of engaging productively with organizations. I thank them all.
On a more practical level, at the behest of the publisher, this time I have written every word of this text myself, quotes excluded. It’s a lot of words! Jem Smith, my eldest son, has been much involved of late, spotting the convoluted sentences and esoteric modes of expression in a last-ditch attempt to improve its reader-friendliness. He is also helping with assembling the references and spotting those typos that fool the spellchecker. In addition, he kindly lets me know about any boring bits so I can have another go at making them more interesting. He has done all within his power to ensure that you find this a readable read; thus liability for any sleep-inducing sections and other errors that have slipped through are to be laid at my door alone. I am truly grateful for his help.
In turn our efforts have been ably supported by Giles Flitney, whose attention to detail as copy-editor was exemplary: no fudge of referencing or “near enough is good enough” laziness of expression got past his eagle eyes and sharp brain. To Giles must go the credit for clearing the way of the last stumbles and trip-ups so that the meaning could flow freely through the text.
And last but not least, I want to thank my husband, Stewart Smith, who, ploughing through text about a world to which he is not connected except through me, managed to spot a variety of opportunities for a joke or a laugh that he could shape into a cartoon. Of itself this book isn’t a bundle of laughs; his ability to spot such opportunities as arise is a true talent. We are all extremely grateful for the light relief thus provided.
1The Legacy of Twentieth-Century Ideas about Organizational Change
Picture the scene. I’m watching Boardwalk Empire on DVD with someone who came of age well into the twenty-first century. We get to the scene where a young “gofer” is asked his name by another gofer. He replies, “Al, Al Capone.” My young friend says, “Wasn’t he a real person?” I don’t answer immediately, pausing while I wait for a suitable gap in the dialogue. She answers her own question: “Yes he was.” She reads a few sentences about Al Capone from her iPhone. She then asks, “Are any of the other characters real?” “I don’t know,” I say. A slight pause and then, “What’s Nucky’s proper name?” “Enoch.” She looks up “Enoch Thompson” on the phone. “Oh yes, he’s real too.” Throughout our programme-watching her phone whistles at her intermittently, and each time she attends for maybe 30 seconds, smiling, pouting, texting.
There is nothing new in this account, and everything. My dinosaur ways, such as watching a DVD rather than viewing content direct from the internet, my assumption that all relevant information is present in the vision and sound on the screen, my distance from my electronic “work” devices (it is the weekend, my mobile phone is in a bag somewhere, undoubtedly still on silent from the last meeting on Friday), all mark me out as essentially from the pre-digital age. My young friend engages with the world differently. Her phone lives in her hand. She is a cyber-person at one with the internet. It is always on and so is she. Any curiosity, mild or strong, can be instantly gratified. When she cooks a meal, before we are allowed to eat it a picture must be sent to friends. Arrangements with friends are so fluid as to be at times indiscernible to the naked eye as commitments. Fraught and loaded conversations with the boyfriend about “the state of the relationship” are conducted in 20-word text bites. She truly lives in a different world to me.
Introduction
My young friend and her colleagues are the inhabitants and creators of future, as yet unrealized, organizations. These organizations need to be fit for the changing world. At present we are in a state of transition from the solid certainties of the latter half of the twentieth century (the programme is shown once, at 9.00 p.m. on BBC1 – make it or miss it) to the increasing fluidity of the twenty-first century (watch it now, watch it later, on the TV, on a tablet, legally or illegally – whatever, whenever). This isn’t only the case in the media world; it can be argued that the organizational development world is in a similar state of flux.
Many of the organizational development approaches and techniques that are in common use in organizations today were developed in the1940s and 1950s. Most of the theorists were male, European and living in America. Their ideas are located in a specific time and context. Their ideas and theories are not timeless truths about organizations and organizational life; rather they are a product of, and are suited to, their time and context. This chapter examines the key features of these organizational development models and their influence on current beliefs about how to produce organizational change. First though, a reminder of how much the world has changed since the 1940s.
A Changing World
The jury is still out on whether the recession of the last six years (as experienced by most of the Western world at least), is a temporary glitch in the upward path of increasing productivity and affluence, or the dawning of a new economic world order. What it has brought into sharp unavoidable focus is the interconnectedness of the world, and the complexity of that interconnectedness. Michael Lewis’s books The Big Short (2010) and Boomerang (2011) spell out in words of few syllables how the US property and financial markets came crashing down, bursting property bubbles all over Western Europe, and bringing other markets down with them. One of the many insights to be drawn from this calamitous tale is that the level of complexity developed in the money market obscured the connective links between actions. One of the few who seemed to understand something of this before the event is Nassim Taleb, who, in his book The Black Swan (2008) (a somewhat more challenging read than Michael Lewis, and not for the faint hearted), essentially says that the real threat isn’t what can be predicted, precisely because we can prepare for that; it is what can’t be predicted. And his argument essentially is that the degree of fundamental unpredictability, for organizations, is growing partly because of the increasing level of complexity and interconnectivity of the world at large.
