It is odd but when I go down to Friston Forest change and transformation makes most sense. I love how the old trees and old leaves give way to new trees and new leaves, a waltz in which old growth contributes to new growth. In the spring of 2020 I will witness that surge of new growth which is exciting and energising, but I will remember it is grounded literally (as the young people like to say), but also metaphorically in the past. My favourite woodland because of accessiblility is Friston Forest and I have enjoyed getting lost in Friston Forest many times.
Fungi in Friston Forest
On this occasion it was the most beautiful morning. We had had days and days of heavy rain, but this morning was warm and sunny. It made for this mist as the wood warmed up, which I have tried to capture here.
Fence and Pathway in Friston Forest
My goal was to get down and dirty with the fungi. The warm and wet summer made for some great photo opportunities and for a while I lost myself in nature.
Fungi in Friston Forest
Natural magic was at work in those woods and I was privileged to behold it. So I said goodbye to Friston Forest for another year and look forward to that spring surge of energy!
Post in 19 words My appreciation of Breaking Convention 2019 psychedelic consciousness conference themed around five personal highlights of a fascinating three days.
2019 Conference Programme
My posts normally focus on
organizations changing. However, I am mindful that I change and that I need to
be open and attentive to internal change, as well as, external change. It is
easy to shout about what is going on around me, which may be important, but it
may also be a strategy to avoid what is going on inside me.
In this spirit I attended the fifth
international conference on psychedelic consciousness (August 16th
to 18th 2019), aka Breaking Convention 2019 (BC 2019). I
enjoyed this intentionally unorthodox conference and I want to single out five
highlights; David Luke, William Blake, eco-consciousness, shamanic drumming and
another world.
It was a happy accident that I discovered and attended BC 2019 this August. One of the convenors David Luke had spoken at Brighton Arts Festival about 18 months earlier. I found his talk and energy inspiring. He touched on the background to Breaking Convention and the unorthodox approach they used to encourage a greater appreciation of psychedelic consciousness. The venue is the old royal naval college which hosts the University of Greenwich, it is also close to the Meridian Line and close to the Thames. We were in a magical place even before we had begun. At the first break on Friday morning I found myself sat in one of the cloistered walkways drinking my green tea. David Luke walked by, I smiled, he came over and we chatted. It was so different from my experience of some other academic conferences, which seem driven by performance with networking more tactical than social.
Greenwich Corridor
My second highlight was Sam Knot’s workshop – Psychedelic innocence and experience. He themed his one-and-a-half-hour workshop around William Blake’s mystical poetry. He had a copy of his illuminated works with both the wonderful artwork and the knowing words. It was odd, but as we talked poetry and otherworldly visions, bits of my brain woke up which had been dormant for too long. The climax of the workshop was being asked to take a poem from the Songs of Innocence or the Songs of Experience pile. The postcards were face down. I selected The Lamb, Sam had hand-painted these postcards (see image). We then read each poem in our circle, it took me back to childhood when I last read a poem aloud. It was a powerfully transformative experience. At the end of the workshop Sam let us keep the postcard we had read. I have since bought the illuminated works and look forward to further exploring these mystical writings.
The Lamb (William Blake) Postcard
I enjoyed going to paper sessions
and they were running five parallel streams with 100+ in each stream. The paper presentations were videoed and
should be accessible via the link at the bottom of this post. On Saturday
morning I went to Psychedelics, Eco-Consciousness and Ecological
Crisis. There must have been 200 +
in this large lecture theatre and throughout the presentations you could feel
the electricity crackling around the room. Sam Gandy kicked off the session
talking about the importance of our connection to self, others and nature. Sounds like a soundbite, but so profound. I
have always had a strong nature connection, but attending BC 2019 was about a
desire to reconnect with myself. Jay Griffiths beautifully shared her
experience of returning to Oxford where she had studied, but now as a panther
and how different Oxford looks from the perspective of a panther. Andy
Letcher’s Ontological Anarchy and the Ecological Self sounded
pretentious, but it was far from it in content and delivery. Andy or one of the
other speakers noted the derivation of humility as humus meaning of the land.
The interweaving of nature and humility was apparent throughout BC 2019.
I wish I could have found the courage to attend the ego-death workshop.
I rose early on Sunday morning to
attend a shamanic drumming workshop facilitated by William Rowlandson.
We congregated in a circle on the lawns between the naval college buildings
with trees nearby. After an introductory
talk by William we lied on the grass in a circle, imagine the petals of a
flower with William drumming in the centre, we did this for ten minutes talked
some more and then did a forty-five-minute session. I studied shamanism when I
was younger and again I found myself reconnecting with a part of myself I’d
left behind in the rush of my performative life. I look forward to furthering my shamanic
practices in the months to come.
