Facilitating Change, Our Only Task?

Introduction

I have decided to stop using the phrase change management.  There are two reasons for this.  First, I just don’t like the word, manage.  It rings of control, order and everything in its place—business as usual.  Well, we are living in a world where business as usual lasts about 5 minutes.  Second, I don’t think you can manage change.  You can guide it, you can resist it, you can deny it is happening but almost by definition you can’t manage change.  Real change is inherently chaotic and while you can do lots of things when chaos happens, managing it is not one of them.

I wrote this paper several years ago as four short articles for the newsletter of a voluntary career development organization in Brussels.  Since then I have continued to read in this field and feel that we are moving toward a much more profound understanding of change and how we facilitate it.  I would like to recommend two recent books that I think are fundamental to understanding the true nature of change and its facilitation.  The 9 Disciplines of a Facilitator, Leading Groups by Transforming Yourself by Jon and Maureen Jenkins explores the deeper realities of the facilitation task and the transformative nature of that task.  Theory U, Leading From the Future as it Emerges by Dr. C. Otto Scharmer of the Society for Organizational Learning works with Peter Senge and others to explore the deep transformation that change requires of individuals and thus of our institutions. However, nothing I have read since I wrote this has changed my original premise— A new paradigm of what an organization is all about is emerging and the obsolete one we have inherited from the 17th Century will disappear.  Our task, at least in part, is to facilitate that emergence.

Jim Campbell

As every blossom fades

As every blossom fades and all youth sinks into old age,

so every life’s design, each flower of wisdom, every good,

attains its prime and cannot last forever.

At life’s each call the heart must be prepared to take its leave

and to commence afresh courageously and with no hint of grief

submit itself to other, newer ties.

 magic dwells in each beginning and protecting us it tells us how to live.

High-purposed we must traverse realm on realm, cleaving to none as to a home.

The world of spirit wishes not to fetter us but raise us higher, further, step by step.

Scarce in some safe, accustomed sphere of life have we established house,

than we grow lax; He only who is ready to expand and journey forth can throw old habits off.

Maybe death’s hour too will send us out new-born toward undreamed of lands,

maybe life’s call to us will never find an end...

Courage my heart, take leave and fare thee well!

...Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1945)

What is going on?

Change management used to be taught separately from “regular management”.  Those were the days when you could look at organizations and distinguish between periods of relative calm and shorter bursts of rapid change.  This is no longer true.  It is now a cliché to say that the only constant is change itself. …Jean-François Manzoni, The Financial Times, 15 October 2001.

 In this first section we want to look at three factors that are fundamentally shaping the facilitation of change in our time.  These are: 1.-The age-old human response to change; 2.-The environment in which we are trying to manage change; 3.-Institutional responses to this environment.  If we are going to deal with change we need to begin by acknowledging these factors and the implications they hold for change facilitation.

The age-old human response to change On an individual level dealing with change is challenging because each person’s relationship to change has a deep psychological or, what some would call, spiritual dimension.  Most of us find this area difficult, if for no other reason than it is considered to be a private matter and not an appropriate topic for discussion in the “work” area of our life.  However, precisely because of the nature of people’s reaction, to change, this area must be considered when dealing with change.

Whether it is summarized in the ancient lament “Vanities of vanities, all is vanity” or Bob Dylan’s anthem of the sixties, “The times they are a changin”, human beings have always known that change is built into the very nature of life.  None of us are strangers to change and yet we, more often than not, find it painful.  Briefly, this has to do with our own contingency. What is the meaning of the fact that time passing means change and that change means the coming into being and the going out of being of all things?  We all seek security in our life and in doing so to somehow ensure the final meaning of our life—to escape from the passing away of our existence.  Change is always a threat to these efforts since it reminds us that neither our work nor our life is eternal.  Arthur Miller’s play, The Death of a Salesman, is a dramatic portrayal of what happens to a man when a series of profound changes hit his life and destroy that which gave meaning to his life and that which he thought ensured his eternity.  Given this reality it should come as no surprise that no one likes change and that we are all threatened to a greater or lesser degree by change in our life, work and world.

The environment in which we are trying to facilitate change

In the second place we find dealing with change difficult because in the last 200 years we have experienced a change in the nature of change.  The space-time continuum in which we experience change has shifted.  The spacial frame of change was once local or at most regional.  Alexander the Great marched from Greece to India but unless you were in his path his activity had little impact on you and your community.  Today, we interact on a global basis—economically, politically and culturally.  There seems to be nowhere that does not, sooner or later, show up on our global television screens.