Unpredictability and complexity create challenges for change initiatives. When there is a high degree of unpredictability and complexity it becomes more obvious that not all the variables relevant to a situation can be known. Not all the likely consequences of actions can be predicted in their entirety, and the effects of our actions can’t be bounded. Cheung-Judge and Holbeche note that “overall the challenges for leaders relate to dealing with the complexity, speed and low predictability of today’s competitive landscape” (2011, p. 283). And yet we all, leaders and consultants, frequently act in the organizational change context as if we can control all the variables and predict all the consequences of our actions. A contributing factor to this misplaced sense of omniscience is that many of our change theories and models are predicated on the idea that organizational change is predictable and controllable. To understand this, we need to recognize that many of them are the direct descendants of ideas developed over 60 years ago, when the world was a very different place.
The Roots of Many Change Models
In the 1940s Europe was busy tearing itself apart in the second large-scale conflict of the century. It managed to drag in most of the rest of the world through alliance and empire as the war ranged over large parts of the globe. Every continent (barring the South Pole) and almost every country was involved. The German Nazi party gave itself the mission of purifying the German race by removing various Nazi-defined undesirable or foreign elements that lived among them. This desire to eradicate perceived threat was focused mainly on the large German and later Polish and other annexed countries’ Jewish populations, but it was also aimed at homosexual men, Gypsies, and the mentally deficient. As the reality of the Nazi ambition became apparent, many under threat sought to leave Europe. America was a place of sanctuary before and during the war for those under threat of death, particularly the European Jewish population.
The genocidal intent of the Nazis and the industrialization of death through the extermination camps were a horrific and terrifying new reality in the world of human possibility. After the war the phrase “never again” encapsulated the ambition of many to understand and prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. Many people devoted their remaining lives to trying to understand how it was possible for people to persuade themselves that such ambition and activity was not only acceptable but desirable and to be actively pursued. For some this expressed itself in an interest in understanding group dynamics. Organizations are a particular expression of social grouping. One German American Jewish refugee in particular wanted to understand how what had happened had happened, and more particularly, how to prevent it happening again.
Kurt Lewin was an immigrant German Jewish psychologist who found employment at Cornell University and then MIT. An applied researcher, he was interested in achieving social change and he developed the research methodology known as action research as a way of creating practical and applicable knowledge. As part of his work and research, Lewin developed models to understand and effect organizational change which still reverberate in organizational thinking. His three-step model of organizational change (1947), namely, unfreeze, change, freeze, is at the base of many more recent change models. This model understands organizations to exist in an essentially stable state, one that is periodically interrupted by short episodes of disruptive change. The use of the “frozen” image to describe the before and after state around the period of change suggests not so much stability as a deep stolidity, like a block of ice. This suggests that change is not something that might grow internally from within the organization, but rather something external that needs to be applied to organizations to encourage change, to create the necessary unfreezing of the present state to allow change to happen. Lewin also described these external forces as a force field, and advocated force field analysis.
He suggested that at any point a stable organizational state is held in place by a force field of restraining and driving forces (1947). The field is revealed through the creation of a vector analysis diagram of any particular context, identifying the pertinent forces. The restraining forces, things such as organizational norms, structure, and so on, he argued, hold the situation in place. Driving forces, such as managerial desire or the consequences of not changing, are those that push in the direction of the desired change. While they are in balance the situation is in stasis. To achieve change, he argued, one needs either to reduce the restraining forces or to increase the driving forces. He argued that the restraining forces offer comfort to people, being familiar and habitual. He argued that a measure of discomfort needs to be introduced to get people to move towards a new situation. In this we can see the origin of the idea of the need in change to “get people out of their comfort zone.” Similarly, when considering how to achieve change, the question frequently asked is, “So what are the driving forces for this change?” The force field model is one of analysis, suggesting that the total situation can be modelled and that all the forces for and against change can be identified. Integral to these ideas is the notion of resistance to change (1947, p. 13). As French and Bell explain it, “Identification and specification of the force field should be thorough and exhaustive so that a picture of why things are as they are becomes clear” (1999, p. 175). Some characteristics of old paradigm thinking are outlined in Box 1.1.
Box 1.1 Ten Indicators of Old Paradigm Thinking
How will we get buy-in?
How will we overcome resistance to change?
What are the driving forces for change?
We need to force people out of their comfort zone.
People don’t like change.
