Tag: leading change

  • 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 Notebook No.1, 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. 

    Notebook No 1 – The Chapters

    The following discussion introduces the chapters in Notebook No.1. 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 

    Notebook No.1 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

    Notebook No.2 – 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 Notebook No.2, I tell the story of how they constructed change leadership.

    In Notebook No.2, 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

    Notebook No.2 – 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 of Notebook No.2, 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 Notebook No.2 is perceived by readers as nonsense, at least I had a go!

    Accessing Notebook.No2

    Notebook No.2 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.

  • Leading Change vs Commanding Change

    Leading Change vs Commanding Change

    Commanding change is a very different practice from leading change. Senior people refer to ‘leadership’ when what they are really talking about is ‘command.’ In a crisis, we urgently require the answers of ‘command’.  During an organizational change, we require the questions of ‘leadership’.

    Introduction

    As discussed in the previous post claiming that a building is on fire may do more harm than good.  I am weary of people asserting that what we need is change leadership, strong change leaders, where are the leaders, etc, etc, etc…

    Both organizational change and leadership are vague/slippery concepts which even respected scholars would concede we do not fully understand. What we really need is a better differentiation of change leadership, from commanding change and managing change.

    Throughout universities, hospitals and organizations, in general, I hear senior people referring to ‘leadership’ yet what they are really talking about is ‘command.’ All organizations at different times draw upon command, leadership, and management. Differentiating these concepts and their appropriateness to specific problems is currently missing from practitioner debates yet integral to organizational change processes.

    If I couch the same idea slightly differently, Stacey (2012) eloquently argued that what masquerades as the leadership of change is closer to institutionalized bullying.  We need to be clear what leadership isn’t (see Figure 1, first column) and equally clear what leadership might be (see Figure 1, second column).

    The compliance produced by
    institutionalized bullying is
    inimical to change.  Change will
    then only come when deviants
    utter ‘shrill cries of protest from the margin’ which those at the centre will probably classify as hysterical. (Stacey, 2012: 89)    		Leaders inspire people by inviting
    them into a dialogue where they
    suspend assumptions and so learn and change. Well-intentioned rational people, engaged in dialogue under inspiring
    leaders with vision, will willingly change. (Stacey, 2012: 80)
    As it is…As it might be…
    Figure 1 – Bullying is very different from leading change

    How can we differentiate the problems organizations encounter and relate them to management, leadership, and command?

    In seeking to understand leadership Grint (2005) revisited Rittel and Webber’s (1973) famous typology of tame, wicked and critical problems.  The tame problems were resolvable, their limited uncertainty suited management and management processes. Whereas wicked problems were complex and intractable without unilinear solutions.  These wicked problems were more suited to leadership requiring leaders to ask the right questions, rather than impose the right answers.  These answers were not necessarily self-evident as they required a collaborative process of dialogue to make progress. Finally, critical problems were the very real crises which organizations encountered.  In these situations, with very little uncertainty and very little time, command was required. Command provides answers to enable taking decisive action in a crisis.

    In further understanding leadership, Grint (2005) revisited Etzioni’s (1964) famous typology of power; calculative compliance, normative compliance, and coercive compliance. Calculative compliance was closest to management in organizing processes. Normative compliance with an emphasis on soft power and reference to shared values was closest to leadership in asking questions. Coercive compliance was all about hard and physical power, typified in the military and emergency services. Coercive compliance was closest to the command of providing answers.  

    This reasoning suggests that in response to different organizational change problems there may be a requirement for management, leadership and command and the exercise of different forms of power.  This is helpful in disrupting the current leading change fetish as the universal panacea for all organizational change problems.

    What is the difference between commanding change and leading change?

    The change challenges organizations and societies face require very different conceptualizations of change leadership, from leading change as commanding change which we currently appear to experience.

    Figure 2 questions today’s dominant model of leading change which I believe has damaged health and education institutions in the UK and perhaps beyond.  I believe in the social benefits of our National Health Service and the transformative potential of schools, colleges, and universities.

    However, I increasingly fear that commanding change masquerading as leading change misunderstands that these organizations are collections of people.  The art of leading change is to meaningfully engage with such people through questioning and dialogue generating collaborative ownership/resolution of change problems.

    Commanding Change
    As it is …    		Leading Change
    As it might be…
    Urgency/CrisisTime/Engagement Always
    Required for Optimum Outcomes
    Top Down

     

    Strong Assertions

    		Questioning

     

    Dialogue

    Hard/Physical PowerSoft Power/Shared Values
    Perceived as Problematic
    Resistance    		Perceived as Part of a
    Change Process
    Answers/Directives/EdictsCollaborative Ownership/
    Resolution of Change Problems
    Figure 2 – The difference between commanding change and leading change

    I am afraid if we continue to misunderstand the hard/physical power of command which is urgently required in times of crisis as leading change nothing will change and nobody will change despite all the noise and senior management edicts.

    The ‘irony of leadership’ is that collaboration diminishes the potential contribution of the leader (Grint, 2005).  The next time somebody asserts what we need is strong leadership ask them do they mean leadership or command?

    Further Reading

    Etzioni, A. (1964). Moderm organization. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

    Grint, K. (2005). Problems, problems, problems: The social construction of leadership. Human Relations, 58(11): 1467-1494.

    Rittel, H.W. and Webber, M.M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2): 155-169.

    Stacey, R. (2012). Tools and techniques of leadership and management: Meeting the challenge of complexity. London: Routledge.