The timeframe of change, once slow and intermittent, is today rapid and persistent.  Today, our lives are lived in “real time,” 24 hours a day.  There is no “down time” and very little time for reflection, interpretation and decision-making. As a local manager we do not have to wait six months to receive instructions (handwritten and delivered by sailing ship) from head office in London or Amsterdam. After thousands of years, in which the fastest change could show up on our doorstep was at the speed of a horse, we are still learning how to cope with change arriving at the speed of light.  As Dee Hock (Founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA International) writes, “Only a few generations ago, the present stretched relatively unaltered from a distant past into a dim future.  Today the past is ever less predictive, the future is ever less predictable, and the present scarcely exists at all.  Everything is accelerating change…”

Institutional responses to this environment

Finally, we must look at our institutions and what is happening within them.  We need to recognize that, while we tinker with the form and change the labels, all of our institutional constructs emerged several centuries ago and remain virtually unchanged.  These institutions were designed to provide stability, continuity and order in a world where today was sure to be much like yesterday and tomorrow was sure to be much like today.  However, this physical and social environment is in a state of global, rapid and constant flux.  Again Dee Hock articulates what is taking place, “An institution is a manifestation of and inseparable from the social environment from which it emerged, and on which its health and existence depend.” When the nature of that social environment is undergoing increasingly profound and rapid evolution then the organization’s evolution must also become rapid and profound.  Thus, our experience more and more indicates that tinkering with the forms and changing the labels is just not going to secure a healthy institution with a long-term future.

As the quote at the beginning implies there is only one leadership task today— “Change Management”—or as I would prefer to call it change facilitation.  Let’s look more closely at the implications of this for institutions, individuals in those institutions and those who would be real change leaders.

Leadership in Organizational Change

“The leader must put the organization into a position where the highest level of performance is necessary in order to succeed.  There is no escape from commitment.”…Sun Tzu quoted by Peter J Reed in Extraordinary Leadership, Creating Strategies for Change.

In the first section we talked about three crucial factors that shape our experience  of change in our organizations.  These were: 1. The age-old human response to change; 2. The environment in which we are trying to manage change and; 3. Institutional responses to this environment.  In this section we want to look at the dynamic of organizational leadership in the light of these three factors.

Leadership and The Human Response to Change

When faced with change everyone feels threatened, everyone experiences fear and anxiety.  The uncertainty of the future can overwhelm us and leave us, and whole groups frozen in inaction.  The task of the leader is to enable the group to overcome this initial response and then to move to the task of creating the desired future.  John A. Shtogren says in the introduction to his book Leadership Skyhooks, “Leadership can help people act bravely in the face of uncertainty.  Instead of taking cover, leadership helps us stand up, face the future and realize we can take charge of our own destiny, that change really can be an opportunity for growth, not loss.”  This infusing of an organization’s staff with courage, confidence and a belief in themselves and their capacity to make the necessary changes is, however, just the first demand upon a leader.  Perhaps more crucial and more demanding for the leader is the task of sustaining people through the on-going and never-ending process of change.  The capacity to call forth the necessary courage and self confidence to face the future and take charge, coupled with the ability to sustain people for the long haul, are the two fundamental leadership skills in this area.

Shtogren identifies seven “core values” (his Leadership Skyhooks) which he considers crucial to this task of enabling and sustaining an organization’s staff:  Vision—Developing and communicating a picture of an attractive future.  Trust—Conveying confidence and respect for your coworkers' abilities, values, and aspirations.  Open Communication—Sharing organizational and personal information widely.  Meaningful work—Making work more than just a job by appealing to the heart.  Empowerment and self-determination—Strengthening individuals and teams through education, autonomy, and accountability.  Teamwork and involvement—Making people partners by giving them a significant role in core business activities.  Transformational style—Facing change with optimism and a conviction that apparent differences can be reconciled in mutually satisfying ways.

