The Wisdom of Managing Change

on wisdom

My grandfather and my daughter, born 85 years apart, both wise in their own ways:

I stumbled across some great quotes this morning, about scholars and wisdom.

“To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of the scholar”
-Samuel Johnson

“Be happy. It's one way of being wise.”
-Sidonie Gabrielle

“The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.”
-Oscar Wilde

“By three methods we may learn wisdom:
first, by reflection, which is noblest;
second, by imitation, which is easiest; and
third, by experience, which is the most bitter.”
-Confucius

"Never mistake knowledge for wisdom.
One helps you make a living;
the other helps you make a life.”

-Sandra Carey

The source for these quotes is  the Poor Scholar.

sailing through organizational change

Consider the metaphor of leading an organizational change as sailing a yacht:

Imagine that you want to sail a yacht to a new destination. You must read the wind well so that you can trim the sails to harness its energy. If the winds are at your back, then you can put up the spinnaker and make quick progress to your destination. 

However, if the winds are blowing against the direction in which you want to travel you will need to chart and oblique course, heading toward your destination without aiming for it directly. If you try to confront the headwinds squarely, your sails will luff, and your yacht's progress will stall.

In the same way, if you want to steer an organization through a major change, you must navigate the relationships among your employees so that you can harness their energy in support of the change. If the key change agents have relationships of trust, respect, and obligation with most employees, then those relationships will help you to build momentum in support of the organizational change. However, if the opponents of your change benefit from higher quality relationships with most employees, you must steer the organizational change carefully.

These are the first two paragraphs in my dissertation. (Piderit, 1999, Navigating Relationships with Coworkers: Understanding Employees' Attitudes Toward an Organizational Change, UMI #9929921)

How do you think of leading organizational change? What metaphor do you find most provocative?

organizational culture emerges from interactions

One of the most frequent Google searches that leads people to my blog is a search about managing culture. I have qualms about whether giving advice about how to manage culture is a responsible thing to do, since it may give managers the false impression that they can control their organization's culture.

Stephen Billing, at ChangingOrganisations.Com, posted a great blog entry this morning, asking "Is there such a thing as organisational culture?" In it, he writes

"I am just concerned about the idea that corporate culture is something (i.e. is a physical "thing" or something with properties similar to a physical thing)  that can be managed in the service of the most powerful managers."

I agree that corporate culture is not a thing. I also share Steven's concern about the idea that culture can be managed. In fact, in an entry last fall, I wrote

"the truth is that culture cannot always be managed. ... Understanding how employees may respond to change initiatives can help calibrate managers' expectations and remind them that their direct influence on corporate culture is limited.

(To read the rest of my earlier blog entry, see Organizational change: can we manage it? Another entry that may be of interest is building support for change.)

Essentially, Stephen and I see culture from the same angle. The angle is that culture is made up of patterns of interactions among organizational members. That's why managers have little ability to influence it -- they don't participate in many of those interactions. A manager cannot be in the middle of every conversation between coworkers. 

Where Stephen and I may differ is that I believe some kinds of interaction can be more influential than others -- specifically, the interactions that involve storytelling. If one employee tells a good story, the listeners may retell it to others. Thus, the story can have a ripple effect, influencing many interactions during which the storyteller is not even present. 

Of course, managers are not the only ones within organizations who can tell good stories. Some of the best stories, the ones that are retold the most often, are the stories that other organizational members tell about managers. Consider, for instance, how an enlisted sailor might tell a story about how his ship's captain held a luau for all those aboard. He could tell the story as a way to illustrate his belief that the captain believes everyone matters on his ship. Or, the story might be a way to illustrate a different belief -- that the captain is lax and wastes Navy resources. Or perhaps he sees the captain as trying to establish a connection with all the sailors aboard, but failing -- because the captain wouldn't allow beer at the luau.

So my conclusion is that if you want to shape your organization's culture, you should cultivate your storytelling ability. Beware, though, because every story you tell can become a kind of Pandora's box -- you cannot be sure about how the story's meaning may change as it ripples through the organization.

a visual display of keywords for The Wisdom of Managing Change

I saw a "wordle" on Jordi Comas' blog, the Nets We Weave, and I wanted to see what one for my blog would look like. Here it is: I wish I could figure out how to display the entire rectangle, rather than just a square.

the lighthouse of transformative cooperation

As I step into my new research persona, I have been thinking back on the scholarship I've done in the past decade that will be of value as I enter the arena of inter-agency collaboration. One way to find nuggets of wisdom I had forgotten that I had gained is to reread my previously published work. I began with the volume that I co-edited with David Cooperrider and Ron Fry,  A Handbook of Transformative Cooperation (exerpts available to read at Google Books, and to purchase from Stanford University Press or Amazon). Here are some key exerpts from the first chapter, of which I am the lead author:

"We wanted to understand what it would take to transform the world, and we entered with one assumption: that cooperation is potentially transformative and can be designed to maximize that potential."

"as we got better at seeking out stories that challenged our assumptions about business competition and managerial self-interest, we found more and more reasons to hope."

So the assumption that cooperation is a powerful force for good is our lighthouse. It is where we begin from in theorizing about cooperation, and where we return to after seeking wisdom from different scholarly literatures. We understand that cooperation is not always a force for good, and that even cooperation that has a positive impact is not always transformative for its participants. Still, our aim became to describe, illustrate, and explain how cooperation can become positive and transformative for all those involved.

Here is our starting point in explaining how cooperation can become transformative:

"Transformative cooperation is a process. It involves both dialogue and action. ...
The root is always hope....
Someone takes unilateral action....
Others join in – the potential for cooperation exists....
Participants may not coordinate their actions smoothly at first....
Responses to the actions of others might include….
The worst possible outcome is that the coordination breaks down… and turns into a fight. Boundaries between different groups emerge. ...
Another possible outcome is that cooperation occurs, but is not transformative....
If cooperation is reinforced the potential for transformation emerges....
Participants will come to think of one another as connected to one another, as members of a group or community, and individuals will continue to be attracted to become participants in the community.

The cooperation becomes self-sustaining, and goes on and on. A community has been brought to life and thrives."

Where have instances of transformation occurred? Did they follow a pattern as they unfolded, like the sequence laid out in the exerpt above, or in some other way? These are the questions that we addressed in the handbook, along with the chapter authors who contributed to the volume.