Balancing group dynamics & creating resilience during change

Week 10 of this attempt to crowd-source a more robust body of knowledge for Organisational Change was tough. Getting my head around some of the concepts in Complexity Science and applying them to Organisational Change was difficult.

On the face of it concepts such as Non-Linearity and Robustness in Complex System seem quite abstract. But they are actually highly relevant to Organisational Change & Development.

Non-linearity helps to understand why Group Dynamics is so important to Organisational Change and why, when we talk about concepts such as robustness and resilience, it is so important to be clear about what we mean.

Framing Organisational Change around Complex Systems has brought further clarity to my thinking which helps to bring focus in building this body of knowledge. Themes keep repeating themselves. The importance of Trust in Leadership, Organisational Justice (Fairness), Relationships, Psychological Safety are all rarely mentioned in popular books on Change Management but are robust constructs in Organisational Development.

I am coming to the end of the journey into Complex Systems (phew!) which I will be summarising at this Change Thoughts talk on Complexity in Organisational Change. So please join me (and help me ;) in consolidating this complex area.

Summary of this week's posts

We continued our journey through Complex Systems and their application to Organisational Change, deep diving into Non-Linearity and Robustness.

As mentioned above, understanding Group Dynamics is critical to Organisational Change. In this post I tried to outline how to keep the balance between autonomy and structure within groups during change.

In this post I suggested some strategies, such as building individual resilience, for building organisational robustness during change and distinguished this from the idea of organisational resilience.

Finally, I used this CIPD evidence review to create a graphic showing the drivers and outcomes of employee resilience.

Whilst reading up on Complex Systems my mind wondered into agile change management (I will link these two together later). I started looking at evidence to support whether it works and how it might work. So please vote here - the jury is still out so every vote counts!

Have a great week!

Events

Here are a group of 7 monthly talks that complement this newsletter covering the?History of Organisational Change,?Adopting a Scientific Mindset, Complex Systems, Myths of Organisational Change,?Neuroscience of Organisational Change?and?Change capabilities.

The aim of these monthly talks is to crowd-source a body of knowledge from people who have experience in Organisational Change.?I hope you can join us?

Purpose & Process

My ambition?for over 10 years has been to try to change Organisational Change (OC).

When I started in Organisational Change I did the usual round of training & qualifications. I was surprised by the underlying assumptions these methods made about human nature. It was taken for granted that 'the natural response to change was resistance' because 'brains hate change' or that we need to start with a 'sense of urgency' and that everyone's experience of change is the same. There was little evidence to support these claims. If managers and practitioners then adopted these methods wouldn't they become self fulfilling and organisations would find it hard to change?

That is?what I would like to change. To build a practice based on evidence. To discover how people really experience change and build organisations that are equipped to help people adapt and learn.

But none of us have all the answer which is why your comments and the dialogue we create is so important.

So the aim of this weekly newsletter?is to crowd-source a body of knowledge from people who have experience in Organisational Change.

To build this body of knowledge?I aim to cover the following topics over the coming weeks and months:

• History of Organisational Change?- this seems like a logical place to start to assess the current body of knowledge and tease out areas that need to be worked on
• Adopting a scientific mindset?-?we need a systematic way of building knowledge and challenging our beliefs
• Myths of Organisational Change -?this will be an exploration into current Organisational Change beliefs and whether they fit with the way we want to build our knowledge base
• Definition and Structure?- maybe the most difficult part. How do we agree axioms on which to build our practice?
• Change capabilities -?this is the body of evidence - a set of capabilities that organisations need to develop to be able to change. The fun bit would be working together to constantly test the effectiveness of these capabilities constantly enhancing our body of knowledge.

Published by

Alex Boulting, Chartered FCIPD

Helping organisations create the ability to change