Leadership and the Shifting Environment

The second dimension we must deal with is the environment in which we are working.  Change is happening so quickly these days and on such an inclusive scale that a whole new understanding of what it means to relate to our environment is required—especially for those of us from the West.  We Westerners have been taught that the way you live effectively in an environment is to dominate it and exploit it.  We have taken literally the Old Testament injunction about man being given dominion over the plants and animals (and everything else).  A command and control manager could do so when the factors he had to deal with were local or at best restricted to his regional or national market—and change, when it did occur, was followed by long periods of consolidation and stability.  Today the market place is global and the speed, frequency, and multi-dimensionality of change makes such command and control illusory at best and disastrously counter-productive at worst.

If control and dominance is no longer appropriate, how should we relate to and/or understand the environment in which our organizations must live and survive?  Anthropology has identified two fundamental human relationships to our environment.  These have shaped our cultures and thus have shaped us and our organizations.  The first is the command and control response to the environment where the organization is conceived of as a machine that obeys the will of its operators.  The second tends to see an organization as itself a product of nature, owing its development to the nutrients in the environment and to a favourable ecological balance.  Fons Trompenaars, in his classic study of cultural diversity in business, Riding the Waves of Culture, says that the modern shift that is required is toward cybernetic cosmology where the focus of control is not dominance of the external but “reconciliation of internal and external control”.  “The manager intervenes but is not the cause of what occurs; the system of organizations and markets have their own momentum which we can influence but not drive.”  Today the leader’s challenge is to enable his/her organization to finds its place in this environment.  Enabling a business organization to become market-driven would be an example of finding the place in the environment where first of all, survival and then growth and development are possible.  Today, to seek to stand outside our organizational environment for the sake of dominating it is simply not a viable survival strategy.  Rather, as leaders we are challenged with finding the ways in which we enable our organization to integrate and adapt to this global changing environment.  In the natural world dominance and exploitation has given us a “dying world”.  In the organizational world, we find the environment littered with dead and dying organizations that proudly fought the good fight for dominance and lost.

Leadership and the Institutional Response

Finally, we are left with the question of the institutional responses to this environment.  The challenge here is that the environment, which gave birth to the organizational forms we all live and work in is shifting and thus those organizational forms are increasingly unresponsive to the reality we experience day after day.  It is here that any leader will face their sternest test in guiding an organization.  To begin with, if your organization is going to change structurally and culturally in response to its environment, how do you achieve this when the environment seems to completely change every six months (just as you are getting the latest restructuring in place)?  How do you lead people when you seem to be asking them to march in a new direction every six months and when, every day, you go further in that direction, all can see the evident irrelevance to the changing environment?

Every leader sooner or later is faced with the question, “What do you keep and what do you change or remove?”  The key prerequisite to answering this question is to identify those norms, values, basic assumptions and structural forms which make the organization what it is.  What is the core, the heart of the structure and culture of the organization?  What is it, that if it were lost, the organization would lose its purpose, its focus, and its reason for being?  Identifying these provides the leader and indeed all the members of the organization a place to stand and a certain security, in light of the questions at the end of the previous paragraph, to determine what must change and/or go.

There are no easy answers or universal prescriptions that a leader can take off the shelf and ensure success for their organization in this area.  Perhaps the best we can do is look for those characteristics that enable leaders to more closely align their organization with this constantly evolving environment.  In their introduction to Real Change Leaders, Katzenback and the RCL Team give seven characteristics shared by the change leaders they identified. 1. Commitment to a better way 2. Courage to challenge existing power bases and norms 3. Personal initiative to go beyond defined boundaries 4. Motivation of themselves and others 5. Caring about how people are treated and enabled to perform 6. Staying undercover 7. A sense of humor about themselves and their situations

Organizations in every sphere of society need good managers.  Today however, they urgently need leadership. Leadership that is concerned with empowering people and demanding their best and staying out of their way while they get on with the job; Leadership that is not about control but about environmental adaptability and integration; Leadership that is ready to break the mold and reinvent the organization.  Today all organizations are, whether they know it or not, on “death ground”.  A great manager will plan a great funeral, while a great leader will find a way to adapt and move forward to a new day.

The People Factor in Change

Just past the middle of the 20th century my brother went to work for one of the largest American corporations.  After a few years the courts decided that it was “too large” and broke it into a number of separate corporations.  My brother found himself working for one of these new corporations.  A few years later when he was in his early fifties he was fired as the corporation under went one of its periodic restructurings.  However, he was encouraged to apply for another job with them in a different city.  His application was successful and he found himself commuting on a weekly basis to a new job.  Fortunately, after a year or so a job became available in his home city and he successfully applied for it.  As soon as he was eligible he took early retirement—he did so because they were about to change the pension and medical benefits system for future retirees.  This is a common story, which is repeated time and time again in today’s work place.

