When the shift to self-organization (or any change effort) don’t work.

The existing data on the success rate of change efforts is limited and sometimes anecdotal, but all the estimates come to similar conclusions: bringing about organizational change successfully is a tough job. In books and articles, since 1993, authors affirm that 70% of change efforts do not achieve the result they intended[1].

In 2009, McKinsey published the result of a survey[2] of 1,546 business executives from different countries that highlighted that only 30% of the sample agreed that their change program had been “completely/mostly successful”.

?When we look at the reasons why change programs fail to achieve target impact, a 2008 study by McKinsey & Company[3] revealed that the two most important factors in failure are:

-??????Employees are resistant to change (39%); and

-??????Management behavior does not support change (33%).

The other two more marginal factors are inadequate resources or budget (14%) and other obstacles (14%).

It is interesting to note that the idea of employees’ resistance to change is not an objective reality. As quantum physics teaches us, there is no objective reality out there: reality is only subjective and depends on the observer and on expectations, beliefs, and mindsets. Thus, in the available research about why change fails, the resistance of employees is but one perspective reported by change agents and biased by their expectations and their interpretation of the change recipients’ behaviors.

Change agents (any corporate leader, change consultant, or appointed change catalyst inside an organization who is in charge or involved in designing and/or implementing change) are generally portrayed as facing an irrational and dysfunctional response on the part of change recipients,[4] without taking into consideration that agents are active participants in and co-creators of the change outcomes with their own behaviors and communication.

The fact is that when change agents receive questions, doubts, sarcasm, and alternative solutions as a reaction to their change messages, they tend to label people’s reactions as “resistance” instead of considering them as a form of energy that can fuel the change and maintain momentum and as a form of feedback on their (ineffective) ways of pushing change forward. Generally speaking, change agents do not consider that in most cases they contribute with their own actions and decisions to:

Breaches of existing agreements and, consequently, distrust ?

This happens every time change agents renege on a promise, an expected behavior, or practice, or modify the allocation of resources following a less than transparent process. When employees perceive injustice or betrayal, they are likely to feel resentment, a sense of being victimized, and a desire to punish the betrayers, along with a loss of trust in their employer.

Breakdowns in communication

This may happen for different reasons. The most common are a lack of or weak communication about the reason for the change (the benefits that change brings to the organization and to the various stakeholders) and the effort to provide rational justifications in response to the greater scrutiny of employees. It may also occur when change agents, intentionally or not, misrepresent the benefits, costs, or success of the change program.

Resistance to resistance

Very often change agents are resistant to ideas, proposals, and counteroffers suggested by change recipients. When exploring with the management teams of large clients how to announce or communicate the change to employees, our proposal to create a forum or a safe space where employees can share their concerns and ideas is too often discarded because the management fears that this would open a can of worms that would question the well-packed and immutable set of changes determined by the few at the top.

What is at play that the people leading the change effort don’t see? How could we make sure that organizations willing to move to self-organization (or deploying any other change initiative) would increase their chances of success?

A different view of what makes change efforts ineffective

Over the years we have drawn different conclusions as to the real reasons why change efforts do not express their full potential.

The illusion that change works top-down

Like any strategic decision in most organizations, the goals, direction, and process of the change (and often even the tactics) are defined around a small table with very few people. Then, as many change methodologies suggest, the CEO develops a “guiding coalition”, namely a group of senior leaders who ideally embrace the change and push it downward to the rest of the organization. Those involved often comply with the CEO’s expectations in the hope of a promotion or a reward or for gaining more power. Usually there is no participation or input from the employees in the change purpose or strategy. Without any participation in the decisions that will impact their future, it is extremely unlikely that employees feel engaged or take ownership of the change.

When management tells people what is changing without seeking any of their input, they miss the opportunity to tap into the energy that comes from the sense that solutions are co-created. This is why coaching is far more effective than any other kind of training or instruction and produces a Return of Investment of 700%[5] – the coach doesn’t tell the coachees the answer or the solution to their problems but helps the coachees to access their own knowledge and wisdom to craft their own solutions. And this not only creates much more accountability and engagement but also more effective outcomes and results.

The illusion that an organization (and its people) works as a machine

Management and consultants expect that once the implementation is complete, people automatically change the way they work according to the new rules of the game. Management treats the organization just as a machine. They communicate a set of instructions from the top and expect the machine to be automatically reprogrammed.

