Change, Conflict and Community: Challenging Thought and Action (The HR Series)

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Change, Conﬂict and Community

Organization Design ISBN: 978-0-7506-6367-0 Author: Naomi Stanford HR- The Business Partner ISBN: 978-0-7506-6454-7 Authors: Barbara Kenton and Jane Yarnall The Changing World of the Trainer ISBN: 978-0-7506-8053-0 Author: Martyn Sloman Transforming HR ISBN: 978-0-7506-6447-9 Authors: Marin Reddington, Mark Williamson, Mark Withers Strategic Career Management ISBN: 978-0-7506-8369-2 Author: Jane Yarnall

Change, Conﬂict and Community Challenging Thought and Action Barbara Kenton and Suzanne Penn

AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • HEIDELBERG • LONDON • NEW YORK • OXFORD PARIS • SAN DIEGO • SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO Butterworth-Heinemann is an imprint of Elsevier

Butterworth-Heinemann is an imprint of Elsevier Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford OX2 8DP, UK 30 Corporate Drive, Suite 400, Burlington, MA 01803, USA First edition 2009 Copyright © 2009, Barbara Kenton and Suzanne Penn. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved The right of Barbara Kenton and Suzanne Penn to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier’s Science & Technology Rights Department in Oxford, UK: phone (⫹44) (0) 1865 843830; fax (⫹44) (0) 1865 853333; email: [email protected]. Alternatively visit the Science and Technology Books website at www.elsevierdirect.com/rights for further information Notice No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN: 978-0-7506-8194-0 For information on all Butterworth-Heinemann publications visit our web site at www.elsevierdirect.com Typeset by Charon Tec Ltd., A Macmillan Company. (www.macmillansolutions.com) Printed and bound in Hungary 09

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Contents List of Figures List of Tables Series Preface Acknowledgements Chapter 1

Introduction

ix x xi xiii 1

The context of this book The aim of this book Who is this book for? Using this book Follow up and feedback

1 3 4 4 7

Chapter 2

8

Making sense of change

What do we mean by ‘change’? How do we feel about change? How do we think about change? Working with change Summary

9 11 13 28 29

Chapter 3

30

Patterns past

Looking back – where have we come from? Resistance to change The shadow system The role of the trade unions Transitional elements of change Summary

31 42 44 45 46 52

Chapter 4

53

Change and conﬂict – a chicken and egg debate?

What is conﬂict? Change triggering conﬂict

54 56

Contents

Conﬂict triggering change What is the cost of conﬂict? Summary

66 73 74

Chapter 5

75

Resolving conﬂicts

Individuals in conﬂict Self-management: self-esteem, self-awareness and emotional resilience Relationship management: empathy, language and behavioural ﬂexibility Key steps to handling conﬂict Supporting others in conﬂict Summary

76 78 82 93 94 100

Chapter 6

102

From conﬂict to collaboration

When conﬂicts get stuck Mediation as a way of resolving disputes So what does the process of mediation look like? Facilitation skills Internal or external mediators or facilitators? Summary

102 104 105 117 122 124

Chapter 7

126

Learning through change

Change, conﬂict and learning Learning interventions Summary

127 141 154

Chapter 8 Energizing the organization Introduction Approaches for managers and change agents Change methodologies that energize Summary

155 155 158 170 181

Chapter 9

182

Holistically healthy organizations

What do we mean by organizational health? The process of healing Ways to support change from a naturopathic perspective Positive psychology A Gestalt approach to organizational health Health and well-being strategies Summary vi

183 190 192 193 194 196 200

Contents

Chapter 10 The bigger picture: community

202

Organizations as communities Organizations: a community within a community? Summary

203 216 224

Case studies

226

Introduction Case studies 1. Afﬁnity Sutton – Merging housing associations 2. Portsmouth NHS Trust – Setting up a mediation service 3. Red Bee – Change and Stress in the Workplace 4. Changes within Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service 5. O2: ‘A Better Place’ 6. Organizational Health from a Gestalt perspective 7. A change agent’s story

226 227 227 231 236 238 241 248 255

Bibliography and Further Resources Index

260 268

vii

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List of Figures

1.1 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1 9.2 9.3

Change, conﬂict and the community The lily pond model Four rooms of change Change triggering conﬂict Conﬂict triggering change Dealing with conﬂict Intrapersonal and interpersonal aspects of conﬂict Self-management Conﬂict handling styles Past experiences impacting present behaviour Process of conﬂict and cooperation The stages of mediation Positions and interests Integrating learning, change and conﬂict Roffey Park’s Iceberg model The locus of creativity Four-stage process of Appreciative Inquiry Aspects of health and well-being McMillan’s fractal web Cycle of experience

5 34 48 56 67 76 78 79 90 95 103 108 119 135 159 165 179 184 188 194

ix

List of Tables

2.1 4.1 4.2 5.1 7.1 8.1 8.2 9.1

x

Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization Unwritten commitments Perspectives on conﬂict Clearer and cleaner language Difference between discussion and dialogue Modes of facilitation Principles of Appreciative Inquiry Interruptions to the cycle of experience

15 60 71 89 142 160 178 197

Series Preface

The volatility of the external environment and the rapid pace of technological change have meant that change is more likely to be a constant feature for contemporary organizations and individuals rather than a linear series of initiatives. As a result, the need for effective change management is more important than ever before. The responsibility for managing change is shared between a number of different stakeholders but adopting a change agent role provides the ideal opportunity for HR practitioners to demonstrate their ability to add value to organizational performance. To take advantage of this opportunity, it is necessary to not only recognize the changes that are required but also to consider the impact these will have on the people involved. Organizational change in all its guises, whether we are talking about largescale transformational change or smaller, incremental adaptations, is likely to be accompanied by some degree of conﬂict. In some cases conﬂict will reﬂect reactions to the change, in others conﬂict will be the spark that ignites the change process. The existence of conﬂict does not necessarily mean that change has been incorrectly managed but does reﬂect some sort of adverse response to what is happening. And the conﬂict itself can take many forms, from external manifestations such as disputes and arguments, through to internal conﬂicts that may not even be apparent to the individual concerned. An understanding of the dynamic relationship between change and conﬂict can help those involved as change agents identify when conﬂict needs to be resolved, when it needs to be accommodated and how to channel conﬂict to positive effect. Whilst much has been written about strategic HR issues including change management, real life examples of what works and what doesn’t are still relatively thin on the ground. As editors, we recognize that HR professionals and senior managers alike face a sometimes overwhelming pressure to follow trends or apply quick-ﬁxes to a wide range of people management challenges. At the same time, it can be difﬁcult to get impartial advice on what to change and how to change it in order to create lasting results. We have, therefore, developed this series to bridge the gap between theory and practice by providing workable solutions to complex people management issues and by sharing organizational

Series Preface

experiences. The books within this series draw on live examples of strategic HR in practice and offer practical insights, tools and frameworks that will help to transform the individual and functional delivery of HR in a variety of organizational contexts. Change, Conﬂict and Community is a valuable addition to the series. Drawing on their own extensive experience, the authors meld practical examples with academic research to produce a book that is practical in focus, but underpinned by theory. The book helps improve our understanding of the dynamic relationship between conﬂict and change and the ways in with both are typically managed. In addition to providing practical approaches to dealing with conﬂict, the authors also explore how conﬂict can be used as a source of creativity to energize the organization. In its exploration of conﬂict and change the book takes us on a journey from toxic to holistically healthy organizations that also takes account of organizations within a wider social setting. The journey we undertake within the book is circular rather than linear and the end refers us back to the start and encourages us to re-examine our perspectives on change and conﬂict. The book is eminently readable and provides ideas and practical examples that will help HR professionals and other change agents deal with change and conﬂict with greater conﬁdence. Julie Beardwell Associate Dean Leeds Business School

xii

Linda Holbeche Director of Research and Policy CIPD

Acknowledgements

We are pleased to have an opportunity to recognize all the people who have contributed so generously to this book. The contributions have been in a whole host of formal and informal ways: through listening and giving views, telling of stories connected with change and conﬂict, contributing case studies, allowing references to linked material and altogether pushing us to make the end result possible. We have very much appreciated the patient interest, enthusiasm and active engagement of our colleagues at Roffey Park Institute, particularly Sue Belgrave and Alok Singh for their help with Chapters 8 and 10 and Clive Rufﬂe for his hard work on the copyright issues. We would also like to thank: Chris Lake of Integrated Development; Samantha Manning of the National School of Government; John Crawley of Conﬂict Management Plus for the contact for the Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service case study and Bob Ratcliffe for his input on this; Peter Shepherd of Ashridge Consulting and Jo MacBeth from O2; Sharon Varney, Paul Barber, John Allen, Mark Hewson, Alison Savage, Cathy Korn, Karin Svensson, Magnus Ernegård and Christophe Lora for case studies and discussions from their own experience and work which have helped to give real examples of change and conﬂict in practice; Rosie Jackson, Hazel Coomber, Sue Witchell, Barbara Sloan, Jane Watkins, Mette Jacobsgaard and Sandra Janoff for their insights and encouragement; and all the clients and colleagues we have worked with over the years for adding to our knowledge and experience in this ﬁeld. Particular thanks goes to Linda Holbeche and Julie Beardwell, Editors of the HR Series for the Series Preface; Ailsa Marks, Claire Hutchins and all their colleagues at Elsevier for making the publication possible. A special mention for our respective families who have helped shape who we are – in particular, Suzanne would like to thank her mum Joan, Jane, David, Steve, Siti, Sam and Ben, whose love and support makes all things possible. Finally, this book is dedicated in loving memory to Barbara’s sister Ann and Suzanne’s father, Reg, in deepest gratitude for their love and inspiration.

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1 Introduction

The context of this book What we’ve got now is a continuous turbulence in the organization which needs us to be ready to be changing, changing our focus, changing what we do, how we think, as we go. And that means you have to be looking at this in HR as something which goes beyond the ‘we’ll do a special project and stop’. Now, it’s not about changing organizations, it’s about changing people and people being ready for change all the time and I think that’s the atmosphere that HR needs to create in organizations today. Vicky Wright, CIPD President (CIPD Podcast 9 Jan 2007) As managers and HR practitioners supporting others through change, it is essential that we are able to work with change effectively, but what does ‘effectively’ really mean? We need organizations to thrive rather than just survive, to deliver the services and products needed, and to be sustainable in the long term. Corporations are tasked with achieving shareholder value. Many of us might also believe that we need organizations to contribute positively to our society in other ways, by creating places of work that are satisfying, motivating and contribute to our individual and collective well-being. We have high expectations of our organizations and high expectations of our ability to handle change including a corporate ability to contribute towards the environment and society as a whole. How effective are we at working with change in our organizations? It is often reported that we are not good enough at it, primarily because bottom line targets are not always achieved as a result of the changes designed to deliver on them. We are told for example that over 40% of reorganizations fail to meet their objectives (Whittington and Molloy, 2005). It is suggested that we are improving, but we still have many challenges: ‘Organizations are getting better in the

Change, Conﬂict and Community

earlier stages of change but ﬁnd it difﬁcult to learn and consolidate’ (Garrow and Stirling, 2007). There is little doubt that large scale changes are hard work to achieve. It is also true that there are people adapting, responding and shaping the future of their organizations every day in myriad smaller ways and there are many organizations where change is achieved in one way or another, with improved performance as a result. Part of our judgement about whether we handle change well, is to do with whether speciﬁc objectives have been achieved. Sometimes we fail to achieve our intended aims, sometimes those aims and goals prove to have been unachievable, or the context has shifted and they are less relevant. Another measure of success may be the experience of individuals and groups through that change. Did we manage to bring the best out of people? Did we work effectively together to achieve changes? How well did we manage the emotional ups and downs of change? With these less tangible aspects of change, it is hard to demonstrate one way or the other how well we have done. From most people’s experience, and perhaps on most people’s ‘wish list’, would be the desire for organizational change to be a more positive, energizing, productive and creative aspect of life than it is now.

What is the place of conﬂict within our ‘perfect’ picture of change? Change in organizations is a collective enterprise and it asks for the best of us, our creativity, our effort and our human collaboration, in order collectively to reshape and redeﬁne how we do what we do. At the same time, it is also capable of bringing out the worst of us, in tension, disagreement, conﬂict and fear. There is a tendency to assume that if we get change right, the shadow side of who we are should not somehow be there, that ‘conﬂict’ means we have got the change management process wrong in some way. Or perhaps we may take the view that in any change there will inevitably be winners and losers; that we can never make everyone happy but, nevertheless, we need to push the changes through and ride out the waves of resistance and angst. Between these two positions are many choices about change and how we view conﬂict in relation to it. Just as the challenge of change is not going to disappear, neither is the challenge of conﬂict, however much we might prefer to avoid it. We see signs of conﬂict within organizations in many different ways. A classic example is that of industrial relations disputes. In the UK, at the time of writing, the police are considering their options for dealing with a pay dispute and their right to strike against the government’s decisions. There are, however, many other manifestations of conﬂict within organizations which are far less obvious. For example, conﬂict between teams, arguments and stand-offs between individuals, resistance to change, harassment, grievances, disagreements, the ‘silent’ treatment and so on. We have all experienced it in one way or another. Some conﬂicts 2

Introduction

are a direct result of change; in other instances, conﬂict or dissatisfaction itself has created change and these notions are explored more in the book. Then there is the internal conﬂict that can be experienced by individuals during change, the emotional roller-coaster that does not always get noticed either by the individual or those around them. It is these dynamics between conﬂict and change which our book seeks to explore.

The aim of this book Our interest is in the dynamic nature of change, particularly as it relates to conﬂict and human relationships. We take a broad view of change, encompassing transformational, large scale change and small incremental everyday changes and adaptations. In addition, we recognize, as in Vicky Wright’s statement at the beginning of this section, that change is a part of our everyday life, rather than simply a linear series of initiatives that we can start and complete. Our focus is primarily on the relationship between change and conﬂict, the underlying assumptions that might be made about these two concepts, the human aspects in relation to organizational life and the considerations that could usefully be made by those of us working in support of organizational growth and learning. Our curiosity in writing this book has been: ■ ■ ■

How can we better understand the tensions that often exist when change is ever present in the organization? How can we work more effectively with the dynamic relationship between change and conﬂict? What other possibilities are there for how we work with the energy of change and of human interaction? How does the idea of ‘community’ help us with this?