What happens to the people caught up in the change process of their organization?  How do they deal with the three factors shaping change management mentioned in the first section?

People and the Human Response

Let’s look at each of these factors in turn and begin with the question of the human response to change.  The age-old human response to change is something that affects everyone to a greater or lesser degree.  The experience of things passing away and new things coming into being is a common human experience and yet we all have profound reactions to it.  It raises the issues of the meaning of our life and work and the question of our place in history—our eternality.  When things pass away, i.e. change, our response is to enter into a time of regretting their passing away— grieving, which takes us on a profound and often troublesome journey.  One of the more powerful change management courses being offered in the UK is derived from psychologist’s work with grief therapy.  The intention of this course is not to do away with the grieving process but to sustain people going through it by shortening it and make them more aware of what they are experiencing.  It has been demonstrated that with the help of this course people are more likely to reengage in their work at full productivity and commitment much more quickly.  This is why corporations are willing to pay for their staff to attend—it has proven beneficial to more quickly focus them back onto their work.

As this training course wisely demonstrates, you cannot disregard with our response to change.  However, you can sustain and enable people going through it.  You cannot remove the pain and suffering of the experience or somehow make it possible for someone to avoid these dimensions of the experience.  In other words, people caught up in these situations are going to have to go through it.  The question is how are they going to go through it—badly or with some courage and confidence?  Is the “grieving” going to be prolonged or are they more quickly going to be able to refocus their lives on the future and their engagement in creating that future?  The psychological and often physical impact of change on people’s lives needs to be acknowledged and ways to sustain and enable people must be incorporated into the change process.

People and the Changing Environment

The second dimension concerns the environment where change is taking place or more exactly the nature of change itself.  We do not need to rehearse the speed and inclusiveness of change as we are experiencing it today.  There is no escape and this constant bombardment of “newness” generates unprecedented levels of uncertainty and ambiguity, which will often leave people and entire groups “frozen” in inaction.  When we see no way forward or have no clear picture of either the future we want to create or even of the consequences of our actions we all tend to dig in where we are, keep our head down and hope for the best.  To quote St. Paul writing to his colleagues about two thousand years ago, “O yea of little faith, what made you lose your nerve like that?”  For this is the experience of the lose of confidence and faith in the institution where we are acting out our responsibilities.  When this profound lack of trust develops in an organization, it quickly comes to include a lack of confidence in our colleagues and particularly in the leadership.

While it has become a cliché, the more transparent the operations of an organization are to its staff, the more difficult it will be for this kind of collapse of confidence to happen.  If people do not know, they can not understand and what they do not know and understand they will not trust.  In an article in The Financial Times Geoffrey Owen quotes Paul Adler, “…effective sharing of knowledge depends critically on a sense of shared destiny, which in turn both depends on and engenders a sense of mutual trust.”  And as the article goes on to point out, this requires an approach to management that encourages openness and accountability and that team-building skills are at least as important as brilliant strategic insight.  The more people know and understand, the more they have participated in the planning and decisions, the more they have been consulted, the more likely they are to retain confidence in the organization through times of great ambiguity and uncertainity.

People and the Organization

In the third dimension we are concerned with the way in which our organizations have become less and less attuned to the changing environment in which they exist.  Thus, people find themselves experiencing a disjuncture between the organization’s life and the larger world.  This gap takes place in several different areas of people’s experience.

1. The classical hierarchical pyramid structure with its rigid systems and division of responsibility finds itself unable to respond to the fast changing world with any degree of flexibility or timeliness.  The systems, created for another time, simply engender deep frustration in staff members anxious to do their job.

2. Also, the command and control approach to management, which accompanies this type of structure, is incapable of doing the job.  There is simply too much to command and control and more and more the primary source of success for a company is its human capital.  In the same Financial Times article as mentioned above, Geoffrey Owen writes, “If the internal organization of large companies is changing, so too is the style of management.  The hierarchical, command and control approach is giving way to a greater emphasis on teamwork…In many (though not all) companies competitive success has come to depend less on ownership of physical assets than on the ability to develop and manage human capital.”

