There is yet another school of thought represented by people such as Ralph Stacey (2001) and Patricia Shaw (2002). These writers use the metaphor of flux and transformation to view organizations. The implications of this mode of thinking for those interested in managing and enabling change are significant:
- Change, or a new order of things, will emerge naturally from clean communication, conflict and tension (not too much).
- As a manager, you are not outside of the system, controlling it, or planning to alter it, you are part of the whole environment.
In Patricia Shaw’s article Changing Conversations in Organizations, rather than address the traditional questions of ‘How do we manage change?’ she addresses the question, ‘How do we participate in the ways things change over time?’ This writing deals bravely with the paradox that ‘our interaction, no matter how considered or passionate, is always evolving in ways that we cannot control or predict in the longer term, no matter how sophisticated our planning tools’.
Our view
This is disturbing stuff, and a paradox that sets up some anxiety in managers and consultants who are disquieted by the suggestion that our intellectual strivings to collectively diagnose problems and design futures may be missing the point. Shaw says, ‘I want to help us appreciate ourselves as fellow improvisers in ensemble work, constantly constructing the future and our part in it’. Stacey says of traditional views of organizations as systems, ‘This is not to say that systems thinking has no use at all. It clearly does if one is trying to understand, and even more, trying to design interactions of a repetitive kind to achieve kinds of performance that are known in advance’.
Ralph Stacey and Patricia Shaw have both written about complexity and change. Managers, and particularly consultants, often find this difficult reading because on first viewing it appears to take away the rational powers we have traditionally endowed upon our managers, change agents and consultants. Patricia Shaw says of the traditional view of the process consultant:
I would say that [the] ideal of the reflective practitioner [who can surface subconscious needs so that groups of people can consciously create a directed form of change] is the one that mostly continues to grip our imaginations and shape our aspirations to be effective and competent individual practitioners engaged in lifelong learning. Instead, I have been asking what happens when spontaneity, unpredictability and our capacity to be surprised by ourselves are not explained away but kept at the very heart [of our work].
In contrast, those working in hugely complex environments such as the health sector or government have told us that they find the ideas in this area to be a tremendous relief. The notion that change cannot be managed reflects their own experiences of trying to manage change; the overwhelming feeling they have of constantly trying to push heavy weights uphill.
But how can managers and consultants use these ideas in real situations? We have distilled some groundrules for those working with complex change processes, although the literature we have researched studiously avoids any type of prescription for action.
In complex change, the leader’s role is to:
- Decide what business the organization is in, and stretch people’s thinking on how to get there.
- Ensure that there is a high level of connectivity between different parts of the organization, encouraging feedback, optimizing information flow, enabling learning.
- Focus people’s attention on important differences: between current and desired performance, between style of working, between past and present results.