The book is about being in the ‘thick’ of change; we are not concerned about how to do it perfectly, but rather how to deal with our experience of it and how it affects us as people; how to do the best we can, in the contexts in which we are working. This may include resolving conﬂicts where needed, learning to live with them, and/or using the positive energy of conﬂict to create change and improvement. A lot of time and energy is spent on conﬂict and change in many ways. Our belief is that organizations and individuals can work with change, in ways which use our best energies. The road is rarely smooth, but we can make progress. Our wish is to contribute to enabling practical people to ﬁnd a few ideas and approaches that may just help them down this road in the organizations in which they work. 3

Change, Conﬂict and Community

Who is this book for? This book is primarily aimed at HR practitioners who have a crucial role to play in working with change within their organizations. Our experience of working with people in HR over many years shows us that there is still a lack of conﬁdence, both within the HR function and on the part of their partners in the business, which can result in a more reactive and less responsive approach to change and conﬂict. Building conﬁdence in these areas includes letting go of some of the more traditional, tried and tested approaches and entering the blue water of unknown territory. We could say that the culture and senior management population in some organizations is closed to allowing HR to work in a more emergent way within the organization, or we could hold a view which challenges this notion, rather seeing HR as the lever for change, an inﬂuential stakeholder who can support managers to think and act differently around change. This book is intended to be helpful for HR practitioners in a proactive and a reactive sense, providing ideas, ways to understand change and conﬂict, and practical ideas for improving our readers’ conﬁdence and competence at both. For HR professionals change and conﬂict present challenges in terms of their ability to work with the business strategy, create HR strategy and policy, advise line managers and, at the same time, manage change within their own function. We have written the book with all of these challenges in mind. The book will also be useful for line managers looking for ideas and ways to understand change and conﬂict and the range of perspectives and options available to them. Our readers will notice that we, at times, use the expression ‘change agents’. Our perspective is that both line managers and HR professionals often act in this capacity, and so the term is intended as an inclusive one for all.

Using this book To put this book together we have drawn on our own experiences, the stories and experiences of colleagues and clients, and a range of research reports, books and articles. We have included short examples of people’s experience of change, conﬂict and community in boxed sections throughout the text. In addition, there are a number of longer case studies that appear after the main body of the book. Our intention is to be primarily practical in our writing in order to help the reader deal with issues and opportunities that arise. We have, however, placed importance on understanding some of the principles behind how change and 4

Introduction

conﬂict are constructed. These are drawn from a range of different perspectives, as we have been keen to present some up-to-date thinking about the concepts, as well as to explain some more classical approaches. Our view is that, although we both have our preferred ways of looking at change, all of these perspectives are helpful in different ways, for different situations and we encourage readers to take a holistic and practical view on the range of ideas offered. What we most encourage is for the reader to be open to new possibilities and to draw their own conclusions. Where you disagree with us, we hope you will use that to stimulate your own thoughts and actions about change and conﬂict. The book covers a breadth of subjects within the overall aim of understanding the relationship between change and conﬂict, and our choices for community or other ways of working as people together in organizations. It cannot, therefore, be comprehensive on all of the subjects and we have provided a bibliography and list of useful resources and websites at the end of the book for further reference. We understand that readers often like to dip in and out of books, and the chapters are, therefore, relatively self-contained to facilitate this. There is, however, a natural ﬂow to the book, effectively a circular one (Figure 1.1), as we explain, with brief chapter outlines, below.

The bigger picture: community

Making sense of change

Holistically healthy organizations

Patterns past

Change, Conflict and Community Energizing the organization

Change and conflict

Learning through change From conflict to collaboration

Resolving conflicts

Figure 1.1 Change, conﬂict and the community

5

Change, Conﬂict and Community

Our starting point is Making Sense of Change in Chapter 2. Here, we take the reader through some critical questions about change in order to refresh and promote some new thinking about how we understand and work with it. We pose some questions for practitioners and change agents to ask in order to promote greater understanding of change in their organization. Chapter 3 then looks at Patterns Past and takes a view on conﬂict as part of the organizational culture and considers how this impacts on ways of handling change. We discuss the concept of the toxic organization and the cellular memory of organizations; how the history and ways of dealing with change in the past can leave an imprint or pattern which determines how things are dealt with in the future. We then move on to look at the relationship between Change and Conﬂict more directly in Chapter 4, to show how they are inextricably linked. We consider how the pace of organizational evolution impacts on people, their role and motivation both positively and negatively. We look at how conﬂict is manifested in organizations from the more overt industrial actions to lower level unrest and the potential cost of conﬂict if left unresolved. In this chapter, we also look in more detail at the rise in political behaviour within the organization. With a greater understanding of change and conﬂict, we then move into ways of Resolving Conﬂicts in Chapter 5. We help the reader to see ways in which organizations typically address change and conﬂict issues through the strategies adopted, either planned or emergent. We highlight the beneﬁts and drawbacks of a number of different approaches. Chapter 6 focuses on mediation in particular, as a way of moving From Conﬂict to Collaboration in addressing or heading off potential conﬂicts. Having explored practical approaches to dealing with conﬂict, Chapter 7 asks how we can learn from what has been happening in terms of change and conﬂict. We consider the challenge of Learning through Change, particularly in order to create an environment where people are able to learn from everyday occurrences, as well as identifying how learning can contribute powerfully to creating change. Speciﬁc approaches to learning are covered which can enable individuals and groups to improve their ability to learn from differences. In Chapter 8, Energizing the Organization, we look at ways of working with change that draw the positive from conﬂict, seeing it as a source of energy and creativity. We explore approaches that can be used in everyday settings by line managers and HR professionals, as well as large group methodologies which create opportunities for dialogue and collaboration. Our exploration of different ways of working in organizations continues with Chapter 9, Holistically Healthy Organizations. Here, the book aims to take the reader to a more holistic view of organizations using the metaphor of open living systems and taking a body and spirit approach to looking at the organizations that we are creating and working within. 6

Introduction

Chapter 10, ﬁnally, looks at The Bigger Picture: Community and considers organizations within the wider social setting. We look at the potential for viewing organizations from a different perspective, where we collaborate as a community and question what this might offer us as an alternative approach to the conﬂict we experience in organizations. We situate the organization within its wider environment and ask what scope there is for collaboration, rather than competition or conﬂict externally. We question the responsibilities an organization has externally, including for example the current concerns about corporate social responsibility (CSR). As we said, the book is circular, in that there is no conclusion. The debate continues in that all we have covered takes us back to the start to re-examine how we view change, the perspectives we take and the assumptions we make about how change needs to be managed. We ask the reader to reﬂect critically on your learning through the book, notice the perspectives you feel more and less drawn to and arrive at your own conclusions about the implications for your practice as an agent of change.

Follow up and feedback We welcome dialogue on the ideas and suggestions contained in this book and would value hearing from our readers with their own stories of change and conﬂict and how the themes here relate to your own experiences. If you feel energized to write to us with your views, please send these to: [email protected] and [email protected]

7

2 Making Sense of Change

It was the ancient Greeks who left us with the maxim that ‘change is the only constant’ (Burnes, 2004). In the early years of the 21st century, change is without doubt an ongoing and major aspect of the agenda for organizational life. Arguably, it is the agenda and it is often difﬁcult to make sense of. As practical people, there is a temptation to jump straight to the ‘action’, to ﬁnd out what to do. As consultants, we are asked frequently for tools, techniques and methodologies for working with change. These are vital for us and we will certainly be covering a wide range of them in the chapters to come. In this chapter, we are encouraging you to pause ﬁrst and consider: ■ ■

The assumptions we might make about change and how to handle it Other perspectives on change that can add to our thinking and, consequently, our action.

We offer an overview of ways to understand change, referring to the perspectives that we ﬁnd most informative in our work as change agents. Our speciﬁc questions will be: ■ ■ ■ ■

What do we mean by change? How do we feel about change? How do we think about change? What implications does this have for working with change?

Given that the focus of this book is change, conﬂict and community, we are most concerned here with issues in relation to the people aspects of change. At the end of the chapter, we list some speciﬁc questions that you will ﬁnd helpful in reviewing your approach to change, both in your own reﬂection and in discussion with colleagues.

Making Sense of Change

What do we mean by ‘change’? When we use the word ‘change’, we are in fact talking about a number of different notions which potentially need our attention and action in different ways. Change can mean: being replaced; transitioning from one state or way of being to another (like water turning to steam); or making or becoming something entirely different and new (Encarta, 2000). We need, therefore, to establish ﬁrst what change means, and what type of change is being experienced or sought. A number of writers have summarized the types of change within an organizational setting. Linda Holbeche (2006) highlights four: ■

■ ■ ■

transactional changes, which are ongoing modiﬁcations to elements such as processes, services or structures; these are comparatively low level orders of change incremental change, which is gradual but high impact and long lasting radical change, which occurs at a speciﬁc moment, such as a crisis, or a merger transformational change, when an organization has to redeﬁne itself in relation to its environment.

Different types of change make different demands on us in terms of emotion, effort and timescales. A common question asked in organizations is: are we seeking to create a revolution, or evolution? The distinction matters. Managers, for example, may sometimes prefer to emphasize evolution, as a way of maintaining ‘business as usual’ while making changes. This can be a helpful approach, although there are times when the change needed is actually much more fundamental, and diluting the message in this way, can work against achieving the changes needed. Warner Burke (2002) provides useful insight into the difference between these two types of change. Revolutionary change impacts deeply into the culture of an organization. There are periods of ‘equilibrium’, where the normal ways of operating are followed and there are revolutionary periods, where the organization experiences a ‘jolt’. The disruption can either come from an internal event (for example, a new leader with a very different leadership style), or from the external environment (for example, a takeover). Change, perhaps more commonly, is evolutionary. The organization is not fundamentally questioned or remodelled, rather continuous improvements are made, some of which will seem more dramatic than others. For some organizations, this is not actually considered as ‘change’ in the sense of being an exceptional event; it is simply a normal part of the way of doing business. In essence, change itself becomes a steady state of affairs. 9

Change, Conﬂict and Community

Some change programmes use structure and process as a way of making incremental changes to lead towards more transformational change. The degree to which this is possible is debateable. Burke and Litwin (1992), for example, suggest that only changes in the external environment, mission and strategy, leadership or organizational culture can create transformational change. This means, for example, that a change in the ‘structure chart’ by itself creates a lower level of change within the organizational system than is often anticipated, despite the depth of feeling often associated with the changes incurred. Accompanying changes to leadership style and cultural habits will shift the degree of change to a deeper level. Change can also be experienced as a reactive process, in terms of responding to market and social changes, or proactive, in the sense of looking for and maximizing opportunities and taking the initiative to lead the way. In many instances, it can be difﬁcult to tell which stimulus came ﬁrst, reactive or proactive, as the environments we operate in become increasingly complex and interlinked. Many changes are both where, for example, what is a reaction to a situation also becomes an opportunity. An example here would be where external legislation (for example, health and safety, age discrimination) is used to encourage a change of approach with an organization. Whether a change is generated by a proactive or reactive response tends, in our experience, to affect people’s approach to it. There is, for example, a great deal of felt difference (and, therefore, behaviour) between an organization needing to change to survive and one which is revolutionizing a product market. An insurance company needed to respond to Financial Services Authority (FSA) requirements to ensure that the performance of all staff, whether giving advice to the public or not, was effectively supervised through appraisal procedures. The HR department used the opportunity to help managers learn about using performance reviews as part of an effective people management strategy by running skills and awareness building sessions and carefully monitoring whether appraisals were being held or not. The need to provide ﬁgures to the FSA gave the organization an opportunity to improve managerial attitudes towards people management and development. Finally, when we consider what we mean by change, we need to consider what to preserve and maintain. In our seemingly constant focus on change, there is a danger that we forget to carry on with what is already good, useful and valuable. Even revolutionary change does not have to cast off everything from the past. By focusing on what needs to be different, change management approaches often imply that all that has gone before is redundant or ‘wrong’. In many ways, this has become our frame of mind: that change has come to be valued above all 10

Making Sense of Change

things and the necessity and challenge of maintaining the current can get overlooked. One practical example of this is to check the level of weight given to change, versus maintenance, in your organization’s leadership competencies.

How do we feel about change? In practical terms, it is useful to identify our feelings in relation to change, because: ■

■

the level of comfort and acceptance of talking about and considering emotions and feelings differs from organization to organization; it is helpful, therefore, not to take their place in the world of change for granted both conﬂict and building community, as covered in the rest of this book, relate directly to feelings, and it makes sense, therefore, to be explicit about how feelings relate to change.