3. The third and most powerful area where people experience this gap has to do with the values people bring to their organizational life.  Organizations are not “valueless” entities.  They embody the values and attitudes of the culture and time in which they were created.  Today the classic organization tends to embody the values of a culture that no longer exists and which many people (especially the young) find obsolete and almost foreign.  It is this gap that leads many people to look elsewhere for employment or to become selfemployed when they can.  Again Geoffrey Owen points to one instance of this challenge when speaking of the recent corporate scandals, “But it would not be surprising if advocates of corporate social responsibility—a concept that so far has evolved rather separately from corporate governance used the opportunity to press their agenda on companies and governments.  This could involve a shift from self-regulation to statutory rules on such issues as “sustainable development”, and perhaps some government backing for “triple bottom line” reporting of companies’ environmental and social impact as well as financial performance.”  This disconnect between people’s life values and those they experience organizations embodying motivates people to seek out those organizations more aligned with their values and attitudes.

Today organizations must examine both their structural and cultural basis.  They must be willing to begin the process of transformation.  Everything—from the structures of decision-making to the attitudes and values that govern their human resource development policies—must be examined and transformed.  Rather than secondguessing what their people are looking for, they must be willing to deeply involve their people in a collaborative process.  This kind of depth participation in the process of organizational transformation is the key to a sense of shared destiny and mutual trust.  And, of course, the more the organization’s values are aligned with those of its people, the greater will be the sense of responsibility for, commitment to, and engagement with the life and work of the organization.

Just as our fast changing world means new opportunities for organizations, it also means new opportunities for people.  If an organization is not changing in a creative and responsible manner the first people “abandoning ship” will be those whose creativity and capacity for innovation make them precisely those whom the organization most needs to keep.  Today, enabling change is the leadership task—and while embodying the appropriate leadership style and enabling organizational transformation are crucial leaders must be closely connected with the task of enabling, sustaining and developing people who on a day to day basis make the organization alive and dynamic.

Beyond Change Management: An Institution for the 21st Century

“The acceleration of organizational change is captured in a recent study at the University of Oxford of top 50 UK companies from early 1991 to 2000.  In the early 1990s, about 20 per cent of these companies were undergoing major reorganizations every year, yet by the end of the period the rate of reorganization was well over 30 per cent.  The average big business today can expect major reorganization every three years.  Microsoft has gone through the process four times in the past five years.”…. Restructuring Roulette, by Richard Whittington, Michael Mayer and Anne Smith.  In the Mastering Leadership series, The Financial Times, November 8, 2002.

The authors of the above quoted article begin the article by reviewing all the reasons a corporation must redesign itself more and more often and why this task is fundamental to the leadership of the organization.  However, we want to suggest that these frantic redesigns, which other studies indicate fail, by and large, to accomplish their objectives, are futile exercises that are postponing the inevitable.  This redesigning of the latest redesign is futile because it ignores the fundamental situation of the institution in today’s world.  The social, political and economic environment we all live in has undergone a fundamental evolutionary shift in the last fifty years while the institution, in its form and structure, has remained essentially unchanged from the time of their invention several centuries ago.  What is true in nature is true in society—when the environment changes you must adapt and evolve with it or become extinct.

In the first section we quoted Dee Hock (Founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA International), he writes, “An institution is a manifestation of and inseparable from the social environment from which it emerged and on which its health and existence depend.”  Today we are experiencing a fundamental disconnect between the form and structure of our institutions and our social environment.  No amount of redesigning is going to restore our institutions to health and secure their long-term existence.  No matter what you call it—redesigning, restructuring, downsizing, right sizing, or reconstructing—none of it is addressing this fundamental and fatal disconnect.  While we frantically redesign our institutions one more time the gap between the social environment and our institutions continues to grow.  We continue to buy our institutions a few more months of life by creating more and more fantastic mutations in their form and structure.  But the reality is that each mutation seems to work for less time and we find ourselves having to redesign it all again more and more often.  Redesigning is not going to succeed.  We have to begin to think about inventing a new form and structure.  Our ancestors invented the form and structure that all our institutions have today and we can invent the new one that will be in tune with the social environment of today and tomorrow.

