The Wisdom of Managing Change

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.

vision for my research persona

At the "blogging for management scholars" PDW in which I participated yesterday, I uncovered a nascent (re)vision of both my blog and my research focus.

My research on transformative cooperation is eminently relevant for the challenges that the Coast Guard and the Navy face in interagency collaboration. The challenges that the Coast Guard and the Navy face because of the fixed-duration rotations officers are assigned to highlights the importance of transitions from the social network of each outgoing officer to the social network of each incoming officer. For officers, the importance of developing collaborative and relationship-building competencies is high. Gathering quantitative and qualitative data about how they develop those competencies is an opportunity I will pursue full steam ahead. I will continue elaborating my developing research ideas, both here in the blog and with an eye toward publication.

I will also be refocusing my blog on the explicit aim of involving other scholars in conversation about my own research, and their related interests in relationships, organizational change, and cross-organizational collaboration. I will invite scholars I know to comment and perhaps to guest-blog about our shared research interests.

If you are doing research you'd like to share, please check back soon at The Wisdom of Managing Change, and please comment on my upcoming blog entries!

If you know colleagues who are doing research they'd like to share that is connected to these topics, please invite them to email me at piderit dot mac dot com, and to visit this blog, so they can join the conversation as well.

transforming the academy

I depart this afternoon for Chicago, where I will attend the 2009 Academy of Management conference. This gathering of thousands of management professors, professionals, and students is convened annually to bring attendees up to date on the state of the art in management research and teaching.

My moment in the spotlight will be an opportunity to role model for other participants how to set up a manageable routine for reading and commenting on blogs. I'll be speaking at the professional development workshop (PDW) organized by CV Harquail. It's called "Blogging for Management Scholars: Why and How to Read Blogs, Write for Blogs, and Create your Own Blog" and will be held on Friday, from 8 AM to 3 PM, at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.

At first, it may not seem like such a subversive act -- but blogging is quite subversive within the academy. As scholars, we are oriented toward publishing journals and books, and very few of those publications have made the transition to digital media. Bringing our ideas to life online, as we develop them -- that will be truly transformative.

I invite you to follow our progress as we transform the academy from a staid, old-fashioned print orientation to a provocative, trend-setting array of electronic conversations:

Check out the workshop blog. It's called Insights to Actions.

a scholar tells a story, with data: unleashing change

In an earlier post, I wrote about scholar Karl Weick's observation that "sages tell stories". There are lots of people in different professions who tell stories -- journalists, educators, and marketing managers, to name just a few. What makes scholars different is that they tell stories that explain *why* and *how* things work the way they do.

Steven Kelman's book, Unleashing Change: A Study of Organizational Renewal in Government, is a great example of a scholarly story. Dr. Kelman served as Administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in the Office of Management and Budget between 1993 and 1997. During that time, he played a lead role in the effort to "reinvent government." At the same time, he gathered data from frontline employees, via a survey of 1593 contracting employees at 19 buying offices. He also conducted in-person interviews with over 200 civil servants (both frontline employees and their leaders) with the help of a research assistant.

Throughout the book, Kelman contrasts previously existing theories of organizational change with what the data analysis suggested was really happening in the procurement offices to change the behavior of frontline employees. He categorizes three  theories of change: the Lewinian persuasive discussion theory, the burning-platform theory, and the leader-pressure theory. None of the three theories did a good job of explaining how procurement reform was initiated successfully.

He develops an alternative theory of initiating change that is called the theory of activating the discontented. Chapter 6 in the book spells out the implications of his theory, and argues that "discontent is likely to be present wherever rules, hierarchy, and specialization are central features of organization design." His theory illuminates a different role for leaders in initiating change -- not persuading, pressuring, or scaring employees, but focusing instead on providing "the opportunity for already-existing supporters to move" (p. 99).

The second half of Kelman's book focuses on how to consolidate change. He demonstrates how positive feedback can allowing a change initiative to grow by "feeding on itself". He also provides evidence about how the change in policies in the procurement offices had deepening effects on employees over time. The new policies became not just a matter of reducing the burden of paperwork for employees and for those they serve, but also a platform for innovation in delivering services.

I recommend Unleashing Change to any reader in search of a good scholarly story about a successful organizational change.

Can leaders drive a company through an organizational change?

Linda Ackerman and Dean Anderson wrote an article in the OD Practitioner a while back, Awake at the Wheel. They assert that depending on the type of change envisioned, managers need to engage in different behaviors to achieve their desired outcome. Some change is developmental, and some is transitional, and perhaps for those types of change the old wisdom about minimizing resistance might be useful, but for the third type of change, the transformational type, different challenges must be addressed.

Here's a key quote:
"Transformation is unique in two critical ways. First, the future is unknown at the start of the change process and can only be created by forging ahead with the intent to discover it. ... Secondly, the future state is so radically different than the current state that a shift of mindset is required to invent it, let alone implement and sustain it."

I'm intrigued that the metaphor that is implicit in this article.  "Awake at the Wheel" implies that leadership is steering an organization to a new destination. I think that the metaphor of leadership as steering, making course corrections, is a bit misleading, because it assumes that by force of sheer will a leader can create motion.

My dissertation was dressed up in the metaphor of sailing, which has affinities with the metaphor of steering. However, a sailboat cannot move equally quickly in different directions, and cannot sail directly into the wind at all (tacking back and forth is required). The sailing metaphor makes it clear that the leader must harness energy from the winds, using the tools available in terms of sails and ropes to trim.

This sailing metaphor is fundamental to my understanding of leading change. Leaders need to read the "winds" and "currents" around them in the organization, and work with them. By this, I mean that the relationships among employees are a key context when setting out to mobilize a company to change. Leaders must understand how employees connect with one another, and whose support and enthusiasm needs to be cultivated first, before committing the entire company to change. Leaders must acknowledge that some destinations cannot be reached directly. If key opinion-makers in the organization are not involved in the design of the change, none of the rational arguments in favor of the change will be heard -- the opposition of those excluded from choosing the company's next moves will prove to be powerful currents holding the company back from the leader's desired destination.

So, it takes more than a leader awake at the wheel to drive an organization through the change process. It also takes a leadership team with the ability to cultivate and tap into strong relationships throughout the organization. Then the team can draw on those relationships to collectively envision and implement a transformational change.

Karl Weick and wisdom

One of the sages of management scholarship is Karl Weick. I had the pleasure of studying with him while I was in the doctoral program at the University of Michigan. Last year, in the foreward to the Handbook of Organizational and Managerial Wisdom, he keys in on an alternative to accepting the label of "expert" -- instead of getting pulled into arguments about facts, sages tell stories.

Storytelling is a key part of Karl Weick's scholarship. Several of his most impactful academic writings delve deeply into stories of single events:

• the Mann Gulch fire
• the Pan Am-KLM collision in Tenerife
• the Union Pacific/Southern Pacific merger

The desire to avoid the label of "expert" is also a key part of Karl's approach to scholarship. He is a humble man, completely unpretentious. Despite his inclusion in a short list of management laureates, I cannot imagine him liking the idea that he might have the last word on a subject.

In the foreward to the Handbook, Karl evokes the notion that wisdom is about the tension between knowing and not knowing. He suggests that wisdom is expressed when a judgment about whether to use an expert's tools in a new situation, or to drop those tools and take on a beginner's attitude. His view of wisdom is consistent with the quote attributed to George Santayana on wisdom,

    "the wisest man has something yet to learn."