Evolving the Organisation

For the next three weeks i’m running a programme around Change Leadership, drawing on my previous work around ‘change as a social movement’, as well as newer work on ‘power ’, ‘identity’, and ‘voice’. I’m using this as a chance to build out some new ideas, and to consider the question of how we lead across multiple systems, through change. From formal to social, and at the intersection of these.

To truly understand change, we need to consider the overarching structures in which our sense of ‘now’ is held: our formal Organisational ones (which we can see, feel, quantify, and change), and the our social and cultural ones – stories, behaviours, belief, pride, belonging , identity, authenticity, voice, and so on (which we cannot force to change, but which will evolve).

To change is hence to alter the formal structure, but also to weave a new narrative around it – to change in both structure and story. Indeed, in ‘The Socially Dynamic Organisation ’ i expressed this by saying that Organisations are primarily entities of story and belief , in that these things are woven around the formal, but form the connective, or constricted, tissue. It is in these stories and social structures that both constraint and dynamism are held.

To change is a dance between the two: an adaptation of the formal, and an evolution of the social, but only one of these can you fully control and therefore change becomes both a dictated and a negotiated phenomena.

I suspect that what our Organisations need is mastery in these different dimensions (although interestingly not necessarily held within the same person). We need to understand the cultural journey of change, the social and tribal one, the narrative one, the flow of identity, the mechanisms by which we process loss, the flow of power within and between parallel systems, and the ways that people come to ‘believe’ in the new story. Because without belief, we may simply be squatting in someone else’s story.