Emerging Trends in Organizational Dynamics

The new form of the institution has not yet emerged in our time.  However there are some trends in today’s organizational dynamics that are indicative of the future.  We can therefore anticipate the kind of form and structure that will be required to support these new institutional dynamics.  First, five of these key trends are:

A foundational trend is the one toward greater and greater participation in the planning, problem solving and decision-making processes of the institution.  This is a trend that has to do with both the depth of participation— responsibility is being driven deeper and deeper into the institution—and the breath of participation—everyone in the institution can and should take part in the crucial processes affecting their areas of responsibility.  It is crucial that we understand here that we mean “authentic participation.”  By this we do not mean, for example, a session where employees ratify a previously made decision but one where everyone concerned is involved in the decision-making process from identification of the problem through to implementation of the decision.  People have the right to participate in those decision-making processes that are determining their future.

A second and related trend is toward facilitative leadership.  Obviously, the classic hierarchical model of leadership—command and control—is not going to work given the empowerment of all an institution’s staff through the creation of participatory processes.  However, this does not mean that we no longer need leadership or that this leadership is powerless.  It does mean that the leadership must operate in an entirely different mode.  In section two we spoke of this sort of leadership—“Leadership that is concerned with empowering people and demanding their best and staying out of their way while they get on with the job; Leadership that is not about control but about environmental adaptability and integration; Leadership that is ready to break the mold and reinvent the organization.”  Leadership power in the new institution is not based on fear or exclusive knowledge (“do it my way or you’re out of here!” or “I know best”).  But rather upon the capacity of the leader to demonstrate their commitment to the values and norms of the institution and their fellow staff members.  While extraordinarily more difficult, it also invests the leader with a power that is extraordinarily more potent while different from that of the hierarchical leader.  One of the leading authorities on facilitation, Roger Schwarz, writes, “Anyone in an organization can become a facilitative leader, even someone who has no supervisory authority.  Traditionally, the influence of a manager and traditional leader stems largely from formal authority.  But a facilitative leader’s influence stems largely from the ability to help others accomplish what they want to accomplish.”

A third related trend concerns institutional transparency.  If the staff of an institution is going to be enabled to participate authentically and meaningfully in the decision-making and planning that relate to their job, they are going to have to have access to relevant information.  People must know and understand the institution’s situation if they are going to participate in responding effectively and creating the desired for future.  Obviously, the key here is information; the more there is and the more widely it is shared the better will be the quality of the decisions and the planning that occurs throughout the institution.  If information is power then the sharing of information throughout the institution is fundamental to staff empowerment.  In addition, as we pointed out in the third section, transparency is fundamental to building trust and confidence in the leadership and the institution.

A fourth related trend has to do with the institutional culture that will accompany the new form of the institution.  Some of the characteristics of this culture will be: 1. It is inclusive rather that exclusive—the institution will value an openness to the larger community and society and a responsiveness to its concerns and values.  Geoffrey Owen of the Institute of Management, London School of Economics—referring to the corporate scandals in the United States—wrote in the Financial Times, “But it would not be surprising if advocates of corporate social responsibility—a concept that so far has evolved rather separately from corporate governance—used the opportunity to press their agenda on companies and governments.  This could involve a shift from self-regulation to statutory rules on such issues as “sustainable development”, and perhaps some government backing for “triple bottom line” reporting of companies environmental and social impact as well as financial performance.”

2. It is integrative rather than divisive—the institution will value and find ways to promote the capacity of the staff to develop a full and meaningful work life in the context of their whole life experience.  Rather than “factory time—8 AM to 5 PM” millions of people are currently working from home or even further a field.  This is a fast growing trend that is set to continue in the next few years.

3. It is open rather than closed—the institution will value and enable risktaking and creative thinking and action.  The staff will be secure in the knowledge that failure is not just tolerated but seen as part of the creative growth process.

4. It is future oriented rather than past oriented—the institution will value the attitude of seeing possibility in every situation and event.  The focus will be on change and creation rather than stability and protecting what currently exists. 5. It is flexible rather than rigid—the institution will value adaptability and learning.  A culture that is open ended and flexible allowing for a constant process of renewal.

The last three points are related to the trend toward a new understanding of what we mean by security and stability.  Staff security, for example, no longer means that you are sure of your position and job and that it is going to last for the foreseeable future, rather, your security is in your marketable skills and your confidence that you have the competencies to provide a needed service.  Stability is not joining a company and settling down for life.  Stability has to do with constantly ensuring that your marketable skills are upgraded and that you are managing the change process you are part of rather than simply responding to or being a victim of it.