  • Leading Change: The Nonsense of Urgency

    Leading Change: The Nonsense of Urgency

    Creating urgency has become synonymous with leading change to the detriment of individuals, organizations, and societies. The more leaders create these artificial crises, the less we trust and engage with our leaders and the less effective their change leadership becomes.

    Introduction – What’s the burning platform?

    The sense of urgency on a major organizational change was famously likened to a burning platform (Conner, 1998).  Subsequently, the question has frequently been asked – what’s the burning platform? 

    Conner (1998) recounts learning about the burning platform through television coverage of an explosion and fire on an oil-drilling platform.  Whilst, 166 crew members, and 2 rescuers lost their lives, there were survivors.  Andy jumped 150 feet in the middle of the night into a sea of burning oil and debris, subsequently commenting ‘it was either jump or fry.’ We will all be confronted with situations requiring urgency, though hopefully less dramatic.  Thankfully the urgency required when confronted with an explosion and a fire was atypical for oil exploration companies.  It is likely that many of their successes were by-products of patient desk research undertaken over many years, rather than taking ‘jump or fry’ gambles on different oil exploration sites.  In this post, I argue that creating a sense of urgency has been overemphasized in accounts of leading change and that the urgency instinct may even be problematic with implications for leading change practices.

    Book Cover "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling
    Book Cover “Factfulness” by Hans Rosling

    How did Kotter encourage a sense of urgency?

    Kotter (2008) devoted a book to change leaders creating this sense of urgency, which was the third of Kotter’s (1996/2012) eight leading change steps.

    Visible crises can be enormously helpful in catching people’s attention and pushing up urgency levels.  Conducting business, as usual, is very difficult if the building seems to be on fire.  But in an increasingly fast-moving world, waiting for a fire to break out is a dubious strategy.  And in addition to catching people’s attention, a sudden fire can cause a lot of damage. (Kotter, 1996: 45)

    Whereas, Andy jumped from the burning platform because it was a case of ‘jump or fry’, Kotter (1996) appears to pre-empt the fire with the change leader encouraged to engineer a sense of urgency so that the ‘building seems to be on fire.’  Kotter (1996:44) offered many tips on raising urgency levels, such as ‘create a crisis by allowing a financial loss, exposing managers to major weaknesses vis-à-vis competitors, or allowing errors to blow up instead of being corrected at the last minute.’ Leading change in such an unethical way is likely to result in trust between leaders and subordinates being lost.  There is a primitive appeal in the urgency instinct as it appears to invest power in the change leader over subordinates, but at what cost to individuals, organizations and societies?

    Why is change urgency problematic?

    Rosling et al (2018) in Factfulness, was concerned with global risks such as global pandemics, financial collapse, world war, climate change and extreme poverty.  The reason Factfulness is invoked here is that one of the eleven problematic instincts highlighted when dealing with these risks was the urgency instinct.  Hans Rosling shared very human examples to demonstrate how the urgency instinct can have tragic human consequences.  He would have agreed with Andy’s ‘jump or fry’ instinct, he would not have favoured Andy applying this instinct to all scenarios or change leaders modeling their leadership around such an instinct.

    When we are afraid and under time pressure and thinking of worst-case scenarios, we tend to make really stupid decisions.  Our ability to think analytically can be overwhelmed by an urge to make quick decisions and take immediate action. (Rosling et al, 2018: 226)

    Rosling et al (2018) question the either/or dualism of act or don’t act as too simplistic. The warning is that framing everything in terms of creating a sense of urgency drains credibility and trust with such constant alarms numbing us to when real urgency is required. The provocative warning is that  ‘when people tell me we must act now, it makes me hesitate.  In most cases, they are just trying to stop me thinking clearly.’ (Rosling et al, 2018:228)

    We appear to have been seduced by a form of change leadership which emphasizes being strong with the Just Do It (JDI) mantra invoked.  Everything is cloaked in a sense of urgency – who is going to debate the merits of an organizational change approach or question a change leader when a ‘building seems to be on fire.’

    What can we do practically to control the urgency instinct?

    Burning platforms and creating urgency have become interwoven with how to lead change with no appreciation of the diversity of change approaches and contexts.  Urgency strengthens the hand of individual leaders to force through change, but it is potentially detrimental to individuals, organizations, and societies. A constant sense of crisis distorts our worldview, which inevitably is to the detriment of everyone.

    Even change leaders encouraged to create this constant sense of urgency eventually suffer ‘we cannot get into a situation where no one listens anymore.  Without trust, we are lost’ (Rosling, 2018: 233).  Rosling (2018) offers four small steps in controlling the urgency instinct which may be applied to leading change.

    • Ask for more time and more information. It is rarely now or never, it is rarely either/or.
    • If something is urgent and important, it should be measured with only relevant and accurate data used.
    • Any prediction about the future is uncertain.
    • Step-by-step practical improvements and evaluation of impact are usually less dramatic but more effective.

    In organizational change terms, this is more about an evolution, rather than a revolution. This does not negate the need for decisive and prompt action when a real crisis occurs, but creating artificial crises urgently needs to be challenged. All of this is contingent on understanding the nature of the organizational change problems which determine if management, leadership or command is most appropriate.  These considerations are addressed in the next post.

    Leading Change book on a recycling bin
    Leading Change now ready for recycling

    Further Reading

    Conner, D.R. (1998). Managing at the speed of change. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons.

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

    Kotter, J. (2008). A sense of urgency. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

    Rosling, B.H. with Rosling, O. and Rönnlund, A.R. (2018). Factfulness. London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.

    Leading Change: The Nonsense of Urgency