Share information on a “need to know” basis.
Just tell them what to do.
I’m just a hired hand, they’re head office.
I’m not paid to think.
Cascading communications.
Organizational development as an approach was built from these early foundations. Some of the early tools of organizational development, stemming directly from Lewin’s early work, include T-groups, action research and participative management. These ideas can be seen in their present form in such common organizational development practices as team development, various forms of action research including Appreciative Inquiry, and employee involvement in decision-making. His research into human and group behaviour during change, and insights expounded about people and change, remain sound and indeed are fundamental to some of the ideas discussed in this book. Unfortunately, his engineering-based approach to understanding organizations has proved to be a stronger legacy when it comes to approaches to organizational change. While they may have proved illuminating in the world of the 1950s, the context within which human organizations exist and function has fundamentally changed (see Table 1.1). This means that some of the assumptions evident in various change models based on the application of his basic thinking are open to challenge. Specifically, we might now question the appropriateness of the idea of periods of stability between those of change; the idea that the whole situation is somehow “knowable”; and the idea of planned change as being sufficiently fast, adaptable, and flexible to achieve sustainable organizational change.
Table 1.1 How the world has changed.
Twentieth century
Twenty-first century
National boundaries
Interconnected world
Jobs for life
Zero hours working
Data search
Data swamp
Fixed communication points
Portable communication points
Local competition
Global competition
Poorly permeable organizational boundaries
Highly permeable organizational boundaries
State-based world economy
Business-based world economy
Manageable rates of change
Unmanageable rates of change
Legacy Thinking about Organizational Change
In line with these ways of thinking about how organizations develop, change in organizations is often characterized as hard, painful, and unwelcome; a process frequently feared and resisted both by those implementing it and by those experiencing it. The most common explanation of the “emotional journey of change” is taken from a study of the bereavement patterns of those coming to terms with a loved one’s dying and death (Kubler-Ross, 1969). Two of the most common topics for managers or leaders contemplating making organizational changes are “how to sell the change” and “how to overcome resistance.” The need to identify and quickly manoeuvre out those who are deemed unable to “get on the bus” of change is a close third. This way of thinking encourages the belief that change is a huge drain on managerial energy as people are pushed through their resistance into new patterns of interacting and ways of working. Lewin’s three-step model of change, now over 70 years old, is behind many of our current approaches to change.
For instance, it encourages the idea that it is possible to “finish” the job of change, that is, that it is possible to arrive at the most “perfect” organizational form that won’t need any further attention. In this way, since hope springs eternal that this will be the last time this level of disruption will have to be experienced, change tends to arrive with a fanfare of announcements that it is “the answer.” In addition to solving current issues, it will revolutionize the work, the company, and your life. All this reinforces the “this time we’ve cracked it” attitude to change as a one-off solution to the problem of organizational design. Lewin was not the only one to apply an engineering eye to organizations, he was preceded by Taylor (1912). Between them they have created quite a legacy.
The Legacy Beliefs of Lewin and Taylor in Our Understanding of Organizational Change
1. Organizational life is essentially stable with necessary periodic episodes of disruptive change
This belief has particularly pernicious effects on how organizations approach change as it contains within it an understanding both that change is a discrete event and that it is an ongoing process. It is the former belief that encourages the idea that the many challenges of organizational design can be successfully resolved “once and for all,” while the later reality means that in the longer term every change initiative is doomed to failure. Small wonder that this second implication gets overlooked in the enthusiasm for solving the issues right here, right now. This characterization of change as an occasional necessary disruptive event encourages three frequently observed beliefs among managers. First, they regard change as a discrete event that only needs to be attended to periodically (and the rest of the time can be ignored). Second, they regard change as an interruption to the normal running of things (that therefore isn’t real work or their core work but rather a resented addition or distraction). Third, and this tends to be a more subtle, less overtly obvious belief, they frequently believe that the current necessity for disruptive change is an indication of some past failure to “get it right,” the blame frequently being laid at the door of the last big change effort.
In addition, this belief discourages innovation or adaptation. Once the dust has settled from the most recent “change” there is a tacit understanding that “that’s it” – problem solved. So what need for constant innovation? This is the best way; we can all breathe out and get back to work. However, over time the downsides of whatever the last solution was become apparent. As Senge said some time ago, “Today’s problems come from yesterday’s ‘solutions’” (1990, p. 57). Over time, the benefits of the current organizational form become less and less obvious, and the downsides more so, until at last there is a huge effort made to swing the pendulum to the other extreme, solving the current downsides, and yet also sowing the seeds for the next “readjustment” in a few years’ time.