Our emotions around change are different depending on the nature of that change and our role within it, what we might call the content and process of the change. By content, we mean ‘what’ is being affected, whether that be ways of working, structures, vision, mission, values, our job, our security and so on. Our feelings will be affected in proportion to how important different aspects are to us on an emotional level. The degree of change, or our perception of it, will also have a bearing on the strength of our feeling. Revolutionary change, by deﬁnition, makes higher demands on our emotions than evolutionary change, an aspect that needs to be taken account of when seeking to manage or create it. By process, we mean how the change occurs, including, for example, the degree to which we ‘have a say’ in what happens, the approach taken to creating the change, the sensitivity and behaviour of leaders and so on. Imposed change is, for most people, particularly difﬁcult, albeit, on occasion unavoidable. As a colleague of ours says: ‘the only people who like imposed change are wet babies’. Sometimes we may feel like ‘wet babies’ when a situation seems to need someone just to direct matters and take a hold of the situation. In most situations, for most people, however, imposition of change is problematic. In order to give of our best to change, rather than simply going along with it, we need to have emotionally bought into both content and process. Attempting to do this through imposition takes a unique situation (where the crisis means people are looking for ‘salvation’) and unique leaders (who people trust and will follow willingly) to accomplish successfully. Perceptions are key aspects of the emotional response we have: for example, if I am (apparently) involved in a change that I suspect has already been decided upon, my feelings against it may be stronger than if it was simply given as a ﬁnal decision in the ﬁrst place. 11

Change, Conﬂict and Community

Resistance is a subject that many HR and change practitioners give a lot of attention to. It happens perhaps at three levels (Maurer, 2006): Level One: I don’t get it (information) – people may need more information, more time to understand it or more time to disagree and contribute opinions and ideas. Level Two: I don’t like it (emotional reaction) – people may need a chance to talk and understand theirs and others feelings in response to the change and to feel heard and understood, that their feelings and ideas matter and can be taken account of. Level Three: I don’t like you (trust and conﬁdence) – a lack of trust or dislike of a leader or change agent can lead to the most challenging type of resistance; people may need to rebuild relationships. Resistance can, however, be viewed too simplistically. It also happens in relation to change that we initiate and choose for ourselves. For example, when we attend a learning programme through our own instigation, there is a need to take a ‘beginner’s mind’ to be open, but we can at the same time resist learning, as we ﬁght to keep our sense of our existing competence and ability. Personal changes highlight this even more: for example, marriage, moving home, moving job. For every gain in our lives, there is the need to give something up, and this can be experienced as ‘resistance’. In essence, it is a moment of transition, recognizing that things are not what they were and that there is a need to ‘let go’ of what has gone before. It is also worth remembering that, as a species, it is mankind’s nature to adapt, to innovate, to survive and thrive. The question we could ask ourselves is: ‘what on earth are we doing to create so much resistance when change can be such a natural part of living?’ We need to rethink the often used statement, ‘people just don’t like change’: if you ask people whether they would like every day, for the rest of their lives, to be exactly like today, how often would they really say ‘yes’? Further chapters in this book will pay attention to the role of positive emotions in engagement with change, as well as looking at the negative emotions that can ensue. In the meantime, it is worth remembering, as Peter Block, a leading writer on change and consultancy, says: ‘If you want change to be supported, even embraced, you focus less on charisma, rewards and motivators and more on honest conversation, high involvement and strong, high-trust relationships’ (Block, 2002). An important point to note here is that feelings in relation to change are much more signiﬁcant than whether or not we are engaged or resisting. Emotion is as essential as logic in creating change in the ﬁrst place, in spite of our often very sophisticated attempts in organizations to focus on the rational drivers for change (George and Jones, 2001). Our feelings can be seen as a trigger system, showing us where there is information that we need to attend to, particularly where that information goes against the grain of how we believe or expect the world to be. 12

Making Sense of Change

For example, we may believe that we have integrity in the way that we approach a change process. If an individual believes otherwise, and gives us that feedback, we are likely to have an emotional reaction of some kind to the difference in how we are experienced to how we perceive ourselves. This feeling of a ‘discrepancy’ offers a stimulus for making a change of some kind as we decide what to do next. On a larger scale, a slight downturn in purchases of a star product may not be statistically signiﬁcant, but our emotional reaction, anxiety perhaps, will prompt us to ﬁnd further information about what is going on. Emotion, in UK organizations, is often overlooked, avoided, suppressed; it is no surprise, therefore, that change becomes such a challenge. The true art of change, in relation to conﬂict and community in particular, is to build an organization that is able to work with the full range of emotions, that is, to build an organization that is emotionally intelligent. Our hope is that the remaining chapters provide some insights and tools for how this can be achieved.

How do we think about change? The value of thought As Einstein is widely quoted as saying: ‘The signiﬁcant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them’. Common sense tells us that we need to take time to think about what we are doing, the changes around us and our approaches to dealing with them. In practice, this is often hard to achieve. The challenge is that our success at work is usually measured on tangible results and delivery. Navigating our way through information overload and attempting to ‘have a life’ as well, leaves precious little space for reﬂecting on theories about change and how we approach it. The busier and more focused we get in our working lives, the less space there seems to be for thought, let alone for new thought. Nevertheless, it is absolutely essential for some very solid and practical reasons: ■

■

Change initiatives are often mistaken for actual change, as people are busy doing something, rather than doing what is most effective. These initiatives can cost a great deal, in terms of money, resources, human endeavour, conﬂict and loss of trust. More thought and discussion of the principles guiding the change may just help. There is not one best approach that will solve all ills and there is not one theory that will illuminate the way for all time. Sometimes our best and longest held beliefs are simply not what is needed. This is a greater challenge than we may ﬁrst think: ‘of course’ we are all ﬂexible and look for appropriate choices, 13

Change, Conﬂict and Community

but would you be prepared to give up those that are at the core of how you see yourself and the value you add? A salutary lesson was provided on a case study based learning programme. A group of HR professionals were keen to advise that the senior management team of the organization in question should be facilitated to talk to each other, even though that was the approach that had failed consistently over a number of years. ■

■

Change is a collaborative effort and, to work together effectively, it helps to have a common understanding of what we are trying to do. All of us have our underpinning personal theories about how to make something work and, sometimes, those theories are articulated and clear to us and sometimes they are simply an unrecognized source of intuition. To work with and effectively engage others in change, you need to have some shared beliefs about the principles of how to do it. Without some kind of dialogue about this, many discussions about what to do become clumsier than they need to be. For clumsier read confusing, fragmented, tense, a source of conﬂict. Know the principles behind change: it is not enough today to have simply a bag of methods up our sleeve. The world moves on so quickly that the methods quickly date, not because we get bored of them through one change initiative after another, but because the new context is different and requires different approaches. It is the same in any ﬁeld: cars become more computerized and the mechanic needs different tools; viruses build resistance and researchers develop new drugs. Understanding the principles gives you choices about methodologies, whether using other people’s approaches or adapting your own for the situation. It enables you as the change practitioner to be nimble and responsive in the same way that our organizations themselves need to be.

The question to ask yourself, and your colleagues, is: ‘what is your theory of how change happens in organizations?’

When you think of an organization, what do you see? Let us start with the assumptions that we make about organizations, about what they are. Our perceptions of how organizations work directly impact on our approach to change within them. Standing back from the daily experience of your organization, consider what comes to mind when you think of an organization. People in discussion? Structure charts? The wheels of industry? Project plans? Money? 14

Making Sense of Change

Desks, computers and ofﬁces? Negotiations and deals? Organizations are all of these things and we tend to be drawn instinctively towards one perspective more than another. When we then seek to understand change within that setting, our approach to how it should be done is coloured by that perspective. Gareth Morgan’s work on metaphors illustrates how different our perspectives can be. Although his work is now 20 years old, originating in 1986, we have found that it enables people within organizations to have useful discussions about how they think about organizations and how to change them. We summarize Morgan’s list of metaphors and their features in Table 2.1 (Morgan, 2006). Table 2.1 Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization

Metaphor

Description

Machines

Organizations as machines with interlocking parts that each play a clearly deﬁned role Rational, analytical Emphasis on control, measurement and efﬁciency Organization as a living system Attention paid to organizational needs and relationship with the environment Different organizations are a different species and suited to different environments Natural life cycles and evolution Importance of information processing, learning and intelligence Developing a ‘learning organization’ Feedback, knowledge and networks Values, ideas, beliefs, norms, rituals and other patterns of shared meaning History and traditions Interests, conﬂicts and power plays Organizations as systems of government Politics of organizational life People trapped by conscious and unconscious processes Psychodynamic principles – e.g. repression, ego, denial, projection, coping and defence mechanisms Change dynamics shaping social life – e.g. self-producing systems, chaos and complexity, feedback ﬂows, dialectics, paradox Potentially exploitative aspects of corporate life, whether of individuals and groups, or of world economy Rational actions for one group can be seen as exploitative by another

Organisms

Brains

Cultures

Political systems Psychic prisons Flux and transformation Instruments of domination

15

Change, Conﬂict and Community

Having a combination of ways to understand how an organization works can be very powerful. You may notice how different metaphors have informed our thinking on change, conﬂict and community through this book. Sticking resolutely to one metaphor limits understanding and choices for action. As Gareth Morgan explains: All theories of organization and management are based on implicit images or metaphors that persuade us to see, understand, and imagine situations in partial ways … metaphors create insight. But they also distort. They have strengths. But they also have limitations. In creating ways of seeing, they tend to create ways of not seeing. Hence there can be no single theory or metaphor that gives an all-purpose point of view. There can be no ‘correct theory’ for structuring everything we do. (Morgan, 2006) John had worked his way up through the hierarchy of a global organization, to a senior management role. This had taken him further and further away from his formative experiences as a mechanical engineer. When a new vision was established for the organization he felt conﬁdent that his clear thinking and project management abilities would enable him to push through changes effectively in his area. He was surprised by the strength of feeling of some members of his team towards the changes and found it harder than he had anticipated to persuade them to let go of habits which were no longer appropriate for the new way the business needed to work. His peers seemed to be more successful at managing the change than he was being, since their reports back to management meetings were always more positive than his own. Inﬂuenced by his technical background, John relied on a logical step-by-step process, using a ‘Machine’ mindset for change management. He overlooked the importance of traditions in the organization (Culture metaphor) and the need to ensure learning processes were in place (Brains). Finally, he was also naive about the power dynamics at play (Political systems and Instruments of domination). Using different ways of thinking about the organization and the changes helped him pay attention to a broader picture of what was happening. One way of making sense of Morgan’s metaphors is to notice your own reaction to them. Which ones are you drawn to? Which ones are you curious about? Which ones do you gloss over and dismiss out of hand. The stretch for all of us in times of change is to accept that thinking about an issue through a different lens is likely to give us solutions to challenges that we had not considered before; and offer opportunities that we had overlooked. It is also worth noticing which approaches tend to be the most trusted and understood in your organization, particularly those that are relied on when speed 16

Making Sense of Change

is of the essence and change is ﬁrmly on the agenda. How do managers perceive their roles? Are they primarily responsible for efﬁciency (Machine) or for learning and performance (Brains)? How does this compare to the view in the HR function? Do you have a clash of metaphors between HR and the line? The Machine metaphor is perhaps the most pervasive approach in organizations. The earliest organizational studies focused on this aspect of human enterprise, with the work, for example of FW Taylor on Scientiﬁc Management in the early 20th century. We can see the assumptions of his work still at play in the view of some that organizations are places for rationality, efﬁciency and focus on the task. This does not necessarily mean being uncaring. Taylor himself was a social reformer interested in improving relationships between managers and workers (Weisbord, 1987), but the primary focus is on getting the job done as efﬁciently as possible, leading to a better performance, which is in the interests of all stakeholders in the organization. The assumption is that managers can control what happens, indeed, that is their purpose. As we shall see later, this can cause an enormous amount of stress in times of complex change, particularly in combination with the belief, from this perspective, that there is no place for emotions at work. Conversely, there can be an equal overreliance on what are apparently people based approaches to change. Work on culture is widespread: competence frameworks, leadership development focused on motivations, attitudes and behavioural change, values and so on. Arguably, these do not actually deal with the real substance of people’s emotions and experiences in the organization, but they do assume that the route for change is not through efﬁciency but individual experience and connection with the bigger picture (Culture metaphor). A balance needs to be achieved by also using approaches that do not work at a behaviour or motivational level, rather at the level of task and actions as in ‘what are we here to do?’ Notice, also, how organizational cultures mirror the industry or profession that they are a part of and how individuals within them approach change as if it were an extension of the technical nature of the work. For example, an engineering ﬁrm tends to view change as a series of processes to be coordinated, controlled and managed; a marketing organization as about ‘selling’ the big idea; a group of care workers as about talking about feelings. In order to embrace new ways of approaching old problems, we need sometimes to unlearn what may be years of professional training and have the humility to be open to other mindsets.

To what extent can change be ‘managed’? Essentially, we are concerned here with the extent to which you believe that you can create change in the direction that you and the organization wish to go, that is, that it can be controlled and directed in accord with a plan. 17

Change, Conﬂict and Community

On an individual level, many success stories describe how someone knew what they wanted to achieve, set the goal and worked for it, whether it was the pursuit of gold medals or business empires. Much of the traditional advice to managers around change tells us that if we get the ‘right’ methodology, change in organizations can be achieved in much the same way as a gold medal: a clear objective and hard work. The basic problemsolving approach is: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Identify desired future state (vision, goal etc) Analyse current state (diagnosis) Identify key actions that will ﬁll the gap between 1 and 2 Manage resources and timescales effectively to deliver the desired state Measure progress and review, making adjustments as necessary.

Many change management approaches build on these basic principles: be clear about what you want and manage the process effectively to get there. This is perhaps the essence of ‘change management’, informed by logical thinking and diagnosis, and implemented through systematic project management. John Kotter proposed an eight-step approach, drawn from studying change initiatives over a 15-year period (Kotter, 1995): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Establish a sense of urgency Form a powerful guiding coalition Create a vision Communicate the vision Empower others to act on the vision Plan for and create short-term wins Consolidate improvements and produce more change Institutionalize new approaches.

