From Plan and Manage to Sense and Respond

CONTEXT

“Change management, huh? Well, good luck! Has anyone told you about Jackson yet?”

It was my first day on the job as a change management specialist, and I was introducing myself to the project teams I would be supporting.

“Who is?Jackson?” I asked.

The employee chuckled and explained that “Jackson” was the name of a failed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) initiative the company had experienced.

Apparently, "Jackson" was?disastrous. At go-live, work ground to a halt across the organization. Materials and parts couldn’t be ordered, invoicing couldn’t be completed, and employees weren’t being paid.

The impact of "Jackson" led to a massive decline in the company’s share price and the resignation (or firing) of most of the executive team.

Although the implementation and go-live had occurred a few years before I started, “Jackson” had become folklore within the organization.

In fact, “Jackson” was now used as a noun to describe a doomed project that was sure to fail:

?? ???? ?“You’ve got yourself a Jackson, don’t you?”

?? ???? ?“OMG, this project is going to be a Jackson.”

?? ???? ?“I’m not going near that Jackson.”

The scars left by "Jackson" were fresh in employees’ minds, creating difficulties for me because any association with technology change—or change management in general—was viewed negatively.

It was challenging to get time with managers and employees to discuss new change initiatives. I even had one group of employees avoid me because (as I found out later) they thought the role of a change manager was to fire them!

I was going to have to adjust my approach to change if I was going to have any chance of success within the current organizational context.

THE BIG IDEA

Organizations are complex adaptive systems (CAS) because they are made up of interconnected agents that continuously interact, adapt, and evolve in response to internal and external changes.

Working in complex adaptive systems requires a shift from the traditional "plan and manage" approach to change to an?approach based on "sense and respond" (sense-making).

Acting in a CAS starts with making sense of its historical experience with change, because a CASs history?influences its current and future disposition toward change.

This is a concept known as?path dependency.

Path dependency refers to how a CAS’s historical patterns of interactions, decisions, and events shape its current and future behaviour.

Present conditions and emergent dynamics influence the trajectory of the system over time, often creating feedback loops that reinforce certain behaviours or outcomes.

The history of a CAS is unchangeable and becomes part of the organization’s memory, deeply influencing the present and shaping the potential for future outcomes.

Making sense of historical context is critical for change agents because it can guide future experiments, actions, and interventions.

INTRODUCING THE "X" FRAMEWORK ?

Ok, I'm going to start by admitting that I couldn't think up a better name for the framework, so for now it's called "X" because its shape resembles the letter X.

This framework helps make sense of the current state through the lenses of the organization's historical context and guides thinking for interventions and actions for the future.

The central idea is that patterns (recurring behaviours) for how change is managed in an organization appear as narratives (the way people talk about change) and narratives influence how people interact with change.

If you can make sense of what you are able to observe via interactions and narratives, you can begin to make sense of the underlying patterns that support them.

If you can do that, you can get a better understanding of experiments you can implement to shift interactions, create new narratives, and maybe enable new patterns to emerge,

The left side of the framework is where we make sense of historical context, while the right side is where we design system interventions.

In the X Framework, the change agent is always positioned in the present, represented by the intersection point between the past and future cones.

The past is unchangeable, but acting in the present with historical context in mind is how we can influence new interactions, narratives, and patterns to emerge. ?

INTERACTIONS

Observable interactions are the building blocks of narratives and patterns and are the most immediately visible aspect of organizational behaviour.

Repeated interactions often reveal underlying dynamics driving system behaviour.?Examples include repeated behaviours in team meetings, decision-making processes, workflows, communication patterns, etc.

It’s helpful to observe interactions at the individual, team, and leadership levels. In the?aftermath of "Jackson" interactions around change were extremely negative. Leaders?were hesitant to be sponsors, managers were hesitant to expose their teams to another negative experience, and frontline employees looked to their managers and leaders as examples of how to approach change.

NARRATIVES

How the organization talks about change (narratives) influences how people interact with change because they shape how individuals and groups perceive and talk about their experiences with change.

I encountered narratives about change on my very first day of working in "Jackson's" shadow:

• “You’ve got yourself a Jackson, don’t you?”
• “OMG, this project is going to be a Jackson!"
• “I’m not going near that Jackson.”
• "Change management is here to fire us!"
• "Change management, hey, well good luck with that."

There was deep mistrust regarding change and change management. Change was seen as something the organization was not good at and something to be avoided.

A narrative is different from a story. A story has a beginning, middle, and end. A narrative is a system of stories that, taken altogether, paint a larger picture with a beginning, a middle, but not an end.

Narratives that employees tell about the organization reveal the emergent patterns that exist.?

PATTERNS ?

Patterns are recurring behaviours, practices, or structures that have developed over time as ways to address change within the organization.

Patterns emerge because of experience and learning, becoming the “standard” or “default” approach that the organization uses to navigate change.

Patterns are the established ways of working that people fall back on because they are “the way things are done around here” and because they align with the organization’s culture and values. Organizational narratives emerge from and reinforce patterns.

Patterns are not problems.

Problems have a clear cause-and-effect relationship and are solvable by breaking down the system into parts to identify and fix their root cause.

Patterns, however, are recurring behaviours or interactions that emerge from system dynamics. They cannot be “fixed” in isolation because there is no single root cause—only a confluence of causes.

LESSONS FOR MODERN CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Working in complex adaptive systems requires a shift from the traditional plan and manage approach to change to an?approach based on sense and respond.

Historical context serves as a guide for how the change agent might intervene in the system to shape new expectations for interactions, leading to new narratives, and, over time, new patterns for change.

It’s important to recognize that interactions, narratives, and patterns do not influence each other in linear ways.

The process of emergence relies on complex, non-linear dynamics and feedback loops. In this article I introduced the "X" framework and focused on the left side of the framework -?historical context.

My next article will focus on the right side of the framework - system interventions. This framework and the ideas surrounding it are the basis for my new?Systems and Complexity?workshop that is being launched next month. Check it out if these ideas interest you. ?

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