2. There is a “right” answer to the challenge of organizational design
In essence there is no definitively correct answer to the challenge of organizational form and so all attempts predicated on the supposition of a right answer are doomed to fail. Indeed, in contrast, constant adaptation within an organization is healthy, as is a certain “untidiness.” For example, exceptions to the generally accepted or standard ways of working may add value for a time, while a complexity of organizational forms under one roof may aid local performance and create flexibility. These are valuable organizational assets that can be destroyed during “big bang” change when the focus on consistency and a drive for efficiency frequently militate against flexibility and adaptiveness.
3. Logic is the route to achieving change
Leaders and managers frequently hold an unarticulated image of the organization as a machine (Lewis, Passmore, & Cantore, 2007; Morgan, 1997), subject to the rules of logic. This leads them to believe that the way to solve organizational problems is to apply their powers of rational and logical thinking. Logic is a philosophical or mathematical discipline. However, few of us are trained philosophers or skilled mathematicians, and consequently, as many authors have shown (Kahneman, 2011), our “logic” is full of time- and energy-saving heuristics (that is, assumptions and shortcuts) and fallacies. In practical terms, this means that an appeal to “logic” to indicate the best solution to a challenge doesn’t necessarily act to unite all in agreement. Apart from the general human difficulty in actually being logical in the strict sense of the discipline, there is also the challenge that each person’s substitute, their idea of what “makes sense” or “seems logical,” is based on their personal understanding of the world. In general terms, we make sense of things differently depending on our context, history, current drives, and so on, meaning that what seems an eminently sensible, indeed the only logical course of action to me may well, equally logically, seem like madness to you. In other words, our own particular beliefs are likely to seem perfectly “logical” to us.
While logical thought is defined as being free of emotional contamination, we humans are constantly assailed and affected by emotion, which affects our judgement. Even if something is accepted as logical, our feelings about a situation might affect our ability to act on that logic. To take an extreme example, starving people in desperate situations have been known to eat the flesh of their dead companions. Perfectly logical, assuming it is accepted that the main goal is the preservation of life.
I don’t think you can argue the logic, but we are by no means all persuaded by it. Indeed, some in those desperate situations have refused to eat the flesh of their dead companions, so condemning themselves to death. And returning survivors rarely seem confident that all will understand and be persuaded by the logic of their decision. In an almost analogous organizational situation, an argument to cut cost by cutting back on staff may be perfectly logical, assuming the priority is to preserve the life of the organization, yet may still be anathema to some present, even though they can see the logic.
The point that is sometimes missed is that just because something is logically correct it doesn’t mean it is morally right. Organizational decisions, involving people, cannot be separated from moral decisions. In social situations, decisions based on “logic” are, a priori, no more valid than those based on values or beliefs. However, in many organizations logic trumps almost every other argument, and moral argument in particular is not always even allowed a seat at the table. When doing what is logical goes against our values, we can experience a sense of betrayal, of wrongness. Sometimes people find it hard to put their counter-argument to the “logic” into words, ending up with “I can’t explain; it just feels all wrong.” The experience of wrongness can be very visceral and embodied. Such feelings drive behaviour, frequently the behaviour that is labelled, harking back to Lewin, as “resistance” to change.
Psychological research in fact suggests that whatever we might declare to be the case, our choices in situations are rarely driven solely by logic; rather they are heavily influenced by emotion and values (Damasio, 2005). This suggests there isn’t a neutral logical argument that will ensure that all see the light of the need for the change; rather there are more and less powerful voices in organizational systems, the “logic” of the more powerful tending to hold sway.
4. There is no need to take account of what has gone before
These change models are based on beliefs of the organization as a mechanical entity, and this sense of change as an engineering problem can be traced back to Taylor (1912) and is present in Lewin’s work. For more on this see my earlier book (Lewis, Passmore, & Cantore, 2007). These models are frequently ahistorical and acontextual (Collins 1998). That is, they take little or no account of what has gone before, and they take no account of the “special circumstances” of the particular situation. Instead they are universal cures or panaceas. They can be applied anywhere, anytime, to any organization regardless of the particular organization’s history or current state. This is essentially the big bang understanding of change: life starts anew at this point. This makes them particularly attractive to new brooms, of whom more later in Chapter 2.
5. People patterns can be engineered without psychological or social impact
If people are considered part of the change at all, they are considered as parts of the machine that can be moved about to predictable effect. Productivity is not supposed to be affected. There is little or no understanding of the cognitive and social energy that goes into reconfiguring mental models to accommodate or adapt to the changes. There is little to no understanding of the energy needed to learn new behaviours, and to suppress or override old patterns and habits. As a general rule, there is very little awareness of the many and varied emotional impacts of change, including glee, envy, excitement, frustration, or relief, as well as despair or uncertainty.