Kotter warned against taking short cuts in these stages and emphasized the amount of time and effort required to make planned change work effectively. He observed that change efforts failed because of underlying process issues, that is, arrogance, poor teamwork, lack of trust, bureaucracy and so on. Fifty years earlier, Kurt Lewin (the so-called father of Organization Development) had also emphasized the importance of people processes: his key principle was involvement, as people worked to ‘unfreeze’ the current organization and ‘refreeze’ it to incorporate new changes. In organizations today, the planned approach is mostly interpreted as being directed from above, relying on a compelling vision from the top, which is communicated (i.e. ‘sold’) to employees. Feedback is asked for, but does not fundamentally alter the approach that has already been decided on. 18

Making Sense of Change

Planned change is often criticized for not creating sufﬁcient engagement, but it might, however, if we gave the process time and created sufﬁcient scope for genuine involvement by employees. Time, however, is a critical issue for organizations. Our discussions about change with managers from a wide variety of roles, organizations and locations often turn to whether or not they believe that managing change in a controlled and planned way is possible. Most managers believe it is what they ought to be doing, in order to manage change properly. Most also believe that it is extremely hard to do, for the simple reason that other changes come along and the goals or approaches start to seem less useful. Sometimes the intended aim is achieved, sometimes it is not. Potentially, people need to improve how they involve others, as we have seen above. Another view would be that change simply does not work in a neat predictable fashion. All change management methodologies build in ﬂexibility, environmental scanning and adaption to cope with the reality of change as choices and paths shift along the way. The challenge for us today is the speed at which those alterations are required and whether the methodologies can respond quickly enough. The expression ‘like turning the Titanic’ is often used about how long it can take to change a large organization, but it also applies to some change methods and plans which in themselves are not sufﬁciently ﬂexible, or nimble, to cope with fast moving situations. This dynamic between ‘planned’ change (what we intend) and ‘emergent’ change (what is actually happening) is an essential one in today’s organizations. The expectation of ‘perfectly’ managed change can create a great deal of anxiety for people. The belief that change can be controlled needs to be balanced with a healthy measure of humility, in that there are many things that we simply cannot control, however much work we put in or pressure we are put under. The combination of holding the Machine metaphor plus the belief in the need to be in control of change leads, in our experience, to: ■ ■

■ ■

Stress from the expectation of being able to control, diagnose and calculate everything in order to get it ‘right’. Annoyance at people not behaving ‘rationally’ about change and about matters not going ‘to plan’. Then the frustration that just when it all seems to be ready and working, we have to change it all again, for another reorganization or shift in policy. Inter-relational conﬂict as a result of frustration, anxiety, and so on, as we shall see in Chapter 4. Ineffectiveness from not responding to the unforeseen events as change builds up momentum.

Planned change holds possibilities for achieving our goals within organizations. Being too rigid about the plan, or believing that a ‘perfect’ approach exists is less 19

Change, Conﬂict and Community

helpful. In our experience, it helps to understand that there are alternatives to the traditional planned approach in order to take a more rounded view of what happens in practice during change. We will look at a few of these in the next section.

What are some other ways of thinking about change? There are three developments in the world of organizational thinking which we would like to emphasize here, particularly since they provide insights to the following questions: ■ ■

How can we involve people, while working within tight deadlines for change? How can we approach change, without the need to believe we can ‘control’ it?

In addition, they inform many aspects of our thinking on change, conﬂict and community in the chapters to follow. They are: ■ ■ ■

Systems thinking Complexity Social construction.

Some of the language and jargon around these approaches can become slightly mystifying, so our aim here is to provide a simple explanation and identify what difference understanding these ideas may make for us in practice. Systems thinking

Systems thinking as an approach to organizations and change has been around for some time now, at least since the 1960s. We include it here because it still tends to be less commonly understood. The basic idea is that nothing exists or functions separate from a wider system and, therefore, to create change, we need to pay attention to the whole system. A change in one part of a system will affect another part of the system in a dynamic way. This idea of looking at the ‘whole’ is in itself not the least bit new. Eastern philosophy has embraced this view for centuries. A poetic re-telling of a Buddhist teaching is a helpful illustration of the value of systems thinking. A group of blind men, faced with an elephant, all touch a different part of the animal and, therefore, have a very different idea of what an elephant looks like. The one, for example, who touches the tail believes an elephant to be like a rope. They all argue that their version of the elephant is correct. The moral, of course, is that ‘each were partly right, and all were in the wrong’ since it is only by putting the parts together and understanding the elephant collectively, 20

Making Sense of Change

as a whole, that they can understand what an elephant is (John Godfrey Saxe in Weisbord and Janoff, 2007). Taking this story into organizations, how many times do we see only a ‘foot’ and believe we understand the whole picture? A system then is: A perceived whole whose elements ‘hang together’ because they continually affect each other over time and operate toward a common purpose. (Senge et al., 1994) Systems thinking assumes that there are principles at work that can be understood and used for making change, particularly in the relationship between different parts of the system.

Mark Harris (2007), Vice-President of HR, global operations at Dell, outlines how he uses a combination of analytical and systems thinking to inform his approach to change. For example, for a turnaround effort for Dell’s business in Brazil, he and the management team asked themselves questions about the whole system and how parts within it (such as strategy, job structure, infrastructure, processes, policies, people, communication) were aligned. The change effort then worked on all of these levels to create changes within the system.

Systems thinking underpins many change methodologies that have been gaining popularity over the past few years. Approaches such as future search work on the idea of ‘getting the whole system in a room’ (Weisbord and Janoff, 2000) with participants from all areas of a system (i.e. both the internal organization and its external stakeholders) to understand the different aspects of the system and work together on creating change. Given that discussion and decisions for these methods is focused over a few days, the speed of change can be great. They also sit well with a planned approach with actions being followed up through the project management processes of an organization. (Chapter 8 provides more information on the future search approach.) Even without using speciﬁc methodologies, managers and HR professionals alike can add to their understanding of and approach to change by using systems thinking. This would involve (Senge et al., 1994): ■ ■ ■

Asking ‘what happens if we change this part of the whole?’ Looking at the whole picture in discussion with others, to get their view of the ‘elephant’ Taking a cross-functional approach 21

Change, Conﬂict and Community ■ ■ ■ ■

Looking for root causes, looking at the past and how it contributes and looking widely for inﬂuences on the current situation Sometimes doing nothing, but observing what happens Being realistic about how much time change can take to implement Being aware of the tangible aspects (structure, processes, policies) and the intangible (feelings, attitudes, beliefs, politics, power) and how they inter-relate.

It is probable that you are already using aspects of this approach in your work. The key, here, is to collaborate with others to build up the picture of the whole system and to ﬁnd workable solutions that take this into account. Complexity

Many systems thinking approaches still work within a ‘Machine’ approach to organizations, favouring analysis, rational cause and effect and a degree of predictability and control over change management. The assumption is also that it is possible to get a ‘complete’ picture of what is happening, if we just have enough data. Complexity is an umbrella expression for a number of schools of thought which work on the principle that life is more complicated than this and that it is not possible for us ever fully to understand a system, predict how it might behave or control the changes within it. Different writers on complexity take slightly different approaches to its application to change. We have chosen here three groups of people who have most informed our own thinking on the subject: ■ ■ ■

Margaret Wheatley Glenda Eoyang and Edwin E Olson Ralph Stacey and Patricia Shaw.

Margaret Wheatley’s book Leadership and the New Science (1999) has inspired a lot of HR and OD practitioners to approach organizations and change in different ways. She tells the story of how scientists have moved on signiﬁcantly from the ‘Machine’ metaphor as an approach to discovery, away from predictability and linear thinking. Managers and practitioners have not always found ways to do the same. A way to relate to this change in thinking is to imagine a Newton’s cradle, where balls are placed in a row, hanging from a bar. When you pick up a ball at one end and let it go, it falls and creates a momentum which is picked up by the ball at the opposite end of the row which rises and falls and the movement continues. We can describe this as linear: for every action there is a reaction, which is somewhat predictable. Now imagine the same set up, only this time, there are hundreds of balls, hanging down in different directions and different places and there is no knowing what may happen if you drop one ball against another. This starts to represent more effectively living systems, and how they 22

Making Sense of Change

change. Taking this approach to thinking about organizations is potentially radical for those of us brought up valuing the planned and rational: Nothing described by Newtonian physics has prepared us to work with the behaviour of living networks. We were taught that change occurs in increments, one person at a time. We not only had to design the steps; we also had to take into account the size of the change object. The force of our efforts had to equal the weight of what we were attempting to change. But now we know something different. We’re working with networks, not billiard balls. We don’t have to push and pull a system, or bully it to change; we have to participate with colleagues in discovering what’s important to us. Then we feed that into our different networks to see if our networks agree. (Wheatley, 1999) In a living system, the cause of change is connection and for that to happen, all have to participate. Everywhere in the new sciences, in living systems theory, quantum physics, chaos and complexity theory, we observe life’s dependence on participation. All life participates actively with its environment in the process of coadaption and co-evolution. No sub-atomic particle exists independent of its participation with other particles. And even reality is evoked through acts of participation between us and what we choose to notice. (Wheatley, 1999) So, what does taking a complexity approach mean for us in practice? As a beginning, it means: ■ ■ ■

Letting go of command and control in order to Trust the autonomy and self-direction of groups and individuals and Embrace multiple ways of seeing things.

The approach of Glenda Eoyang and Edwin E Olson (2001) to complexity provides us with further ways of understanding the dynamic processes inherent in organizations. Glenda and Edwin work with the idea of ‘complex adaptive systems’. Basically, anything that involves living things can be seen as a ‘CAS’ (as it is abbreviated to): animals, people, organizations, cultures. Some behaviour is predictable, some emerges out of the interaction between different parts of the whole and is unpredictable (Battram, 1999). Eoyang and Olson (2001) make six ‘innovative assumptions’ about change as a result of viewing organizations as complex adaptive systems: ■

‘change through connections (not top-down control)’: change is made through connections between people throughout the organization, not by hierarchical instruction 23

Change, Conﬂict and Community ■

‘adapt to uncertainty (not predictable stages of development)’: change in the system is not predictable, either in terms of the direction it may go, or the scale of it; one small change can create extensive consequences, large interventions can do very little, so observation of what happens is critical ‘emerging goals, plans and structures (not clear, detailed plans or goals)’: detailed plans and goals are not helpful because they become too inﬂexible; instead, a simple set of principles or rules enable an organization to create direction (e.g. ‘customers ﬁrst’) ‘amplify difference (not build consensus)’: consensus is not needed; people need to keep exchanging ideas and information until the next step to take emerges ‘self-similarity (not differences between levels)’: rather than treating different parts of the organization as if they need different approaches to change, treat the system as a whole, make small changes in many different areas and enable people, ideas and information to link up ‘success as ﬁt with the environment (not closing the gap with an ideal)’: an organization succeeds and thrives because it matches its environment for the long term, not because it achieves certain goals, that may or may not remain relevant.

■

■ ■

■

This approach, therefore, recognizes the emergent nature of change, our inability to control everything and the importance of autonomy and self-direction. In the UK, Ralph Stacey and colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire have worked with complexity approaches within organizations in a different way. They provide a deﬁnition of organizations as follows: Organizations of any kind, no matter how large, are processes not things. They are continuously reproduced and transformed in the ongoing communicative interaction between people in the living present, both their formal members and people in other organizations. (Stacey, 2001) Creating change within an organization from this perspective can take a variety of forms, with a particular focus on what is happening here-and-now, whether that is within the boundary of the organization, or in the wider arena. From Stacey’s point of view, we are all part of the process (we cannot stand outside of it and simply observe) and it is our interaction that creates the organization and, therefore, change. One particularly striking approach is that of Patricia Shaw (2002) who focuses on the importance of conversation as a vehicle for change. By simply conversing with people, without structures, or a need to agree or focus, she talks with people about what is important to them, for example, in relation to the organization’s culture. As they talk, they make sense of what is happening, and co-create multiple possibilities and understandings. Once the conversation is over, people will naturally carry back what is important to further interactions and changes will, therefore, emerge. 24

Making Sense of Change

Applying complexity thinking in practice can be challenging, particularly because it emphasizes the emergent nature of change: for organizations based on the principles of clear plans, delivery dates and objectives, this can be a hard perspective to bring to the table. It does not have to be a question of either/or, however. For example, when we look at plans and goals, we can be in danger of becoming too ﬁxed in our view, of mistaking what they tell us for ‘reality’. Working from a complexity perspective, an HR practitioner or change agent stays open and aware of what else may be going on and remembers that the plans and rational arguments are simply a representation, a means for being able to talk about the organization. Our practitioner case study towards the end of this book provides an example of how one individual manages to balance his personal preference (and the organization’s need) for structure and clarity, with his acceptance of the emergent and complex nature of change. The Global Learning and Development manager of an off shore oil and gas company realized how invaluable the insights of complexity were for her when working on a major change programme. The business was haemorrhaging money, having lost $500 m in one year. It had grown by merger and acquisition and people were struggling to ﬁnd ways to make the organization function effectively. They were smart and capable people, but nothing seemed to work. A new CEO and management team introduced a series of interventions. As a part of this the L&D Manager realized that people needed to ﬁnd a way to work together, to interact. Working with consultants who took a complexity view, she set up a leadership programme, accepting that the content provided was not in itself important, but needed to be attractive enough to get people from across the world to attend. It was the space for discussion that made the difference. People took the opportunity to learn from each other’s experiences and to learn to trust each other, without pointing ﬁngers, using the excuse of a learning event on change as a catalyst. The outcomes had never been predictable, the L&D Manager was simply setting up something that would get people together to interact. Her advice is ‘if you get too ﬁxated on speciﬁc outcomes you might miss a bigger prize than you had dreamt of ’.

Social construction

The ﬁnal arena that we would like to pay attention to is that of social construction. Again the academic label can be off-putting. The approach, however, underpins some of the most signiﬁcant current approaches to change (e.g. appreciative inquiry, which we will discuss further in Chapter 8) and is worth having an 25

Change, Conﬂict and Community

understanding of. Once again, there is not one answer to what is meant by social construction: part of its value is that it is open to different perspectives. We have outlined here our own interpretation of it and how it helps us in our work. You will notice that it has strong links to the complexity approaches we have already looked at. Language creates

The basic principle of social construction is that when we talk with one another, we do not just talk about reality, we create it. The idea is that we are not simply ‘observers’ of the world, who comment on and try to understand what the ‘Truth’ of a situation is. Instead, we are active participants and any truths that exist are of our own making. Science, for example, is something that we have constructed as a way of making sense of the world we experience. It is not an objective ‘thing’ in its own right, although we often talk about it as if it is. Organizations may have bricks, mortar, handbooks, assets and so on, yet, similarly, we construct ‘what’ they are and what life is like within them, as we talk to one another. This can be a bit tricky to get to grips with, so let us take an example: ■ ■ ■

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Think for a moment about how the process of change is talked about in your organization. What words are used to describe it? In some organizations, the language goes something like this: process, rationale, difﬁculty, leveraging, driving, forcing through, struggle, resistance. Consider what managing and experiencing change would be like in an organization like this. Now imagine that people begin to have different conversations including: excitement, opportunity, ideas, progress, inclusion, autonomy, decisions. The key here is not simply that communication about the change from the senior team is different (as a way of selling it), but that the conversations along the corridors are different. The action that follows is also likely to be different.

