Tag: Change Failure

  • Notebook No.3 – Did I really say that?

    Notebook No.3 – Did I really say that?

    Notebook No.3 is a gentle tirade against business school academics frequently and repeatedly claiming that organizational change tends to fail.  Addressing these ‘failures’ informs university leadership and management courses for students and consultancy for organizations. Perversely I am now referenced as the missing change tends to fail ‘evidence’.

    This Notebook reflects my increasingly paranoid scream!!!

    The Chapters

    In this third and final Notebook in this series, Chapter One sets the scene and connects with the first two Notebooks. Understanding depictions today of organizational change as tending to fail requires an appreciation of the historical evolution – a chronology of framing organizational change failure over decades features in Chapter Two.

    A special issue of a prestigious academic journal, themed around organizational change failure, is this Notebook’s focus. There are reviews and commentary on the contributions in Chapter Three and the guest editorial in Chapter Four. The contributions and editorial make a significant contribution to understanding organizational change failure. I am referenced as claiming organizational change tends to fail on four occasions, and these instances are highlighted. Chapter Five takes the form of a discussion, offering four explanations; innocent misunderstanding, association fallacy, confirmation bias and impression management.

    Chapter Six draws this Notebook to a conclusion reflecting on the writing process and further potential dissemination. An awkward question has featured in all three Notebooks, why have organizational changes been depicted as tending to fail? The Notebook subtitle captures my succinct answer. Finally, I believe that erroneous depictions of organizational change failure have implications for universities, organizations and societies.  The debates featured here were never purely academic; they have enormous practical importance.

    Appendix – The Graveyard of Disappointed Hope features a conference paper where I question the gap-filling fetish of academics.  These three Notebooks have been my attempt instead to challenge sacred academic assumptions.

    Accessing Notebook No.3

    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

    Hughes, M. (2011) Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail?” Journal of Change Management 11(4): 451-464.

    Schwarz, G.M., Bouckenooghe, D. and Vakola, M. (2021) Organizational change failure: Framing the process of failing. Human Relations, 74(2): 159-179.

  • Notebook No.1 – Framing Organizational Change Failure

    Notebook No.1 – Framing Organizational Change Failure

    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
    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.

    Hughes, M. (2011) Do 70 per cent of organizational change initiatives really fail? Journal of Change Management, 11 (4): 451-464.

    Hughes, M. (2016) Who killed change management? Culture and Organization, 22(4): 330-347.

    Hughes, M. (2016) The leadership of organizational change. London, Routledge.

  • Notebook No.2- Constructing Change Leadership

    Notebook No.2- Constructing Change Leadership

    This post introduces the second Notebook No.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
    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.

    References

    Hughes, M. (2016) The leadership of organizational change. London: Routledge.

    Kotter, J.P. (1996/2012)Leading change. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

    Marshall, S. (2016). A handbook for leaders in higher education: Transforming teaching and learning. London: Routledge.

  • The Dark Side of Organizations

    The Dark Side of Organizations

    It took me time to theoretically appreciate the dark side of organizations.

    In writing a managing change textbook a decade ago, I included a chapter on ethics.  It seemed like the right thing to do. In all honesty, probably one of the book proposal reviewers suggested it.  My dilemma was that I wasn’t as fully engaged as I should have been, whilst I try to be ethical and encourage workshop participants to reflect on their own ethical positions I academically struggled at the time. 

    The favoured philosophical framing appeared to be an academic abstraction even an abdication of some of the evil acts of individuals and organizations.  Over the past decade, I have engaged more with the ethics literature, which has become particularly relevant as I have focussed on leaders and leadership.  I share this because I had the realization that if I couldn’t engage even myself when writing the ethics and change chapter, I was unlikely to engage readers.

    This dilemma surfaced writing the new textbook, although writing about ethics seemed to be the right thing to do, earlier concerns persisted.  I could write a far better chapter than a decade ago, but would it really influence or persuade? Or would the celebration of philosophies from ancient Greece now look more elegant, but little else?

    I decided to frame the relevant chapter in terms of the dark side and at the very least this made the activity more interesting and meaningful for myself and hopefully, my engagement would influence readers, only time will tell.  

    A few years ago I purchased, read and enjoyed The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership.  It reads very well, offering case study warnings from organizational history about when transformational leadership goes wrong.  It was like an antidote to all the excessively enthusiastic transformational leadership literature that seemed to dominate debates. It offered a model of relating the critical/theoretical to the practical application of leadership in which readers were made very aware of the negative consequences of leader actions, the cloak of Greek philosophy had been removed.  Using case studies gave us context often missing from enthusiastic accounts of leading change and transformation.  I believe that these deep and rich accounts of context would allow readers to relate what leaders were doing to themselves asking that important question what would I do in that situation?

    In writing the textbook chapter, it proved difficult to differentiate the dark side of organizations from the dark side of organizational change and in the end, I settled for the former. In reviewing literature for the chapter, I was surprised about the development of dark side literature, it went far beyond my own interests in management and organization studies, capturing the imagination of scholars in very different academic disciplines.

    As I explored the dark side literature I appreciated the shades of darkness, one might even say grey, through to black.  This reflected some accounts of the dark side not being very critical, through to critical accounts which question the political and economic context in which organizations operate as being highly problematic. In understanding the development of interest in the dark side of organizations I found Linstead et al’s (2014) review very informative in terms of how this debate evolved and their differentiation of a darker side of organizations and why we need to challenge such aspects of organizations.

    I tend to facilitate organizational change workshops for external clients and to date, they have never asked for input on ethics or the dark side.  The closest I came was doing an overview of organizational change over a morning. At the end of the morning, the Chaplain asked why we hadn’t covered ethics and organizational change. It was a fair point in that the onus must be on me to introduce ethics/dark side concerns into workshops, rather than waiting to be asked. In fairness, these days I do, any discussion of organizational change inevitably raises (or should raise) ethical/dark side concerns.  When I frame the debate in terms of the dark side we tend to have a good level of debate quite quickly. 

    My one current concern is semantic. Decades ago there was a debate about associating black bin bags with rubbish and by association black people with rubbish.  I wasn’t convinced by that debate.  However, I always watch the non-verbal closely and there does appear to be some unease. It was slight, but for example, recently a Ghanaian workshop participant appeared uncomfortable with the fashionable dark side terminology. I reassure myself in that the critical scholars cited are explicitly anti-racist and that they use this terminology to highlight discriminatory workplace activities and colonialism. Then again we know how powerful language and discourse can be in shaping thinking, this debate is ongoing.

    Further Reading

    Hughes, M. (2019) The dark side of organizations. In Hughes, M. (2019) Managing and Leading Organizational Change. London: Routledge.

    Linstead, S., G. Maréchal., and R.W. Griffin. (2014) Theorizing and Researching the Dark Side of Organization. Organization Studies 35(2): 165-188.

    Tourish, D. (2013) The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective. London: Routledge.

    The Dark Side of the Organization