Managing Change - woodlanddecay.com

The tools and techniques of change management (Hughes, 2007) was a catchy title for a paper, yet revisiting the paper a decade later much of my thinking has subsequently evolved. In the new textbook (Hughes, 2019) I included a chapter on tools and techniques, something which I hadn’t done in previous textbooks.

Textbook proposals go through a scrutiny process in terms of what to include. There was interest from some reviewers in tools and techniques, which I could have resisted, but I wanted to respond to interest in tools and techniques, although probably not in the way reviewers wanted…

Often critical scholars disparage me as merely peddling tools and techniques, as their worlds move forward informed by the writings of Foucault, Bourdieu, and Greek philosophers. Whereas practitioners disparage me for not placing enough emphasis on tools, techniques and their application. I exist between these two very different worlds. At times it feels very uncomfortable writing for the liminal space between worlds. Most of the time I enjoy the creative tension between these very different world views and the demands their proponents make.

There are at least five ways in which Hughes (2007) would be very different if written today.

That change management thingy
Change as dynamic
Subject expertise, definitions, language and discourse
Context is everything
Practical judgement

That change management thingy – In UK universities change management really arrived in the mid-nineties. At Brighton, we were pioneers in launching an MA Change Management in 1995. Today, the words appear very rusty and dated implying that change management is a thing to be accomplished, a tick-box ticked and then onto the next tick-box. However, academics and practitioners had this realization that they were dealing with something far more fluid. It was a process, although even claims that there was a beginning, a middle and an end were increasingly questioned.

We began to appreciate that an organizational change such as a cultural change could take years to bed down and even then, it would be a fluid and emerging phenomenon, rather than a thing. An appreciation of processes and process thinking was not restricted to change, increasingly, for example, we engaged with the nursing process and education processes. Back to organizational change and we increasingly moved away from change management as a thing towards managing change as a process. So today the paper would embrace the processual nature of managing change tools and techniques.

Change as dynamic – Closely related to appreciating the processual nature of organizational change has been a greater appreciation of the dynamic and ambiguous nature of organizational change. Mantras such as ‘change is the only constant around here’ and ‘we are living through an era of unprecedented change’ are misleading rhetoric.

Many constants in organizations do exist, think of staff working relationships which may last over many years. Every decade I have lived through is billed as an era of unprecedented change, every era by definition cannot be one of unprecedented change? Beneath the empty words, we need to better appreciate the dynamic nature of organizational change. In terms of evaluation, today’s failed change with time may be perceived as a success and vice versa. Different managing change tools and techniques may be more or less appropriate at different stages of dynamic changing processes.

Subject expertise, definitions, language and discourse – In 2007 I was naïve in assuming the existence of a bounded set of change management tools and techniques, with certain tools included and excluded from the change management toolbox. Today, I appreciate that the world isn’t like this, subjects such as strategy, organizational development, project management and HR have their own tools and techniques. Some of these tools and techniques are relevant to organizational change, others less so.

Tools and techniques raise issues of definition and I like the notion of tools being nested in a technique. In the past quality circles may have been labelled as a tool, nested within a total quality management technique. The language of tools and techniques is slippery and equally the discourses of the latest management fashions seek to persuade and shape our thinking. So today if I was writing the paper it would have been bounded such as managing change tools and techniques for quality management or for HR development.

Context is everything – I was mindful of the significance of context back in 2007, unfortunately however perhaps we pay lip service to context. I have seen Harvard Business School models applied in voluntary and public service in the UK. The implication being that such application brings business acumen from the world’s leading business school to these sectors. However, the HBS models tend to be based upon American businesses, in terms of their underpinning research, their target audience and their application. It’s like taking some daffodils which look lovely in an English country garden and expecting them to flourish in the Sahara, context really is everything. So today if I was writing the paper it would be set in a specific context such as managing change tools and techniques for quality management in hospitals.

Practical judgement – One of the best books I have read recently is Tools and techniques of leadership and management (Stacey, 2012). The book informs organizational change understanding without featuring that much about organizational change. The book’s title must have frustrated many readers, I must admit the reason I came to the book was when I was writing the new chapter. Early on you realize that Stacey (2012) is not selling notions of tools and techniques. Instead, he appears to have become disillusioned with an emphasis on tools and techniques in management and leadership.

He draws on his experiences of working with managers and leaders, suggesting that the more experienced managers were far less reliant on tools and techniques and far more reliant on exercising practical judgment.

Practical judgement is the experience-based ability to notice more of what is going on and intuit what is most important about a situation. (Stacey, 2012:108)

So today if I had been informed by Stacey’s (2012) account of tools and techniques I probably wouldn’t have attempted to write a paper on change management tools and techniques.

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.

Tag: Managing Change

Tools and Techniques of Change Management

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The Dark Side of Organizations

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