Change and the Socially Dynamic Organisation

Many of my conversations at the moment seem to concern movement: on the one hand, movements forwards – to ‘unlock’ and ‘unleash’ potential, or change, to exploit new technology and to ‘transform, to move into a ‘future of work’ – and on the other hand, a movement backwards, towards the familiar – back to the office, back to familiarity, back to ‘basics’. Pretty much nobody is asking me how they can stand still.

In my own work, the key dimension that I’m exploring around this is not to view it as a single, linear track. One that we move forwards or backwards along. But rather to consider a more holistic and multi dimensional perspective that may cause us to deconstruct the very phrasing of our questions.

When we define something, we do so either through presence, or absence. If I wish to go to New York, I am defining it by presence. If I simply wish not to be here, I am defining it by absence – anywhere else in the world would be fine, just not ‘here’. When we look backwards, we may be more likely to define by presence: back to something defined and family – a structure of power, a place, a sense of collaboration, a habit or visible feature – whilst when we look forward it may be more of a sense of absence – e.g. not here! We want to be more effective and agile, more culturally coherent and ‘together, more inclusive and tech enabled, more innovative and competitive. But all of that – at heart – means ‘not here’.

If we consider change at the broadest level, we can look at it in terms of what we want, or want to lose – where we come from and where we are going. But we can also look at it in a different way: in terms of the general resisters and amplifiers of change within our unique context (essentially how sticky, fluid, or elastic our current context is), and also in terms of our ‘sense making’ apparatus, which is a key feature of insight and understanding.

And in an ecosystem perspective, we should also consider the value of viewing the Organisation not as one ‘thing’, but rather in multiple concurrent and parallel levels – the multi dimensional Organisations. I explored this idea in ‘The Socially Dynamic Organisation’ book, but have built it out further since then. Under this perspective we have the Structural Organisation – the one we can directly change and engineer, and then the many Social ones, including our individual and collective Social Contexts, within which we lead and learn, and within which the social construct of culture is held.

Collectively, under this view, we would see change more as a collective and social feature, with a structural component, but essentially one of social change, including the prototyping of alternative frames of understanding. And the prototyping of these frames is the intellectual pathways of change, because it is in the envisioning that we create and codify the new ‘reality’.

If we focus on the structural future, we confine our potential to ‘building’, in an attempt to fit the social within the structure. If we consider a more socially mandated model of change, we we the future state more as a dialogue between social structure and the formal context.

This may sound like we are somehow giving something up – some control, some definition, some power – whilst in reality we are recognising that true change is both a negotiated as well as a dictated feature – and that a socially moderated approach permits both greater individual agency, as well as the potential for emergence.

Emergence is something I’m increasingly interested in as part of the Learning Science work, and work on Collective Capability and Social Metacognition: it may sound like I’m saying ‘rely on good luck’, but emergence isn’t luck. It’s an output from an overall connective and dialogic system. Excellence is an emergent feature, not a fully codified one.

In my broadest work on the Social Age, I describe a foundational understanding, whereby we recognise that we are moving from an Industrial and Post Industrial model into something new: the Socially Dynamic Organisation, the broader societal context of the Social Age, which brings with it a fundamentally adapted system of power, influence, effectiveness and control. We can fight it, but that will only weaken us whilst asymmetric and non standard competitors fracture our foundations.

This is still early stage #WorkingOutLoud, but at the very least it impacts our thinking about organisational leadership and learning, as well as considering the extent to which our power is rooted in structure, culture, or simply historic pride and success.