Multiple perspectives

Social construction is not about right or wrong: it does not present itself as the ‘next best thing’ in terms of correcting the ideas that have gone before. It is an approach that believes that there are multiple perspectives on any situation. Being right or wrong ceases to be the point, as co-creation, arising out of those different perspectives is how things work and, therefore, what we can usefully attend to. Social construction is a way of thinking, using, for example, Morgan’s metaphors as a way of viewing the world in many different ways and acknowledging that each has something to offer; some may be more useful at some times than others. 26

Making Sense of Change

We get into difﬁculty when we become so wedded to one perspective that we are blind to whatever else may be happening. There is a certain humility in accepting that even though we have worked hard to gather data and understand what may be going on around us, the situation is that ‘Everything could be otherwise’ (Gergen, 2000). Accepting this principle can be unsettling, but it also means that we are open to new information and ideas, even when they seem at ﬁrst to be threatening to the course of action we have set our hearts and minds on. Context is crucial

Working with many different organizations as we do, it quickly becomes clear how beliefs about what works, or what makes sense to a group, are constructed within the context of that organization, its history and its people. One group will say, ‘of course you need to consider feelings when deciding where to relocate’, another group will say, ‘we’re a business, not a charity, we do what’s practical’. There is not a right and a wrong here, just different perspectives. Cultural differences are a further example: some nations are more individualistic, others more collective in approach. Our history and our conversation deﬁnes what is ‘right’ to us: the power of the social construction viewpoint is that it opens up possibilities and choices, that things can just as effectively be otherwise. Action arises out of meaning Through discussion we attach meaning and signiﬁcance. From that attachment we generate choices about action and discover energy to move things forward, to resist, to do nothing, to initiate and so on. Practically speaking, this might mean, for example, that I am more likely to take action about something that I have made sense of with others. This can be an introvert as well as an extrovert process, since while I think, I am actually reﬂecting on conversations, articles I have read, past experiences, all of which constitute a social construction of meaning. Reﬂection is critical In the end, social construction offers a way of thinking that encourages us to reﬂect on the meaning we are making through our dialogue with others and to be fully open to other perspectives, even when they seem diametrically opposed to our own. Social construction is not a ‘neat’ methodology, but it challenges us to keep our thinking open:

…many questions remain concerning what we do differently when we operate from a constructionist sensibility. For us, social construction is not a theory that proposes particular techniques or methods of practice, but is more of a general orientation or thought style – a way of engaging with the 27

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world that centers on dialogue and multiplicity – an orientation that gives new meaning and value to ongoing and open dialogues. (Hosking and McNamee, 2006)

Working with change Some of the questions that are worth keeping in mind for future chapters as we look at conﬂict in relation to change are: ■

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Control: assuming we can control what happens creates anxiety for us when we experience an uncertain and complex world. We can choose to identify what we can and cannot control. Alternatively, we can seek to inﬂuence through a variety of means and remain open to the unpredictable consequences of our actions. Involvement: ask yourself to what extent people are truly involved in making changes within the organization? How much time and space is given to conversation, working with ideas and buy-in? Further still, to what extent is the idea of co-creation and self-determination accepted within the organization? Language: how is change talked about in the organization? Notice what words people use about change and how to create it. Emotions: To what degree are emotions spoken about in your organization? Do people express emotions, both positive and negative, or does even the word ‘feel’ get a sceptical reaction? How are emotions considered within the change process? Planning: To what extent does change need to be carefully planned in your organization? How is the need to plan and have a sense of direction balanced with being open to possibilities and emerging change? How much do you observe the effects of change interventions: as Warner Burke advised in a presentation to an OD conference, do you simply watch the stone you throw in the water or do you also ‘look for ripples’? Thinking: How much do you feel a need to ﬁnd the ‘right’ way of managing change? How much do people in the organization debate in either/or terms, rather than being open to multiple perspectives? How do you think about organizations and change, speciﬁcally notice your assumptions, and those of your colleagues in relation to: ■ What is an effective organization? ■ What metaphor would you use for an organization? ■ How does an organization respond to change most effectively? ■ How does an organization initiate change most effectively? ■ What is the role of individuals and leaders in change? What is the role of groups/teams?

Making Sense of Change ■ ■

Which of the theories of change that you have heard about excite you? Make most sense to you? Scare or worry you? What approaches to change would you like to ﬁnd out more about?

Summary There are different types of change in organizations, ranging from incremental improvements to whole scale transformation. Emotions play a crucial role in enabling us to identify what changes need to be made and we can also have strong feelings in relation to both the content and process of change. The way we think about organizations directly impacts on the approaches we then adopt to try to change them. The idea of an organization as a machine has been a powerful metaphor in organizations leading to the assumption that change can be controlled and directed. Planned approaches to change have suffered because they have often not sufﬁciently engaged participants in the process of recreating the organization. Systems thinking suggests that we need to develop a whole view of the organization (to see the whole ‘elephant’) drawn from a wide group of stakeholders, both within and outside the organization. Complexity approaches focus on how change emerges from participation and interaction, challenging the notion that change can be controlled. Social construction offers the view that we co-create our organizations as we interact together. We need to pay attention to the conversations we have and how we make sense of what is happening together. Letting go of there being ‘one right answer’ enables us to be open to other ways of understanding and other possibilities for working with change. Finally, we recommend that practitioners ﬁnd opportunities for conversation with colleagues and clients in order to surface the underlying assumptions that are being made about how to manage change and to consider other possible ways of approaching it.

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3 Patterns Past In this chapter, we consider how much of the past of an organization, or smaller system within it, impacts on the present and how relevant is it to take into account when considering change. Much of the writing on the emotional aspects of change will pay attention to endings and either the celebration of the past and/ or the mourning of losses. If our organization has a stormy past which in some way feels unhelpful to the direction in which we need to go, does paying attention to the mistakes (or learning if reframed more appreciatively), help us to be more effective in the future? Or is it easier and more effective to start afresh with less baggage around what happened before? Is it even possible to ignore what has happened in the past? And what are the implications if we do? These are some of the areas we explore in this chapter, together with the topic of organizational culture. Here, we further our understanding of the emotional side of change, how the behaviours in the organization reﬂect the culture and issues to pay attention to when planning or responding to change. We look at change and conﬂict at individual, group and organizational levels and the aspects of our history and past that might impact on us in the present. We believe paying attention to the human aspects of change are as important as ever in addition to the more tangible task elements of any change process. Later in this chapter, the links between change and conﬂict are made more explicitly. We start by attempting to understand culture in order to understand better conﬂict in the context of change. The culture of the organization will have a large impact on the way change and conﬂicts are handled, led, managed, ignored and/or honoured. There is a lot of debate and interesting differences of opinion about whether culture can be changed or whether in fact it just is a fact of organizational life; something that emerges from the nature of the work, the people that work in the organization and the way they interact within it. Rather than a chapter about cultural change, this section pays attention to noticing what the culture is and understanding the

Patterns Past

signiﬁcance of culture and history for working with conﬂict in the organization. In this chapter, we aim to cover the following questions: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

What does the history of the organization tell us? And how can we learn from the past? What is culture? And what purpose does it serve? What models and frameworks tell us something about the culture of the organization? How does culture get embedded and to what positive and negative effects? How do conﬂicts arise from the culture of the organization? How much attention needs to be paid to the past? And the transitional elements of change? How can an organizational culture support change?

Looking back – where have we come from? There are different schools of thought in terms of the importance of history, whether we are thinking of this at an individual, group or team level. Do we need to know what happened in the past in order to move to the future? In some forms of mediation, for example, where a third party is asked to support people in dispute, there is an emphasis on focusing on the future and what people want now and next rather than spending time going over old ground. Political speeches and debates are often riddled with criticism of past acts and negative comparison about the track records of the various political parties. Where there have been past hurts, things said perhaps unintentionally, deeds done which have had a negative impact on others, it can be difﬁcult to see any positive aspects to giving this air time. However, in many arenas, most visibly that of large scale international conﬂicts, the lack of attention and compassion in relation to the history of the dispute and the different viewpoints has perhaps added fuel to the ﬁre. It seems clear from talking to people we work with that, when they are in the midst of challenging times, some attention to what has gone before has signiﬁcance. A recent learning set with a group of managers who were looking to implement a new business planning process highlighted some of the frustrations of people who talked of ‘re-inventing the wheel’ and the history of how managers had worked with the process in the past. Whether we think paying attention to the past is appropriate or not, frustrating or not, there is something about allowing people an opportunity to give it due consideration. Companies with troubled histories can also use the past to help people learn and understand the signiﬁcance of mistakes. One of the biggest examples of this must be Enron; 31

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the energy company that went into bankruptcy in 2001 after claims of fraudulent behaviour on a massive scale came to the fore. If the company themselves do not beneﬁt from learning, certainly it provides an opportunity for other businesses to think about their practices and question their ethics.

It’s not all bad news! Part of who we are is linked to where we have come from. It is perhaps true that history is more important to some people than others. For example, at reunions and other ‘rituals’, some people will meet up with friends and associates from their past either in terms of work colleagues or people they have not seen for a while. It can be a way of remembering who we were at the time of these associations as well as who we have become. In the same way, in an organizational context, remembering the history of the organization and sharing in the stories from the past can be a way of embedding a collective sense of who we are and what be believe in. Roffey Park is an example of this. Both authors previously worked full time at the Institute which places an emphasis on sharing its history with both employees and clients. Reading and hearing about the background and history of Roffey, which is displayed pictorially and in text outside the walls of the conference room, gives a sense of the values (grounded, individual, transforming, visionary and bright) and behaviours that shape the day-to-day practice in the present. It is worth asking yourself: how much do people know of the history of your organization? Who were the founding members? And what legacy have they left? What can we, and are we learning from this? How much, if any of the past informs what we are today? What might be important for people who work in the organization, our clients and customers to know about our past? Consumers these days like to feel associated with the company as well as the product and, with increased choice about where to go for what, companies with a clear sense of who they are and what they stand for are more likely to be selected. History can play a strong part in this. Sainsbury’s has just published ‘Sainsbury’s Our Story’ and it is available in their supermarkets giving shoppers an insight into their history from the ﬁrst store opening in 1869. Schein (1997) makes the link between history and organizational culture as ‘the accumulated shared learning from shared history’.

What is culture? ‘Culture’ has become a somewhat blanket expression to describe aspects of the organization that are not easily deﬁned. We have an understanding of what the organization is, how it is conﬁgured, how things work or do not work, how people behave in a collective sense, what is important and paid less attention to, 32

Patterns Past

the day-to-day aspects which somehow create meaning and so on and, in a way, the word ‘culture’ helps us to put this under one umbrella. Edgar Schein is perhaps the most well known of the writers on organizational culture, but many others have added their views to the pot on this, including Gareth Morgan and his deﬁnition is shown below: An active living phenomenon through which people jointly create and recreate the worlds in which they live. (Morgan, 1998) This deﬁnition illustrates that culture is evolutionary in nature and shaped by the people within the organization in their day-to-day work. Our experience of working within organizations and coming in from the outside would bear this out. If you have ever left an organization and gone back years later, it is likely you will ﬁnd some aspects of behaviour, the interactions between individuals, the environment and the interface they have with the outside world will have changed, even in the most traditional of organizations. For example, the Co-operative Bank have still kept true to their values of ethical practice, but the services they provide and how they provide them has changed substantially over the years to not just keep up with the competition, but to provide a competitive edge. The total culture of the organization is not always clear to the outside eye. Often, there is a good deal of difference between the artefacts and elements on display to the customers and the experience of what happens on a day-to-day basis within the organization. Mostly, people identify with a simple deﬁnition of culture which is ‘how things are done around here’ as a short hand. However, in reality, culture is complex and working within the existing culture, as well as identifying aspects of culture which might need to change to meet the future needs of the organization is a challenge for managers and those in HR tasked with implementing change. The Lily Pond model (Schein, 2004; Scorzoni, 1982) is included here as a more familiar framework for reﬂecting on the culture of the organization. Other aspects of culture are returned to later in the book.

Lily Pond This model outlines three levels of organization culture (Figure 3.1). Level 1: Visible manifestations of the culture: The ﬂower of the lily which shows above the surface Level 2: Values – the stems which support the ﬂower and can be seen through the surface of the water Level 3: Basic underlying assumptions – the hidden root system which supports and nourishes the plant. 33

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BEHAVIOURS, NORMS, ARTIFACTS, ETC.

VALUES, WHAT’S IMPORTANT

ASSUMPTIONS, PHILOSOPHIES

Figure 3.1 The lily pond model. Reprinted from ‘View From The Lighthouse’, ©2005 CoastWise Consulting, Inc. http://www.coastwiseconsulting.com with kind permission of Tracy Gibbons, President, John Scorzoni and Ed Schein. http://www.coastwiseconsulting. com/nl_14.htm

An example linked to this model is highlighted below. LUSH handmade cosmetics have been in existence since the 1970s, manufacturing fresh products such as bath bombs, soaps and shampoo bars with few preservatives and environmentally friendly packaging. They now have 370 shops worldwide and operate a mail order business to 11 countries worldwide. Their aim is to have the youngest freshest products in the history of cosmetics. Level 1: visible manifestations of the culture: if you go into one of their shops (there are about 80 across the UK and Northern Ireland) you are surrounded by colour, smells and a wide array of bright products of different shapes and sizes. There is a lot of produce on display in a rather chaotic but 34

Patterns Past

somehow creative fashion that says ‘fun’. The young staff are friendly and down to earth and genuinely seem pleased to see you and tell you about their products. Their website exudes energy, fun and excitement, as does their newsletter, with bright graphics, cartoons and loads of product details. Stories ﬁll the newsletter with people quoting their favourite products. The recycled paper reﬂects the packaging for mail orders which is minimal and recyclable. Level 2: The values: the espoused values of the organization are reﬂected in their newsletter: ‘Here at Lush we like to have fun…. We also like to look after our environment – and we like to make the two work together’ ‘What we believe’ is also on their website (www.lush.co.uk) under ﬁve core headings: Fresh, No animal testing, Hand made, Ambience, Good Value. An example under ambience is: We believe in long candlelit baths, massage, ﬁlling the house with perfume and in the right to make mistakes, lose everything and start again. Level 3: The basic underlying assumptions: as this level is seldom explicitly extroverted it can be difﬁcult to determine. These are the unspoken rules which exist which are often only understood once within the organization. They might include what everyone knows is acceptable and appropriate but no-one really talks about. These are the tacit assumptions and either support the other levels or tell a different story. Examples might include (not in relation to LUSH): people stay until the work is done; relationships are the most important aspect of the day-to-day work; we all share in the successes of the company etc.