Neuroscience helps us to consider how our brain works when we are told what to do. David Rock, a leadership consultant and author of the book Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Leadership At Work, and Jeffrey Schwartz, a research scientist at UCLA, maintain that:

?“The traditional command-and-control style of management doesn’t lead to permanent changes in behavior. Ordering people to change and them telling them how to do it fires the prefrontal cortex’s hair trigger connection to the amygdala. The more you try to convince people that you’re right and they’re wrong, the more they push back. The brain will try to defend itself from threats.”

The illusion that change happens without transformation

Change is what happens in the environment outside of us, above the surface of our reality. It could be a new organizational structure, a new IT infrastructure, a new work methodology. When faced with change, human beings need to adapt and align to the new reality. This adaptation process is called transformation. It happens inside of us and helps us to reformulate how we think, what we believe, and how we feel, so that our consciousness can move past our fears and adapt and embrace the change outside of us.

Transpersonal psychology[6] suggests that the innate desire to develop and grow infuses human beings with energy. Employees will not put sustained effort into a new kind of behavior if they have only an intellectual understanding of why it matters to the company; it must mean something much deeper to them!

If the leadership of an organization does not recognize that there is a need to address the change on one side AND the human transformation on the other, it sets the change up for failure.

Often, the shift from hierarchy to self-organization is a top-down change program. Some self-organization models suggest that when the CEO is ready and sign a new “organizational constitution” that rules how work must be carried out, then the rest of the company will shift. We always argued this is not the case.

What makes our AEquacy implementation model conducive to change

When we started to design the best course of action to support an organization to adopt AEquacy, a hierarchy-free organizational design and operating model, a few principles were absolutely clear to us, and we built the sequence of implementation phases around those principles:

Broad participation

Contrary to the way most change programs are implemented, with AEquacy all the employees, or a broad representation of them, should be engaged from the beginning in the decisions, in the design and in the planning of the new design. We propose the AEquacy concept and the building blocks of the new design to the organization, but employees will design their own company, its purpose, and the way people will work together.

Self-transformation

AEquacy Certified Facilitators are trained to support people to make the shift in consciousness that enables them to update their map of the world, their mindsets, and their ability to move past their fears and embrace change. This support includes a process of alignment between their personal values, what they care about most, and the desired values they want to experience in the organization.

Bridging organizational change with people’s needs and desires.

Creating a connection between the deeper needs and desires of employees and the higher scope of the change (which should include the meaning of the change for society, for customers, for the company and its stakeholders, for the team, and for the individual employees) can trigger a shift in perspective and behavior. It is important to give change a personal meaning for employees.

Prototyping

The implementation model’s focus is on an iterative process of a) research problems and opportunities, b) identify themes and brainstorm solutions and ideas, c) testing the ideas and getting feedback and input to refine the solutions and d) finally experimenting and testing ideas and solutions as an early, inexpensive, and scaled-down version, in order to quickly measure the impact and reveal potential problems with the implementation.

The idea is that any solution is never expected to be definitive and “perfect” from the start, but rather safe enough to try, with cycles of testing and refining until the solution meets the needs of the users.

Applying these principles to the organizational design change effort (but also to any change initiative) allows employees to become co-authors of the change outcome and thus committed to its success, helps them evolving their mindsets and capacity to hold new perspectives and find meaning in the change initiative and to learn to prototyping to innovate.

If you find the content of this article interesting, please consider to buy the book "AEquacy. The new human-centered organizational design to thrive in a complex world."

[1] Michael Hammer and James Champy, in their book “Reengineering the Corporation”; Nitin Nohria and Michael Beer in a 2000 Harvard Business Review article; John Kotter in his 2008 book “A Sense of Urgency”

[2] The Inconvenient Truth about Change Management by Scott Keller and Carolyn Aiken (https://projektmanazer.cz/kurz/soubory/modul-c/the-inconvenient-truth-about-change-management.pdf).

[3] Beer and Nohria (2000); Cameron and Quinn (1997); CSC Index; Caldewell (1994); Gross et al. (1993); Kotter and Heskett (1992); Hickings (1988); Conference Board report (Fortune 500 interviews); press analysis; McKinsey analysis.

[4] “Resistance to Change: The Rest of the Story,” by Jeffrey D. Ford, Laurie W. Ford and Angelo D’Amelio, Academy of Management Review 2008, Vol. 33, No. 2, 362-377.

[5] The 2009 International Coach Federation (ICF) Global Coaching Client Study reported the median coaching ROI of coaching to be 700%.

[6] Transpersonal psychology developed in the 1960s, when Abraham Maslow, Stanislav Grof, and others began integrating the classical Asian traditions of Zen Buddhism, Taoism and yoga into their theories and the practice of humanistic psychology.