This is far from an exhaustive list of cultural characteristics but rather some that are fairly clear and indicative given the other trends and signs we have identified.

A fifth related trend has to do with staff development.  Again in the third section we quoted Geoffrey Owen, “…In many (though not all) companies competitive success has come to depend less on ownership of physical assets than on the ability to develop and manage human capital.”  However, this is not just a leadership challenge, it is really a question of the fundamental orientation of the institution.  And behind this orientation is the system of beliefs, values and norms, which enable an institution to put its staff and their development at the centre of its life.  Perhaps John Russell, the managing director of Harley-Davidson Europe, sums it all up in this quote, speaking of their management style, “If you strip it all back, we’re behaving like human beings.  If you treat people the way you want to be treated, you become a team.”  Or, as Richard Donkin says in the same article, “Another feature of great employers is that they work out how they should be doing things, often in close consultation with the people in the front line.  Then they do things in an even-handed way from top to bottom.”

What then are these “clues” telling us about the future form, structure and culture of tomorrow’s institution?

Perhaps the first and most obvious is that the institution is going to be nonhierarchical.  Management functions and decisions are going to be in the hands of those who are doing the job.  It is likely that operational teams will be empowered to take many decisions that are today considered part of management’s function (things like salaries, promotions, transfers, training, etc.).  There will be few if any management layers between the top leaders and operating teams.  The structures of the institution will be minimal.

Another key characteristic will be that what structure there is will be flexible.  As the strategic directions of the institution shift over time, in the context of its overall mission and vision, the structures will “flex”.  Rather than the task having to fit into a given structural pattern, the pattern will adapt to most effectively enable the strategy and task.  Nirmalya Kumar, in an article about the turnaround of IBM in the 1990s, writes of the chairman and chief executive, “…he understood the importance of aligning structure with strategy.  He worked hard to get the various IBM units to “play together” rather than engage in constant turf battles…”  The structural pattern will also be flexible so that staff enablement and development can be a priority.  The structure will enable a variety of work patterns (flextime, work from home, part time etc.).  It will enable and encourage all sorts of training—both job related and general education.  It will enable staff to participate fully in the other dimensions of their life (family, recreational, etc.).

As tasks that have been considered as central management functions (like finances or human resource policy and management) will be dispersed to the operational level of the organization, the structure will resemble a network.  While there may be a financial manager in the central management team he/she will not be overseeing a department but rather a network of people integrated into the operating teams and often performing other crucial functions as part of those teams.

This flexible, minimal network structure will be self-generating and selfrenewing.  That is to say, the structure will develop along the lines of information flow in the network and as these shift, so the structure will shift.  The driving force for this will be the information people need to accomplish their task and where they can access this information.  While some lines of information flow will be relatively permanent and large, others will be either temporary or episodic depending on the strategy of the institution.

Because information is power and information is dispersed and accessible to all, there will be a similar dispersal of power.  Rather than permanent nodes of power, there will be temporary nodes of power in the structure.  As the strategy shifts and the information flows in different directions, the nodes of power will also shift.  This flexible “network power structure” will require facilitative leadership rather that command and control leadership.  Leadership that is based on the “ability to help others accomplish what they want to accomplish.”

Today the typical organization has a structure which has evolved over the last two hundred years.  When those Dutch and English businessmen first started to envision a structure that would enable them to enact the strategies they wanted to put in place, I am sure they did not foresee what it would become in our day.  However, that did not stop them from creating what they needed nor should it stop us from creating what we need.  REstructuring is exactly that—a process of attempting to REcreate from the past.  The future is not going to allow us to continue doing that much longer.

Epilogue

I asked a question in the title of this paper, Facilitating Change, Our Only Task?, and I think you deserve a definitive answer—yes it is.  Facilitation is about enabling effective, more human change in our institutions, organizations and communities across this troubled world.  It is always about the future, a future that beckons us and whispers, “Courage my heart, take leave and fare thee well!”. The sub title of Otto Scharmer’s book says it all, Leading from the Future as it Emerges.

What does all this mean, do we know or have all the answers?  No, of course not, but today and tomorrow, next month and next year, in this decade and the next, we and others will work to find the answers.  We will invent a new organizational paradigm that is not deadly because it is from an age that is gone, but that is enlivening because it is of our day.

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