As with all plant life, the most important part in the health of the overall plant is at the root level, but all three levels have importance both separately and in their relationship to each other. Hence, we often see in organizations visible manifestations of what the organization wants the external customer to see rather than a reﬂection of what culture really exists. Assumptions and beliefs account for the values that become important in the organization which, in turn, account for the behaviours, norms, artifacts and so on. Again, as with plant life, organizations must be able to adapt to their external environment to survive and be successful, so many change programmes will place an emphasis on environmental analysis as part of the change process. If we are looking at the organization through this framework, we might see conﬂict as arising when the layers are misaligned, for example, with differences between our external image and internal behaviours. A value of ‘people are our most valuable asset’ is a classic example. Do managers, front line staff and everyone who works for the organization behave in a way that reﬂects this value? 35

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Other ways in which the culture of the organization might be understood is by research, observation and interviews; less formally by listening to the stories which get told in the organization about the past events, shared history and people who have had an impact in some way and shaped the organization in terms of what it has become. Key questions to help assess the culture might include: ■

What are the rituals that take place on a daily basis that are part of the fabric of the organization? – for example, tea breaks? Working lunches? Working late or leaving promptly at 5 pm? Birthday and other celebrations? What are the visible signs of the culture of the organization: kite-marks? Reception area? Ofﬁce spaces? Open plan? Doors open or closed? Managers visible or not? Who has control and power in the organization? And how does this manifest? How do decisions get made? At what level? Who gets listened to and why? What are the formal and informal ways of inﬂuencing how things are done in the organization? What systems are in place and how effective are they? For example, communication systems, appraisal systems, production systems etc. What is valued in the organization? Hard work? Creativity? Interpersonal skills? Empathy? Getting results? Teamwork? And how is this value rewarded? Or not?

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The example below shows aspects of an organizational culture which might need attention.

A large charitable sector organization was undergoing signiﬁcant change as a result of pressure to reduce costs by downsizing its operation (including numbers of staff), increasing its competitive edge for funding and generally updating its image. People talked about the history of the organization associated with the buildings and the people; there was a sense of nostalgia about the ‘old days’. The stories were mostly internally focused on relationships within rather than the interface between employees and the clients they served. The words ‘customer’ or ‘client’ were little referred to and sometimes it seemed the beneﬁciaries of the charity had become rather lost. People were caught up in an internal world. Meanwhile, the two most evident stakeholders of the organization – those giving money and those beneﬁting from it – had different perspectives of the charity. Those giving money seemed happy, satisﬁed that their funds were being used well; those beneﬁting were less enamoured with what funds were 36

Patterns Past

being spent on. The greatest inﬂuence was wielded by the ‘top team’ who, most agreed, were ‘dysfunctional’ in that they rarely agreed on anything. The CEO was well thought of but seemed to have no power over other senior managers on the executive who gave little if any direction, lacked leadership skills and were constantly criticizing each other. The structure of the organization was hierarchical with little decision making devolved to the line managers, and the power at the top went unchallenged. One of the rituals involved long tea breaks with a convivial atmosphere but a lack of urgency about getting back to do any work. A casual approach to business in the sense of providing value for money was part of the norm and allowed to continue by a management team perhaps too caught up in their own dynamics to notice. HR in this organization had a mixed reputation among the majority of staff but was powerful in the sense of having a seat at the strategic table and was protected by the senior team.

Understanding the present culture from these different perspectives helps to give us some insights into how things really are, rather than how they purport to be, including: the conﬂicts that are around; conﬂicts of interest, conﬂicts of purpose and intent, conﬂicts around values, personality clashes, conﬂicting roles and responsibilities and so on. This level of organizational awareness can then open up choices for what to do, if anything, with greater shared responsibility for the future of the organization.

What are the supportive aspects of culture? Culture provides people who work for the organization with a clear sense of belonging and a personality with which they can identify. Whether someone works for a public, private sector or charitable organization, the culture will be something that either reﬂects their values and sense of what is important or (particularly if the organization and its fundamental purpose changes) how the personality and values of the organization conﬂict with what they feel is important. Organizations with a strong sense of identity have become skilled at making sure new employees are clear on the culture of the organization and have an appropriate ﬁt in terms of individual and organizational values. The ‘work hard play hard’ culture, for example, is still thriving and some companies will overtly select people who can work in this way. Culture changes over time through necessity and by design and we have seen many public examples of this. Marks & Spencer 37

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is one organization that comes readily to mind, with a drive from competition and a need to modernize its image, challenging aspects of its history as a traditional (and somewhat old fashioned) company. Paying attention to aspects of the present culture that need to be maintained and those that need to be altered is an important part of organizational survival.

Embedded cultures – for better or worse? It might be useful here to ponder on culture at individual, group and organizational levels and develop our understanding of the notion of resistance to change in relation to these. Another way to look at embedded cultures is to say that the culture on these different levels is strong. So, if it supports the direction of the organization and the behaviours that are needed for the future, this is a really helpful aspect of culture. We explore three examples below and make the links between change, resistance and conﬂict: Personal culture: as shaped by our values and beliefs, our background, our ethnicity, religion, friends and life experiences.

Andy was a senior manager in a pharmaceutical company. He had been in this role for over 10 years and felt somewhat stuck in terms of being unable to progress further. Discussions with his line manager had highlighted speciﬁc areas which needed to be developed if he wanted to take up a more strategic position on the Executive team in the future. Speciﬁcally, Andy needed to develop his strategic thinking skills, his conﬁdence in inﬂuencing others and be more proactive in marketing the work of his team. His background had been in research and he now had management responsibility for a team of 30 based around the UK. Through coaching, his personal culture was explored, which included a working class background and a strong work ethic; a family man whose work–life balance was important to him. Relationships with others at work were important but perhaps secondary to the research which he believed fundamentally important to the future of the company. The experiences he had in terms of health in his own family had led him into a career in research and he missed the days when he could absorb himself in this work without the distractions of managing others.

Resistance to change? In coaching sessions it seemed that Andy was reluctant to explore how he might develop in the ways in which his manager had outlined. He seemed quite happy to remain in a less strategic role which put less pressure on 38

Patterns Past

him and his family. His children were still quite young and he felt his duty lay in spending time with them rather than at work all the time. His lack of conﬁdence in inﬂuencing meant he had not spoken with his manager about how he saw the role, his frustrations at managing others and a desire to go back into a research role.

Addressing different needs The conﬂict highlighted from this included: an inner conﬂict for Andy of wanting to please his manager, but stay true to his own values; a potential conﬂict of interests between Andy and his manager about the role he was in and expectations on both sides; a potential organizational issue about placing specialists in management roles with little consideration of how this might meet their personal needs and aspirations.

Group culture: as shaped by the social norms, group cohesiveness, methods of decision making, leadership issues, communication patterns and stages of development.

A small team in the transport industry – relatively new, all very bright with members not all in place in terms of the team structure. They were at the start of getting on board with processes coming into place over the next 6 months. According to the manager of the team, ‘people were not used to change’ and were ‘more into contemplation than action’. There were issues around trust with some potential fears about job security. Work tended to take place in silos and the lack of cooperation across the team meant there was insufﬁcient focus on the customer, a need to deliver business results and make an impact in the quickest time, work more as consultants with their contractors and customers and a need for greater articulation of the obstacles and best practice. The manager wanted to create a culture where change was accepted more readily and there was greater support of each other to meet the business needs.

Resistance to change? The culture of the team included an emphasis on competence, knowledge and skills and this was evident through a diagnostic feedback approach where they were prepared to acknowledge each other’s competence but only felt safe to do this at a distance. The lack of sharing knowledge and working more 39

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collaboratively reﬂected confusion over roles, identity and acceptance in the team. A lack of understanding of the priorities within and across functions meant customers were not being shown the true value of what could be offered. In diagnostic work, there was also revealed a lack of celebrating any successes so the overall conﬁdence of the team was low. Someone described the team as, ‘A group of talented and highly skilled individuals who have a mould breaking opportunity but are too nervous to grasp it’ and ‘Immature, not fully understanding its scope and ﬁt within the organization’. So the culture within this team was perhaps one of caution, uncertainty and, to a certain extent, fear.

Addressing different needs The conﬂict highlighted from this included: needs of the manager for the team to be more open and proactive in their interactions with each other and with him – more robust in some senses. The team, however, needed greater clarity around job roles and priorities, greater understanding of needs across teams and within the team; support and acknowledgement of what was working well; more visible planning and a clear common vision. There was a need to feel part of a team without losing their own sense of autonomy and competence.

Organizational culture: as shaped by the values, systems, processes, behaviours and environment.

A large retail company had been affected by a number of key changes over a period of time including: increased competition, technology and legislation and increased customer demands. People expected faster turnaround of products, a more responsive production service and a greater product range. Removal of trade barriers had meant increased competition from the continent and more centralized warehousing systems allowing smaller manufacturers to enter the competition. Greater levels of accountability and responsibility were needed in terms of employee and employer relationships and the shorter production times meant an update of machinery was necessary. The culture of the organization was one of tradition, with decisions being made by hierarchy and a highly directive style of management. The structure of the organization meant there was little cross-function working, 40

Patterns Past

with teamwork being limited to the line management functions. People were used to being told what to do and how to do it, so there was a lack of proactivity and creativity in moving quickly to new ways of thinking.

Resistance to change? There was a sense of security with the familiar ways of doing things in the organization. People were able to hide behind the hierarchy in the knowledge that the structure would be a way of escaping taking responsibility for making decisions on a more personal level. Power had been vested in the managers rather than a shared responsibility for the success of the company. In some ways, this suited both the managers and employees, with the managers being able to keep hold of the power and employees able to lay any blame at their door if things went wrong. At the outset there was some resistance from managers who felt the changes needed to be made by the staff, rather than owning that they needed to make changes themselves. Any change intervention in this organization needed to acknowledge the role of line managers and actively engage them and their teams in supporting the culture change; to enable managers to see that they could still have power but share this by engaging with others to create a culture that worked better to meet the needs of the organization.

Addressing different needs As outlined above, the differing needs at stake here might be summarized as follows: managers needed to retain a sense of authority and power, to have a role in relation to the management of their teams and to build skills to support people through the change. Staff elsewhere needed to trust that they could contribute to the process and that their ideas would be listened to and taken seriously. Trust of the managers needed to be built into any intervention but by different methods than those used in the past. The businesses operated across different sites and so the diverse needs at each of the sites in terms of pace of the change needed to be accommodated and emphasis on hard aspects of culture change (e.g. equipment and work environment) had more focus in some areas than others. Management style and behaviours were addressed through a range of workshops in other areas where the nuts and bolts were already in place. In this way, ﬂexibility was also an aspect of culture change that needed to be modelled.

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Change, Conﬂict and Community

The above examples do not give answers to the questions that were raised in dealing with these situations; rather they are given here to provide a backdrop to our understanding of the effect of culture. We give examples of strategies for supporting change and conﬂict in the next chapters. Culture, whether personal, group or organizational, will always serve a purpose whether it is deemed to be healthy and appropriate to the business needs or not. In organizations we work with it seems that little attention is paid to the needs that are being served by the existing culture, rather the emphasis is on how to change it to ﬁt what is assumed is needed in relation to the change. Andy in our ﬁrst example had perfectly understandable reasons for resisting change, perhaps before the coaching sessions, outside of his conscious awareness. The transport team too had very legitimate needs that were being served by working autonomously and resisting the pressure to work more collectively. In our individual worlds, there is a perception that we have more control. Once we become part of a group, there is a risk that our knowledge will either have greater or less currency once benchmarked with others. There is also a risk that our intellectual capital will be used by others for their own ends. The organizational example again highlights that managers with clear line responsibility and a directive style can act as a container for anxieties that might be around in the organization, particularly through times of change. Predictability brings with it a sense of stability of which there is little to be found in today’s organization.

Resistance to change Resistance to change is a phrase often used but not always understood in our view. Work in this area has identiﬁed that there are certainly factors which are more likely to create a negative feeling towards change. One aspect of this is changes to the nature of the ‘deal’ between employer and employee (Strebel, 1996), in terms of: ■ ■ ■

the ‘formal’ aspect: role, resources, performance evaluation and pay the ‘psychological’ aspect: feelings about the work and the amount of it, recognition and personal satisfaction the ‘social’ aspect: values and beliefs about how the company should work and how it works in practice.