On the final Sunday afternoon, I
went to a parallel session on integration. You’d expect numbers to be
dwindling, but again 100+. Somebody stands up and announces the chair and the
first speaker are not attending and everyone was so chilled. I experienced for
a few days another world. A world remote from busy consumerism, the constant
treadmill of modern life and the related expectations we put on each other and
ourselves. We have an excess of digital connections, yet such limited
connections to self, others and nature. Participants wanted BC 2019 to
work and it worked, thanks to the hard work of the convenors, volunteers and
speakers, but also due to the goodwill of the participants. My wait was rewarded with two interesting
papers on psychotherapy. I was glad I waited as I learnt about the archetypal
dance of the mystic and the pragmatist. I appreciated that I needed to embrace
my mystical side a little more if I was to become more integrated and I am up
for that homework.
On Saturday evening I had enjoyed the premier of Journeys to the Edge of Consciousness, which raised thoughts about childhood and my journey. It was a film featuring the contributions of Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts. Director Rob Harper watched the premier with us in what was a packed and very hot cinema. He did a Q&A session afterwards and appeared genuinely humbled by the positive reception he received afterwards.
There was much more going on such as artworks, installations and stalls. In the evening bands and discos took place in the Student Union beneath the old naval college buildings. I was keen to explore as I love going underground, I think I may have been a mole in a former life. I had scheduled a visit for the Sunday evening and my mind was willing, but my tired body was unwilling. I am still amazed that another world was created for a few days.
I am looking forward to the next Breaking Convention in the meantime I am inspired to shift my consciousness and to break some conventions.
We need to question the currently favoured persuasive narrative that organizational change tends to fail. This post introduces Notebook No.1 and its chapter content questioning currently favoured change failure framing.
Notebook No.1 Cover Image
Problematic Generalizations
Academic journals, monographs and textbooks repeatedly claim that organizational change tends to fail. However, the more that you examine this persuasive narrative the more doubtful you become.
The label organizational change covers many types of change. Change is undertaken in different sectors and different countries. Approaches to making change happen are many and varied. Specific organizational changes will succeed and fail with considerable variation given the contextual differences. Depicting organizational change as tending to fail is a problematic generalization. It is problematic like a sexist or racist generalization and we know such generalizations do great harm.
Persuasive Narratives
If still persuaded by the narrative that change tends to fail, look to the main proponents Harvard Business School (HBS) professors. They claimed that change and transformation initiatives failed. However, a large part of the work of their school involves facilitating change and transformation.
Should we applaud a business school for its social responsibility in sacrificing all that income through so publicly acknowledging change failure? Or was a far more subtle narrative at work?
Today I believe that it was change management which they wanted to depict as failing, this was so that we would believe that change leadership would succeed. Unfortunately, my insight has turned into an albatross for myself. I have been unable to convince academic journal Editors and their reviewers about the wisdom of my little epiphany. They reasonably want evidence, they rightly claim that in telling my story, multiple stories are at work. Notebook No.1 and Notebook No.2 are my best effort to retrace my steps in clarifying and explaining my thinking.
I feel oddly obligated to offer an alternative narrative to the current dominant narrative that organizational change tends to fail. In this first Notebook, I reflect on my successes and failures, perhaps a little too candidly. The idea of the Notebook label is to signpost that these aren’t the usual sanitized and contorted words we commit to paper.
The Chapters
The following discussion introduces the chapters in this first Notebook. In, Do 70% of organizational change initiatives really fail, I tell the story of how I came to write the paper of the same name. I tell the story of how one of the HBS professors reviewed the paper and what I learnt from him. Who killed change management also shares a title with a paper. This chapter takes an enjoyable postmodern turn when I decide to investigate the conceptual murder of change management. I begin to appreciate that it wasn’t organizational change which was failing it was change management. The role of textbooks in framing organizational change failure asks an awkward question. If we believe change tends to fail, why is there so little coverage of evaluating organizational change in textbooks? In A tale of change management failure on the misty literature mountains, I share my learning from writing the monograph The leadership of organizational change. In that monograph, I wanted to establish the origins of change leadership which required a narrative review of 35 years writing. The chapter tells the tale of an author going off on a Tolkienesque adventure in search of the precious thing. A different organizational change failure story is the penultimate chapter. I offer my account of an alternative organizational change failure frame. In Beyond the rhetoric of failure, I reflect on my successes and failures and the need to do things differently. I also reflect on my hopes for the future framing of organizational change failure.
