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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