The advice given is to renegotiate all of these aspects of the working relationship clearly, in order to build buy-in; while this is important, resistance is more complex than this, as we started to touch on in Chapter 2. A detailed examination of how change occurs (George and Jones, 2001) has highlighted how resistance can arise at different stages in the thinking and feeling 42

Patterns Past

process of individuals. When we are faced with something that seems to be a change to the way we see our work, our organization and our place within that, it represents a change to our patterns of thinking and feeling. Our emotions are engaged as we notice the difference between our view and this new idea or event. Change occurs, internally, when we accept the ‘new’ event as a change to our way of thinking or feeling about something and then start to behave or act in a way that accepts that new idea or event. An example of this would be raising awareness of the need for a different approach to customer service. An individual employee may pride themselves on their technical knowledge and professional judgement. A customer who places greater value on being dealt with as an individual potentially offers a challenge to the employee’s approach and view. This awareness may lead to a change in approach as the employee recognizes value in taking this information on board. It may, however, be resisted, for both emotional and intellectual reasons, including, for example: ■

■ ■ ■ ■

belief that the original view (that professionalism is more important than an individual) holds fast, sometimes reinforced by a team of like-minded individuals belief that this is just a ‘one-off ’ event and, therefore, not important information to take on board belief that there is nothing that can be done in response to the information denial of the importance of the information, because the emotions raised are too great to deal with a belief that other issues are more important. There is a tendency in organizations to treat resistance as:

■ ■ ■ ■

individual, by classifying some people as ‘resisters’ or ‘cynics’ ignorant, that if only people understood, they would accept the changes irrational, based overly on emotions that get in the way of seeing the rationality of the changes something to ﬁght back against, by pushing ideas harder and defending one’s position to overcome those who seem to stand in the way. Other ways to approach resistance are:

■ ■ ■ ■ ■

listening to the feelings and arguments behind the resistance curiosity about other perspectives and ideas that may improve the approach to be taken, or explain why resistance is occurring compassion for the difﬁculties we all experience in working with change humility and acceptance that these people could be absolutely right collaboration: given all of this, what will we do? 43

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The shadow system The ‘shadow system’ is a term that describes the set of interactions people have outside of the legitimate system, that is the way people interact within the political environment of the organization in pursuit of their own goals, but also the arena for creativity and play (Stacey, 1996). This part of the organizational culture can be well established and anarchic in nature with ‘mob-behaviour, ever present’ (Stacey). The legitimate system keeps this side in balance very much as the darker side of human nature is kept in check by societal norms. Once the legitimate system becomes de-stabilized, the shadow side can take a hold. Such is the case with some industrial disputes. The perception, for example, that the psychological contract has been breached in some way can lead to an upsurge in the shadow system with a range of behaviours reﬂecting antiestablishmentarianism.

The toxic organization We wanted to pay attention to the concept of an organization where the shadow system becomes embedded in ways which seem to be counter-productive to the overall health of the organization. We have certainly come across organizations where there is a strong culture of blame, for example, where scapegoating is rife and it feels unsafe to express an alternative view. Openness is limited and people seem wedded to set behaviours which are maintaining the status quo. Usually, the behaviours are exhibited in the most senior team in the organization as an indicator of the wider culture: We can think of organizations as falling on a continuum. One end is anchored by organizations that function well. In the middle we ﬁnd the average organization that is effective but could be better. Finally, we have the toxic organization, an organization that is largely ineffective, but is also destructive to its employees and leaders. (Bacal, 2000) Good leadership and management are certainly important factors in determining the health of an organizational culture, but Hay (2004) notes a number of other aspects of organizational toxicity: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 44

Lack of good leadership and management Lacking focus of mission, boundaries of limitation, values and history Lack of satisfaction and optimism Closed communication Punitive in nature and not even-handed Unassailable knowledge, intolerant of questioning

Patterns Past

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Authoritarianism, legalism, rigidity, control Emotional, physical, sexual abuse Treat individuals as interchangeable/replaceable cogs Delusional and dissonant Lack of work–life balance Low self-esteem Lack of development and learning.

In our experience, it would be unusual to ﬁnd all of these present in an organization and so we would not identify with the notion of an organization being toxic overall. Also, some examples may be clearer cut than others. Few might dispute that abuse could be considered ‘toxic’, whereas others in the list might be more about perception, for example, ‘Good leadership’. In our experience, elements of the above might appear either in parts of the organization or for a period of time, perhaps more predominant again in times of change, where levels of optimism can be low and focus less clear. If several of the areas above are present, including a lack of good leadership and management, perhaps the perception of the majority in the organization is that it has indeed become ‘toxic’. In the same way that an individual can compromise their overall health in the lifestyle they choose, an organization can also become unhealthy if it becomes insensitized to patterns of behaviour that are counter-productive. In the next chapter, we explore ‘in the grip’ experiences which can be played out at an organizational as well as individual level with overly bureaucratic processes put in place and excessive attention placed on monitoring and controlling.

The role of the trade unions There is perhaps still a role for trade unions (TU), particularly when some of the more toxic aspects of organizational life are present. Trade union representatives could be said to be one of the ‘toxic handlers’ referred to by Peter Frost (2003). We think that HR often performs this role too in the way they respond to felt pain in the organization. The ﬁve major themes Frost writes about include: listening, holding space for healing, buffering pain, extricating others from painful situations and transforming pain. The implications of being in this role over a long period can mean stress and toxic overload for the individuals supporting others. If HR and any TU representatives share some of the load in this respect, together with managers and peers, the burden can be lowered. This means working in a spirit of collaboration rather than conﬂict. Unfortunately, trade union members still tend to be associated with the more negative aspects of conﬂict, in particular industrial action. However, there are 45

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many examples where trade unions have been the catalyst for positive changes in the organization, particularly around protection of workers’ rights and beneﬁts. One of the new laws introduced after the ‘Thatcher’ years stated that employers did not have to recognize any trade union if they did not want to, regardless of how many of their workers belonged to it. This meant that trade unions could play no part in negotiations and could not represent their workers at all. However, in 2000 a new EU employment law came into being which stated that an employer must legally recognize and negotiate with a trade union if more than 50% of its workers belong to it. This legislative requirement rather forces the involvement of trade unions. In our discussions with organizations around managing change and involving stakeholders, it is interesting to note that the trade union representatives are often not included as a signiﬁcant stakeholder. This rather depends on the industry and legal requirements though and the rail and airline industries, for example, often have strong trade unions and any management of change would need to take into account the views of these representatives of the workforce. Trade unions increasingly wish to be seen as working with employers to create a better and more competitive economy and not as organizations that stand in the way of change and increased costs for ﬁrms. Most would agree that they have mutual interests with the employers in terms of ensuring the success of the company and the security of employment for individuals. However, where the balance lies in relation to these two core areas is, in itself, often the source of conﬂict. In the past (and perhaps still present in some organizations), an ‘us and them’ culture between trade unions and employers has prevailed with each side taking what can seem like an entrenched position, guarding information and negotiating from a limited win-lose perspective.

Transitional elements of change In this section on patterns past, the emotional aspects of change also need to have some attention. Mostly, as with associations with the word conﬂict, people may readily associate with the negative emotions around at times of change. However, there are a whole host of emotions that will be around through change including: fear, anger, joy, excitement, anticipation, anxiety, hope, threat; guilt and shame might also be there as people reﬂect on mistakes of the past. It is often this medley of emotions that is difﬁcult to manage either for self or others. As change is experienced differently by individuals, applying a strategy to support the transitional elements of change can be challenging. However, by paying attention to the process of change as well as the content, we believe some helpful approaches can be taken. 46

Patterns Past

Change curve Many of our readers will be familiar with the change curve, ﬁrst proposed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (1969), which links the past to the future in terms of identifying patterns of behaviour through change. This curve has been much plagiarized over the years, but we still think it signiﬁcant to mention here as many people going through change identify with the emotional aspects it highlights. ■

■

■

Stage one is about holding on to the past. Individuals may be experiencing shock, numbness or denial. Denial may also come in the form of minimizing the effects of the change. Stage two is about letting go. The middle stages of transition where fear, anger and possibly depression might be around. Blame sometimes shows itself here too in the form of blaming self, ‘If only….’, or blaming others, ‘If it wasn’t for the CEO…’. The manifestation of these stronger emotions may signal that individuals are starting to accept the changes as reality. When acceptance kicks in (and sometimes it really does feel like a kick to the stomach), acknowledgement usually follows that the change is here to stay. A realization that things will not be the same again may result in individuals staying in a depressed state longer than is healthy for themselves or the organization. Stage 3 is about moving on. This is the phase of change where discovery, learning and integration take place. There is a notiﬁable change in energy towards working with the change rather than against it.

From our experiences of working with change in organizations, we would make several points about this model: 1. The rate at which individuals go through the cycle is different for each person 2. Not everyone will experience the whole range of emotions in every change that is presented 3. Those tasked with implementing change are probably in a different place from those experiencing it further down the line 4. People are likely to be in one phase of the change cycle when another change hits them. As managers, leaders and change agents we cannot wholly prevent the triggering of uncomfortable feelings during change so there is something about accepting that, for some, these feelings will be around and that they may be compounded by a whole host of other related factors. These might include an individual’s personal experiences of change, different levels of comfort around control, preferences about inclusion and engagement and what else is going on in someone’s life 47

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more generally. What we can perhaps more helpfully pay attention to is how to avoid unnecessarily raising levels of discomfort during change.

The Four Rooms of Change Another popular model in the USA and Scandinavia, but less well known in the UK, is the Four Rooms of Change by Claes F Janssen (2006). This theory of change was built up by Janssen with the groups he works with and indicates how, in all of us, there are different responses to change, both negative and positive. A typical collection of emotions from within the different ‘rooms’ in which we react to change is shown in Figure 3.2.

CONTENTMENT Adjustment. My present situation feels good enough as it is. Relaxed, effortless self-control, as when riding a bicycle. Attention focused on the here and now, no marked self-reflection. ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’. Feeling ‘average’ in the sense of not special. Being there.

DENIAL Pseudo-adjustment. Self-discipline with focus on completing a certain task or defending a certain pattern or status quo. No clear feelings. I am in control but uptight. The here and now (if experienced at all) feels empty and mechanical. Irritation. Attention concentrated on the task felt to be necessary, on the rules and/or my image in others’ eyes, on not to lose face, on tactical considerations, etc.

RENEWAL Creative change. Integration. A sense of ‘getting it all together’. Insights, ahaexperiences. Feelings freely felt and expressed. Intense experience of the here and now, with self-reflection: I participate and observe that I am participating. Strong feelings of community. Self-confidence. Energy. Radical ideas, a desire to make things happen.

CONFUSION Maladjustment. Something is or feels wrong here and now, but I do not know what, or what to do to make things right. Tense, negative self-consciousness with feelings of inferiority and doubts; ‘self-centred’. Chaos. Dialectical YES/NO conflicts within and/or without. Feelings in a clinch. A sense of unreality.

Figure 3.2 Four rooms of change. Reproduced from Janssen, C. (2006) ‘The Four Rooms of Change Theory’: Ander and Lindstrom AB, Stockholm, Sweden. See also http://claesjanssen.com and http://www.audolin.com/fourrooms

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During the process of change, according to this model, we move from Contentment, through Denial, to Confusion and then to Renewal, and back again to Contentment. We may feel during the change that we are in any one of these rooms at any time but, in reﬂecting back on the process, we can see that there was indeed an overall pattern. The challenge of change is to be prepared to spend enough time in the rooms that are less comfortable for us in order to maximize the essential beneﬁts they offer. In addition, when it comes to conﬂict, understanding where people are on an emotional level becomes critical. During a merger, one usually very aware senior manager reacted so strongly to the news of the impending change that he was unable to operate for several days; his desk and diary remained empty and he stayed in his ofﬁce doing nothing, pitching between denial and confusion. Weeks later, when his place in the new organization was assured and he was working on an exciting aspect of the change process, he looked critically at members of his department who were still uncertain of the future, and asked ‘what’s the matter with these people, why can’t they just get on with it?’ However capable we are, it is very easy to forget how strong feelings to change can be.

Transitions All changes in our view, whether perceived to be positive or negative, will have an element of loss attached to them. For example, both of us now work as freelance consultants, having been employed full time for many years. In both our situations, we chose to leave organizations, on good terms it has to be said, and a positive decision on our parts. We left at different times and no doubt had very different emotional reactions to the changes that then followed. What is true for us both is a conﬁrmation that the relationship aspects of organizational life as a permanent employee cannot be replicated in freelance life. However good your networks are, there is something about the quality of relationships inside the organization which is different. This stage of acknowledging endings and losses is referred to by William Bridges (2004) in his book on Transitions. The three stages of transition referred to by Bridges include: endings, the neutral zone and new beginnings. The losses which inevitably come with endings can include a range of things from relationships, loss of competence, loss of control, loss of status, loss of environment (in relocations for example or even in the case of moving ofﬁces) and loss of identity. We can choose perhaps not to focus on the losses or honour the past by giving them some attention. Working with HR functions in a variety of organizations, we notice the impetus for change, for example, to the HR Business Partner role, often pays little attention to what needs to be let go of from past ways of working. This can leave individuals who have built their careers around the more operational aspects of HR feeling de-skilled and undervalued. 49

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Rather than brushing aside these previous ways of working, an attention to how they can be built on might help people to move forward in a less conﬂicted way. In coaching sessions with individuals going through change either on a personal or organizational level, paying attention to what might need to be let go can be a determinant of whether they want the change or not. For example, Andy, in our earlier example might decide that in order to be in a more strategic role in the organization and meet his manager’s needs, he would need to let go of some of the security of being able to refer up to others; he might also need to let go of some of the work–life balance that has become important to him. From powerless to proactive

Bridges’ next stage in the transitional process is referred to as ‘the neutral zone’ or being in limbo. We recognize this as a common stage when working with organizations undergoing change: when the new beginning (Bridges’ ﬁnal stage) is not yet here but we have not quite detached ourselves from the past. This is an uncomfortable phase as emotions are often in turmoil – a combination of anticipation of the changes to come and frustration often with working with the old systems, structures and behaviours still in place. Individuals too can get frustrated with trying to make changes on a personal level and ﬁnding themselves slipping back into old patterns. Habits are a recurrent, often unconscious pattern of behaviour, acquired through frequent repetition, so change requires constant repetition or re-enforcement if it is to become embedded. Organizations going through mergers for example, may ﬁnd the neutral zone lasts a considerable length of time and during this phase it is difﬁcult for people to move into new ways of working. Again, the move to an HR Business Partner model highlights the discomfort that is around for many: having to continue with operational activities until both the skills and capabilities of people new into the role have been built and the internal client system is in a sufﬁcient state of readiness to work in new ways. In this middle stage of the transition, coaching can be particularly valuable, helping individuals to see what they have some inﬂuence over in relation to the change. For example, there may be no negotiation on head count but people may be able to inﬂuence what the roles will look like for those who will remain. Individuals will often have more inﬂuence and control than they at ﬁrst think they have. Coaching in this way can help support a personal transition from feeling powerless about anything that can be done in relation to the change to being proactive about what they can inﬂuence. This leads into Bridges’ third stage of new beginnings which will include helping people to develop the skills and conﬁdence to take on new roles or understand new ways of working. 50

