I was delighted to read this appreciative review of my final textbook Managing and Leading Organizational Change and grateful to Dr David Wilkinson for taking the time to write it.
In academic circles, despite the money students and university libraries invest in such texts, textbook authoring is surprisingly unfashionable. David fairly explains why such academic scepticism about textbooks exists, thankfully for myself he doesn’t bracket me in this category.
What I most appreciated in his review was that he appeared to understand the deeply embedded intent in my writing. In an ideal world organizational change theories and practices would be informed by the latest research in the leading academic journals. The danger is that we assume that this ideal is the reality, I don’t believe it is.
After decades of reading organizational change journal papers, I struggle with some of the content. In all honesty, some of it is too intellectual for me to comprehend – my bad! Other papers about organizational change leave me pondering if an organizational change is the primary interest of the author or an instrumental means to an end – publication in a prestigious journal. My workshops and writing have largely been informed by reading journal papers, but sometimes the most useful contributions to organizational change theory and practice are not in the most prestigious journals, but instead they are in the less prestigious journals and books.
As a textbook author I see my role as a scholar, rather than a researcher. A researcher gathers new knowledge, a scholar critically interprets existing knowledge. I explain this further in the preface of the new textbook, this preface should be freely available on the preview pages of the book on online sites.
As a scholar I see my role as acting as an intermediary between what is being written and published by trustworthy academics and student and practitioner audiences. I want to guide readers towards the more reliable and valid literature. Also, I want to guide readers away from less reliable and valid literature. I remain troubled by the simplistic associations that the most prestigious Business Schools always offer the most reliable and valid organizational change insights. My academic life has involved questioning organizational change knowledge. As I move into a later phase of my academic life, I now have more questions than answers, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Myth-understanding Organizational Change
The first chapter of the textbook compiles many of the organizational change myths I encountered during my career. In hindsight, the chapter was far too philosophical for an introductory chapter of a textbook. However, I do provocatively believe that engaging with and understanding organizational change myths is as important as busting these myths.
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.
In this post I want to focus on communicating change in organizations, highlighting four publications which have proved popular in workshop settings sparking meaningful debate. They are not the most sophisticated or academically prestigious publications in this sub-field, but they all had something to communicate in their different ways.
Communicating Change Publications
These are my communicating change choices, I have deliberately left out discourse, rhetoric and framing. The following choices are illustrative of the work of their respective writers, reflecting the applied nature of this aspect of organizational change.
In a nutshell: The absence of tangible dissent does not signal the presence of consent.
I wish this classic paper was required reading for every change manager/change leader. It certainly aligns with my lived experience of organizational change, when we talk about the concept of organizational silence in workshops it has plenty of meaning for participants. The paper is all about how we make sense of organizational change and the silence refers to the silence of the senders and the silence of the receivers of communications (think in terms of ‘keep your head down’). The authors argue that those communicating changes hold back information fearing that it will be problematic for employees. Equally, employees hold back concerns fearing it will be problematic for their careers. It sounds blindingly obvious, yet I fear for many managers/leaders it is missed in the communicating change process, particularly when there is an appetite for strong change leadership.
In a nutshell: There are a set of context-dependent communication strategy choices in communicating change
Whereas Morrison and Milliken (2000) warned about a tendency to withhold information at times of change, Clampitt et al (2000) offered a range of communication strategy choices. At the heart of their paper they highlighted five communication strategies; spray and pray, tell and sell, underscore and explore, identify and reply and withhold and uphold. I am afraid I am guilty of spray and pray in the literal, rather than metaphorical sense (too much information). Each of these five communication strategy choices has strengths and weaknesses and is very context dependent. Each choice has implications for the effectiveness of the communication and the amount of information transmitted. They do not offer one best way to communicate change and acknowledge that you might move through processes of communication during different phases of a change initiative.
Cornelissen, J. (2017) Corporate Communication: A Guide to Theory and Practice. London: Sage Publications Ltd.
In a nutshell: If you want to understand change communications you need to understand corporate communications.
I have been very aware of communications in organizations becoming more professional and more sophisticated over the decades. Sadly, the more professional communications become, the less I trust the messages. The professional advancement of organizational communications has been accompanied by the arrival and development of the concept of corporate communications. Corporate communications today is supported through training and development, professional courses, conferences, and journals. Cornelissen (2017) acknowledges the Latin ‘corpus’ meaning body with corporate communications looking at the organization as a body which includes internal and external communications. This textbook is very readable with a dedicated chapter on communicating change. The author is a highly respected contributor to academic journals.
Barrett, D.J. (2014) Leadership Communication. New York: McGraw Hill Education.
In a nutshell: communications are integral to leadership and leaders lead through effective communication
Years back, I used to refer to a 2002 paper by Deborah Barrett when covering communicating change in workshops. The paper provided a good starting point for workshop discussions. I would then be a bit ‘sniffy’ and suggest that as she worked as a communications consultant we should be cautious about the validity and reliability of the ideas that she was selling. It was only recently that I learned that she also worked as an academic and had written a successful textbook. The more I have studied leadership the more I have appreciated the centrality of communications, at times it seems as if leadership is communication, a creation of the imagination. In the new textbook, I take the questioning into discourse, framing, and social construction, but that is enough communication for today.