The first two Notebooks include unusual appendices which require a little explanation. Ernst Bloch’s (1995) The Principle of Hope made a big impression on me. Bloch (1995:195) wrote ‘even disappointed hope wanders around agonizing, a ghost that has lost its way back to the cemetery and clings to refuted images.’ Academics invest hopes in unpublished papers. The graveyard of disappointed hope offers a public resting place for an unpublished paper.
I do hope that these Notebooks might provoke meaningful practically orientated organizational change debate beyond the firewalled academic journals and costly academic books. As change is all about moving into an unknown future only time will tell…
Accessing Notebook No.1
This Notebook and the other two were available on the Amazon self-publishing platform in paperback format. I enjoyed being a publisher – cover design, proof reading, layout etc. The Notebook even sold a few copies, which was a pleasant bonus. Today, if you would like a digital copy of the draft please contact me using the Contact page.
References
Bloch, E. (1995) The Principle of Hope. Translated by N. Plaice, S. Plaice, and P. Knight. Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
This post introduces the second NotebookNo.2 and its chapters. The shift from change management to change leadership begs a question? Everybody seems to place faith in leading change, but why?
Updated February 2023
Introduction
I worked at Brighton Business School from 1987 to 2019. During a lot of that time I undertook organizational change scholarship and facilitated organizational change workshops. In the early days my focus and the focus of workshop participants was change management. Over time that focus shifted to change leadership. In organizations including my own I witnessed a growing enthusiasm for change leadership and leading change.
I began wondering why this shift had taken place, had I missed the relevant memo?
There is a lack of research/evidence that change leadership delivers successful organizational change. However, I have been surprised at how many bright academics believe such evidence exists and that it is just waiting to be discovered. I have been surprised in the UK how much faith hospitals, schools and even universities have placed in the benefits of leading change.
In The leadership of organizational change, I searched for the origins of change leadership over the past 35 years. This search mirrored my earlier challenging of the belief that 70% of all change initiatives failed. By happy accident rather than intelligent design, I realized that it was change management that they were depicting as failing so that we might believe in change leadership as succeeding.
I believe that the shift from change management to change leadership was merely a change of narrative. That was the easy bit, how do you convince fellow academics about your ecstatic revelation. If the shift to change leadership was more research implied, than research informed, how do you counter a dominant narrative? The succinct answer is with great difficulty.
The clearer my realization became in my mind the less clear my academic journal submissions became. My counter-narrative didn’t convince Editors and reviewers and I could only ever offer them parts of this story in specific focussed journal submissions. In this second Notebook, I tell the story of how they constructed change leadership. My desire to explain the construction of change leadership is not a purely academic exercise. I am concerned about how much organizations and governments have invested in change leadership, at a time when societies have suffered through extreme austerity policies. My story is not a neutral story, I do want to challenge current thinking about change leadership and the implications for practice.
Notebook No.2 Cover Image
The Chapters
In the second chapter, Anarchy in the UK, anxiety in the USA, I contrast the anarchy of rock music in the 1970s/1980s with anxieties corporate America was experiencing. In, Reality used to be a friend of mine, I introduce social constructionism. Your change leader is very real, but are some of the strengths and weaknesses you imagine she possesses real? The title, Eight steps towards successfully leading change, is sarcastic. I do not believe that the eight steps which Professor John Kotter prescribed for leading change deliver successful change. This debate has been confused through references to transformational leadership. Robust research does inform transformational leadership, but transformational leadership is concerned with transforming subordinates rather than organizational transformation. I explain this further in the chapter, Transformational leadership misrepresented and misunderstood. I suspect I am sarcastic in the penultimate chapter Let’s assume change leadership works. The title is based upon a textbook author who suggested that we assume change leadership works in the absence of evidence. I consider depictions of change leadership in textbooks, academic handbooks and journals. The tone is more positive in the final chapter in which I encourage a greater emphasis on differentiating Commanding, managing and leading change.
In the appendix, I include an unpublished paper Questioning the leadership of change in Higher Education. I was troubled when I read A handbook for leaders in higher education: Transforming teaching and learning (Marshall, 2016). This handbook targeted at university leaders, celebrated Kotter’s (1996/2012) eight leading change steps with the book described as a ‘classic’. I thought enough is enough. I knew I needed to be far more proactive in challenging the change leadership fetish. Even if these Notebooks, are perceived by readers as nonsense, at least I had a go!
Accessing Notebook.No2
This Notebook and the other two were available on the Amazon self-publishing platform in paperback format. I enjoyed being a publisher – cover design, proof reading, layout etc. The Notebook even sold a few copies, which was a pleasant bonus. Today, if you would like a digital copy of the draft please contact me using the Contact page.
