Management Perspectives

It is stating the obvious to say that change is ubiquitous, in both organisations and life, more generally. We are awash with advice from experts, thought leaders, consultants, former leaders, academics, and more on how to manage, lead, navigate, deliver, overcome, drive, and generally wrangle change such that we experience some semblance of control over ‘it’, however illusory. This is in no small way down to the myth of fixability (Cole & Higgins, 2022), the idea that we have more agency than we actually do when faced with messy reality. It is a form of laziness, in part underpinned by assumptions about the nature of change. We see this in responses to complex challenges such as climate change or pandemics, and this thinking is pervasive in organisations, where the allure of ‘n’ step models of change remains strong, even though the evidence base for many of these is suspect. For example, a 2013 study found that as many as 13 of the most widely used ‘planned change models’ replicate and echo Kurt Lewin’s three-step model (Evans, 2020: 6) . In a further delicious twist, there is some question as to whether Lewin ever developed a three-stage model of change. Cummings et al suggest that it came into being after his death (2016: 1) and: “This foundation of change management has less to do with what Lewin actually wrote and more to do with others’ repackaging and marketing.” (Ibid.: 3) This is an example of the laziness I mentioned earlier: it is a lot easier to simplify Lewin’s work than wrestle fully and engage with the complexity and mess of change as it ‘really’ is in human systems.

What are the essential ingredients for positive change, then?

The first thing to say is that the top ‘3’, ‘5’, or ‘10’ lists are part of the problem; they are a way to manage anxiety by suggesting that if you do these things then everything will be fine. My intention in what follows is to offer a few suggestions that might serve all leaders when faced with change, to consider, along with an invitation to see these as a starting point first and anything but definitive:

Remember, change is not a thing

Despite developments in organisational and leadership theory and practice over the last thirty years, organisations are steeped in often unconscious, and therefore untested, assumptions about what an ‘organisation’ is. The fact we assume it is a ‘thing’ may be the first problem: it is not, it is an abstraction, and only exists because the people in it decide it is one. ‘Thingification’ is endemic in organisations and theories about them, and ‘management speak’ is dripping with abstractions and nominalisations (verbs solidified into abstract nouns). ‘Organisation’, ‘culture’, ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ are all abstractions, and ‘change’ is the daddy. We ‘land the change’ and ‘drive change’, which makes it easier to construe ‘it’ as a thing we can move around, like furniture. The trap for leaders is that the pressure they are under can lead to oversimplification of complex phenomena. The need, therefore, is to see things as they really are, and change as unfolding, ubiquitous, complex, and messy.

Re-think change capability building

When organisations embark on largescale change, particularly, when there is a recognition it might involve cultural and behavioural change (which essentially means every change project, unless your organisation employs nothing but robots), there is often an intent to upskill a core number of people, building capability in consulting or change agency, say. This is a form of psychological splitting: leaders appoint teams of specialists ‘qualified’ to deal with the issue(s) so they themselves do not have to think deeply about it. I have run many capability building programmes, and a common pattern has emerged. As soon as development has taken place, the very people who have had their ‘capabilities built’ are included in restructures and consultations, and large numbers end up leaving. As I have explored this further, it has become clear that organisations typically do not have a clear idea whether they want (and need) either context-specific specialists who can move between spaces in response to need or ‘centres of excellence’ so everyone knows what ‘good’ looks like. What is clear from many conversations with leaders is that they know how important these skills are. As one senior leader said to me about the people I was about to start developing, “We want them to be far more skilled at support and challenge and acting at a level above their pay grade.” The need, therefore, is to ensure that skills are developed both where needed within a business, and that senior leaders recognise when they too have capability gaps. This requires a fundamental rethink of what is meant by change capability building, and who needs it.

Change is everybody’s responsibility

Linked to this is the tendency to see change as the responsibility of a narrow set of people, often at the top, and/or the specialist teams mentioned above. The reality is that knowledge lies out in the organisation. A good example of this is every episode ever of the TV programme Undercover Boss, where the moral of the story is typically ‘leader-learns-something-reallyimportant-they-would-never-have-knownhad-they-not-spoken-to-the-people-whoactually-create-value-in-their-organisation’. It is a wonderful example of how things are simply not joined up in many organisations, and no wonder senior executives need the plausible deniability of a consultant, sometimes one after the other, overriding what came before with newer, shinier presentations and models. Change, particularly, culture change, is everybody’s responsibility. To change a whole system, you need everyone involved, or at the very least, a representative of every part of the system. This requires leaders to both let go of their need to be in control and accept they may not know everything or have all the answers. This is a muscle that needs to be intentionally worked.

Model it

Connected with this is the fact that most change initiatives have a cultural element to them or depend on behaviour change. That is true even with organisation redesign, often mistakenly construed as merely technical or structural change. One 6,000-strong global organisation I encountered in 2015 restructured from a divisional to matrix structure. I asked how it had gone. The response? “Nothing has changed—the top thirty people are all behaving in the same way.” In the case of another client, the senior leaders of the EMEA region in a global business mandated new behaviours. Again, little change, and one courageous OD manager within the business pointed out to them the reason for this was that they, as the five most powerful and influential figures, were not modelling the behaviours they expected others to adopt. Time and again, the single biggest failing I see is the inability of leaders to model behaviours and ways of working they expect others to adopt. If you cannot do that, do not expect change to stick. 

Acknowledge and attend to anxiety

Take organisation design as an example again. When you re-design an organisation, you are in effect removing or at the very least disrupting the containers that have held anxiety in place for those working in the system. If you remove these, you need to think about how to manage the anxiety that in all likelihood will increase in light of change, even if it is framed as a ‘good thing’. The difficulty is that most organisations, and leadership teams, struggle to even admit to anxiety, or know how to attend to it when it arises, in no small part due to the shame dynamic. When things do not go to plan, there can be another whole cycle of denial rooted in the need to defend the fragile egos and reputations of all involved. And there is a lot of vulnerability at play that drives behaviours, and it boils down to some profoundly human stuff that is as real in a school playground as it is in a boardroom. When Allan Katcher, an American psychologist, asked senior executives what they would “least want their subordinates to know about them, in nineteen out of twenty cases” they “feared that their subordinates would learn how inadequate they felt in their jobs” (Micklethwaite & Wooldridge, 1997: 60).

What all of this requires

In terms of what this translates into for leaders of change, I suggest there are four things:

1.Develop reflexivity: it all starts here, with the ability to notice your own beliefs, judgments, and practices and what influences them.

2.Cultivate a both/and mindset: if the context you are in is full of people demanding certain, binary, yes/no, either/or answers, getting comfy with not knowing means working with nuance.

3.Ask questions: when you are in the mess and the unknown, that is a place for sensing and responding, not heroic leadership.

4.Experiment: being prepared to fail and learn is central when you do not know what is going on or what to do. Leaders will never be omniscient or omnipotent. A more grounded and compassionate stance is one of courageous humility in the midst of change. Anything else runs the risk of denying reality.