Creating better organisations

I used to help organisations change and improve by creating plans and timelines, drawing diagrams and flows, showing where problems are, and how we can make things more efficient. Creating reports of progress and expected outcomes. Sometimes, this was useful and they were acted on but the outcomes were not as expected. And most times the efforts of making change happen were thwarted before they were complete.

• The plans never matched the real trajectory that the change needed to go in the way that we thought. The typical response to this was to try and close the gap between the plan and the reality by forcing the actions needed.
• The diagrams were interesting but in themselves they had little real impact on changing the way people understood the patterns the diagrams were describing.? People held on to their previous narrow beliefs.
• Pointing out problems highlighted them, but it left the causes of the problems hidden. The problems emerged later to cause further problems in another part of the organisation.
• The reports simply did not portray the reality of what we were trying to communicate, insights were not recognised and often reports were misinterpreted into something that was not intended. In one situation, six months of great work was discarded in a few weeks, because I had created a report to communicate the learning and outcomes to a senior manager.
• Resistance to change was rife, and I attempted to resolve by communicating and ensuring staff affected are informed and have the ability to comment on the change as it happens. However this situation mainly placated people for a short time.

My thinking

Different activities occurred than anyone would have predicted and I understood that it was down to me not having done something well. What I eventually found out was that this variation from the intended plan was actually part of the uncertainty that is inherent in organisations. I learned that the idea of being able to predict, in advance, what was going to occur was a folly of my mechanistic mindset. I learned that people were at the heart of how organisations works and that people are not mechanistic in the way that they perceive, how they work together and how make decisions. If we switch our mechanistic paradigm to one of a Complex Adaptive System CAS, then we open up to using alternative ways of understanding the organisation and enabling change.

My new systemic and complexity informed approach

• Allow uncertainty to be bolstered by working together to get systemic understanding, rather than detailed analysis and data.
• Use diagrams, but it is in the coming together, recognising our silo perspectives, with a desire to learn using the concepts that underpin the diagrams, that makes the diagrams useful.
• Create directions of change, using a framework that allows for the necessary flexibility for outcomes to emerge.
• Start with the behaviours and culture and work back into the concepts and paradigm that we hold as truths. These cause culture. Expand the engrained paradigm to come to recognise a new shared common view of our organisation and how we work.
• Recognise the difference between complex and logical situations, and realise that each uses different methods and approaches. If we use methods designed from one in the other, then they will fail.
• Work together and explore and learn together in the hierarchy, rather than tell people what the solutions are and what they should do.
• Come together from across disciplines and departments, and have meaningful conversations to learn and change together.
• Dont try and impose change on others, help them to be the change. The design and change team made up of staff from the service. Then resistance to change dissolves.
• Help decision-makers reflect on what their role might now become.
• Story-telling and and sense-making become powerful techniques to share complex multilayered situations.
• Presentations are replaced by leaders becoming part of the design team, through frequent engagement and working together.
• Measures are visible and used by the change team, rather that hidden and sent to managers.
• Systems thinking and complexity concepts and methods replace reductionist analysis and project planning.
• We begin to replace command & control mechanistic thinking with systemic wholistic thinking.
• Networks across the organisation begin to become more important than formal hierarchical control mechanisms.
• Managers support and remove barriers to change rather than define what should happen and measure compliance.
• Innovation emerges from engagement with each other and the meaning that emerges. Together we create in ways that are not possible on our own.
• Be pragmatic and see simple patterns through the complexity that confronts us. Dont follow rules, learn how to deal with patterns.
• Take people on learning journeys by demonstrating and witnessing what is happening in the workplace, rather than showing and telling.

The method of change

And lastly, this all combines to create a better systemic method for change in an organisation. Free from the constraints and thinking of the traditional planned mechanistic methods.

I uncover the evidence you need to understand where and what to change, and then work with you to create innovative and forward-thinking approaches to advance your organisation.

For examples https://www.improconsult.co.uk/systemic-design-portfolio.html

and further resources for you to browse that I use https://www.improconsult.co.uk/systemic-resources.html