How can we create & sustain energy for change?

How can we create energy in organisational change?

Energy Sapping Old Skool Organisational Change

There is an underlying assumption amongst traditional organisational change thought leaders that because ‘change it pain’ (Rock) and people are ‘canyons of complacency’ (Kotter 2012) organisational change needs to create an ‘emotional stir up’ ?(Lewin 1943), ‘sense of concern’ (Phillips 1983), ‘sense of urgency’ (Kotter 1995), ‘destroy attitudes’ (Schien 1962) or 'orchestrate pain' (Conner 1993).

Thankfully, our thinking has moved on. We recognize our duty of care to people and that scare tactics don’t work and undermine trusting relationships which are so critical for change.?As Kanter et al. (1992) suggests, we should be wary of overselling change and “crying wolf” too often.

From Discrete to Continuous Complex Change

If change is becoming a continuous process (rather than a set of discrete interventions/projects following n-step linear approaches) how can we keep energising & stimulating people to keep adapting and avoid entropy ?

Since the 1960’s organisations have been conceived as complex open systems - something that the Old Skool n-step models miss such as Kotter, ADKAR etc.?

Open systems can exchange energy/information with their environment – if the market becomes more competitive organisations must adapt or potentially die. Complex systems can

“change and reorganise their component parts to adapt themselves to the problems posed by their surroundings” (Holland 1992 p18)”

This is why our definition of organisational change is

“the practice of adapting human capability to meet internal?& external ambitions”

Physics has the answer?

Maybe physics has the answer to creating sustained change.

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When you watch this video something magical seems to happen as the metronomes start to synchronise.?

It is as if there is a rudimentary level of ‘consciousness’ as all the metronomes perceive the movement of others, act upon it and ‘decide’ to self organize because moving together is a more predictable preferred state to the unpredictable one of them all doing their own thing. I even found myself typing the orange guy (front row, third from the right) and his mate behind him as a potential resistor ??

But what we are really seeing is a simple transfer of energy in the form of vibrations through the blue table.?The pendulums become predictive of each other through the vicarious influence of the base.

How we sync with our environments

At a very simple level this is how organisations sync with their external environments and how we (humans) sync with ours. We minimize surprise (free energy) by continually testing our mental models and try to second guess our external environment (‘reality’) through a process of active inference . To minimize surprise, we actively seek information that confirms (infers) our world and pursue behaviours that create the world we want to live in.?If our mental or an organisation’s operating model no longer predicts its environment our world appears to be VUCA

I believe this view of organisations and people helps us get closer to solving the "two way relationship" (double hermeneutic) inherent in social systems that Sumantra Ghoshal challenged the management world with nearly 20 years ago and is often cited as the reason why social science should be treated differently from natural sciences (Giddens 1987)

By viewing organisations as complex systems, through the lens of active inference, we can see that people and organisations are both the influenced and the influencers of their environments.

Building Organisational Change Capability?

Through our behaviours, we all create information about who we are and our view of the world – we continually exchange energy with our environments, it doesn’t need to be forced as Conner, Kotter etc. tell us.?

So, the question is not how we create energy (the laws of physics stop us from doing that so no point in trying) but how it is channeled and under what conditions is it most efficiently transferred. How can we create paths or least resistance?

So rather than think about how we can herd people to a particular change, we should focus on creating the conditions (organisational change capabilities) under which any change can happen. People are smart enough and best placed to work that out what change needs to happen for themselves.

If you would like to find out more about building organisational change capability you can watch these two videos:

Trust In Leadership

Fairness in Decision Making

and sign up to our next Building Organisational Change Capability talks

Psychological Safety

Organisational Support

Building Strong Relationships

and the overview Building Organisational Change Capability

Watch out because there will be more...

If you are interested in testing your own organisations capability to change please get in touch!

Have a great weekend!