Patterns Past

Bridges and Mitchell (2000) highlight the limitations of change programmes rather recommending that managers and leaders need to be coached to understand where they are in relation to the phases of transition and to build their own capacity to coach others. In this way, leaders, managers and others charged with supporting people through change recognize the importance of paying attention to the transitional side, rather than trying to apply a quick checklist approach. Bridges also highlights some useful steps to managing transitions: 1. Learn to describe the change and why it must happen in less than 1 minute 2. Plan the details of change carefully and appoint people responsible for the details including communication plans 3. Understand who is going to have to let go of what 4. Include steps to help people respectfully let go of the past 5. Help people through the neutral zone with communication around the 4 ‘P’s ■ Purpose – Why we have to do this ■ Picture – What it will look like and feel like when we reach our goal ■ Plan – Step-by-step, how we will get there ■ Part – What individuals can (and need to) do to help us move forward 6. Create temporary solutions to temporary problems and the high levels of uncertainty found in the neutral zone 7. Help people launch the new beginning by articulating the new attitudes and behaviours needed to make the change work and then modelling and rewarding those behaviours and attitudes. On some managing change programmes, we have asked participants to consider the ﬁrst step and explain the reasons behind the change to others in a way which they can understand. This usually highlights some interesting issues for individuals, in particular how much they understand the change themselves, but also the level of complexity that is involved in the change. The other important aspect to this question links to communication during change and being able to adapt the message to meet the needs of particular stakeholders. Describing the change and why it needs to happen to a member of staff will need to be different to delivering the same message to a customer or contractor. In our later chapters, we look at widening the circle of involvement in relation to change to bring to the surface potential conﬂicts and use the energy behind them to engage people in a more meaningful way. Some of the steps outlined by Bridges could therefore be discussed and decided upon with a wider group of people in the organization, for example, in creating a picture of what the changes will look like and feel like. This partly depends on the changes that are likely in the organization and the amount of clarity there is about the end result. When the end result is not known, a sense of clarity might emerge from greater engagement of others. 51

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Summary This chapter has paid attention to understanding what culture is and what meaning it gives in relation to us as individuals, the groups to which we belong and the organization overall. We have highlighted the importance of understanding the history of the organization and smaller systems within it, paying attention to what has happened in our shared history, what meaning this represented for us and what we might need to carry forward into the future. If we arrive at a place of unconditional acceptance and acknowledge how the organization is, warts and all, we are more likely to be able to work within it and understand ways of working with change and conﬂict. It has also highlighted the importance of paying attention to the emotional aspects of change, recognizing that in all change people will go through an emotional as well as transactional experience and that for those of us leading change the pace of our emotional journey may be quicker. We hope this chapter also highlights the importance of paying attention to emotions and understanding the underlying reasons for how people feel, rather than judging resistance, for example, as a negative aspect of the change process. This part of the book has been about paying attention to what we already know as well as what we might need to know more about and in this way valuing our own history of knowledge and insight. We aimed to spark interest and curiosity about what our organizations are really like rather than what they claim to be to the outside world. By surfacing and seeing value in the less visible aspects of culture, we can determine if we like what we see and start to question its relevance in terms of what we want and need to do next.

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4 Change and Conﬂict – A Chicken and Egg Debate? In this chapter, we explore more explicitly the relationship between change and conﬂict. We invite the reader to continue checking your own assumptions about the relationship between the two and notice if, in your own experiences of change, some level of conﬂict has always been present. Also, we think it is useful to look at instances where conﬂict has provoked change and been the driver and energetic force behind a change that needed to happen. If this is the case, it may be that we need to pay more attention to the notion of a ‘burning platform’ when working with change and consider strategies that draw out the conﬂict rather than ignore, suppress or stiﬂe it. We are bombarded daily with news of conﬂicts in the international arena and the abuse of power by governments which have cost millions of lives and resulted in devastating consequences for many countries around the world. An increasingly present example of change and conﬂict presents itself in climate change with the challenges of increased technology and organizational growth and decreasing resources and ecological sustainability. Unfortunately, conﬂict is readily associated with these large scale events, so most people have negative associations with the word. Even in the most difﬁcult and complex situations, there is undoubtedly some learning to be had if people choose to listen with an open mind. We do not underestimate the challenges this can bring when individuals and organizations are in the midst of seemingly entrenched conﬂicts. Some of the more beneﬁcial aspects of conﬂict are highlighted in this chapter and returned to again later in the book. Questions addressed in this chapter include: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

What is conﬂict? What causes conﬂict and how does it manifest in organizations? Does change cause conﬂict or conﬂict cause change? What is the relationship between the two? What is the cost of conﬂict for organizations? Both ﬁnancially and personally?

Change, Conﬂict and Community

What is conﬂict? In working with groups and individuals to help them understand and work with conﬂict, we often ask the question of what it means to them. Typical responses might include: ﬁght, aggression, losing face, stress, fear, bullying, catalyst for change, energy, power imbalance, winners and losers, necessary, exciting and so on. Many initial associations with conﬂict have negative connotations, although a few will give a more positive or neutral perspective as shown above. Conﬂict it seems is neither straightforward nor generally agreed upon by everyone in terms of how it is experienced. Two dictionary deﬁnitions highlight differing aspects of conﬂict. Conﬂict – to ﬁght, to be antagonistic, incompatible, or contradictory; clash; a ﬁght or struggle; sharp disagreement or opposition (Collins, 2007). This deﬁnition would tend to imply that conﬂict is somehow outside ourselves and between two or more people. However, another deﬁnition throws a slightly different perspective on the word. Conﬂict – an emotional state characterized by indecision, restlessness, uncertainty and tension …. (Webster, 2002). The Webster’s deﬁnition challenges our perception that conﬂict is something that happens externally. Rather, that it happens within ourselves and, therefore, the actions we might consider taking in relation to this conﬂict will be quite different. Certainly, in most cases of conﬂict at work, an element of internal tension and emotional unrest will be present. However, traditional methods for resolving the conﬂict mostly focus on the external sources and may not help the individual to understand and manage this inner tension. Before exploring this in more detail, a couple of other deﬁnitions to ponder on: ‘Conﬂict is natural, neither positive nor negative, it just is’ (Crum, 1999). This viewpoint puts a different perspective again. In viewing conﬂict as something that naturally occurs as part of the human condition, we might grow to accept it and work with it rather than against it. Conﬂict does not, of necessity have to result in a battle; however, when left either unrealized or unresolved more overt aspects might appear either between individuals or across the organization, like a rash on the skin provoked by infection underneath. Raised levels of self-awareness to what provokes anxiety, discomfort, adrenalin even as the starting point for action can help in deciding what next steps might follow. Most people would accept that differences of opinion, particularly in times of change, are necessary and can create a greater range of options and better quality of decisions if allowed to surface. ‘Conﬂict and contention in organizations are not just unavoidable – they are positively to be welcomed’ (Pascale, 1990). Guttman (2003), for example, states that conﬂict can produce dynamic tension: ‘…the dynamic tension that results when executives go head to head can 54

Change and Conﬂict – A Chicken and Egg Debate?

be a source of great creativity, excitement and even strength’. When people feel brave enough to explore their areas of difference, passion and energy can be released for something different going forward. There are implications here for the organization in providing a culture which allows an element of risk taking, honest conversation and experimentation. These notions are explored later in this book, in particular in Chapter 8 on energizing the organization where we look at the notion of ‘creative abrasion’. For the purposes of being able to discuss conﬂict in this chapter, we invite you to take a broad understanding of the word as being something that naturally occurs, both intrapersonally (within self) and interpersonally (relating to the interactions between individuals and groups). For ease of writing here, we make an assumption that all conﬂict, whether about task or relationships more overtly, will have an element of the intrapersonal and interpersonal and can be sparked by external factors, in particular, change. As a manager or HR practitioner, questions you might usefully ask yourself about the conﬂicts which surround you or you are a part of at the moment include: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

How am I deﬁning ‘conﬂict’ for me, my team or others? And at what point does something become a conﬂict which I feel needs to be managed? How am I experiencing conﬂict at the moment? What do I sense in terms of what I see, hear and feel? And what is my intuition telling me about the conﬂict? How, if at all, am I acting on my senses and intuition? What or who has been the trigger for the conﬂict that is presenting itself? In what way does this conﬂict reﬂect other issues being experienced in the organization? Who is impacted by it? And in what way? What is my part in terms of contributing to the conﬂict or ‘fanning the ﬂames’? How might I be colluding with the situation if not actually escalating it? What would happen if the conﬂict continues? (maybe nothing) What would happen if it were to be resolved? Who needs to take responsibility for doing something?

These might be useful questions to consider before taking any action to deal with the conﬂict. In this way, we can gauge the extent to which the conﬂict is our responsibility and how much of it is outside of ourselves. Conﬂicts will often involve a combination of ingredients, conditions and triggers. The ingredients will be the people involved, their personalities, ideas, values and beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviours. The conditions include the factors which contribute to the conﬂict; for example, the physical environment, conditions in the workplace, rules and processes in place and the way the dispute has been handled in the past. The triggers will be the things that ignite the 55

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conﬂict and bring it to the surface. There will normally be an immediate event which raises the temperature of one or more people and kicks things off. There are several ways in which the conﬂict might progress from that point, leading to either a destructive or constructive outcome.

Change triggering conﬂict If we take the assumption to start with that change is likely to cause some level of conﬂict (Figure 4.1), whether that be overt opposition or an inner tension as in Webster’s deﬁnition, let’s consider some of the possible causes.

Competition over scarce resources This will be a common aspect of conﬂict in many organizations undergoing change. With an emphasis on cost effectiveness and value for money, resources, which are either human or material, will be in demand from people with seemingly equal needs and priorities. Competition in one organization we have worked with recently extended to competing for ofﬁce space in a relocation. When security needs are not being met elsewhere, the needs for space and a comfortable working environment become of great importance. A system (in this case a particular team within the organization) deﬁnes what is important and then if there is not enough of it, people exercise choices

Conflict

Change

Figure 4.1 Change triggering conﬂict

56

Change and Conﬂict – A Chicken and Egg Debate?

about the degree to which they want to ﬁnd a way to get hold of it. Competition may not be obvious with people handling their different perspectives in different ways. Again, we might view this competition negatively, or rather accept that it is an inevitable part of what happens during change. If there is a challenging aspect in relation to any of this it is perhaps how people’s needs are expressed and addressed. One way to gauge the temperature on reactions to change is to encourage open dialogue about any perceptions of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’.

Differences in values When change happens in organizations, people can start to question fundamental values such as: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

How does the direction of the company tie in with my own views about what we are here to do? How are people being treated and does it ﬁt with my model of how people should be treated during change? How are we serving the needs of our customers through the process of this change? What is being given more or less importance through the change? And do I agree with this? Who needs to take responsibility for change around here? And how should they be managing the process?

When there is a clash in values resulting from organizational change, conﬂict can manifest itself in a whole host of ways from subtle signs of tension, such as increased gossip and rumours and blaming of the leaders in the organization, to all out strike action. There is a question here about how much, if at all, the values of individuals need to be aligned with the values of the organization. For example, if a public sector employee favours the Conservatives as their party of choice, can they still serve the Labour government and carry out their policies with integrity? We imagine most public sector workers would say they can and do. On the other hand, someone working for a small independent bank that gets taken over by a large multinational with very different policies and practices may feel their sense of meaning at work has been eradicated. In this way, my sense of who I am and what I believe on a personal level may feel challenged.

Differences of opinion about how to do things Although differences of opinion are sometimes expressed in a way which makes them difﬁcult to hear, they are also an indication of the level of commitment people 57

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have to the organization. If people did not care, the views, even ones which seem negative, probably would not be expressed at all. During times of change – particularly in organizations where people care about what they do and the organization overall – most people will have a view on how things ought to be managed and rarely are they the same. A tricky aspect of managing change, particularly for senior managers and/or those with key responsibilities for managing change, is having a strategy which takes into account the needs of the business and all stakeholders including employees, hence the trend towards HR strategy being incorporated or at least aligned into the business strategy. It may seem obvious that the organization exists to make money or at least to break even, but sometimes from an HR perspective balancing the needs of the business with the needs of employees can be challenging. Questions around this might include: what are the strategic priorities in relation to the business we are in or about to become? If we did not exist, what would be the consequence? Perhaps these questions are more relevant to those of you involved in business strategy but, in our view, they are fundamental to rising above any conﬂicts and sorting out the proverbial wood from the trees. When differences of opinion are expressed, rather than concentrating on what is said at the level presented, it might prove useful to look beyond, behind, above, below, inside and outside to get different perspectives on what has been raised. By asking questions and really paying attention to the answers, we can broaden our joint understanding and challenge conventional organizational thinking on the issues. This process is one way to help develop the organization’s capacity to change and develop. Questions again, either asked explicitly, or used to inform the thinking process might include: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

What are we hoping to achieve in the longer term? How does our history inform what is happening now? What would the Board of Directors or Board of Trustees take on this be? What would the canteen staff or the admin staff ’s view be? What would our key clients and customers say/think/do/want in relation to this situation?

An underlying assumption in these questions is that everyone has a valid view and there is no one perspective that has more truth than another. The question of organizational history and the impact this has on the present and future of the organization was addressed more in the previous chapter.

Role ambiguity The ambiguity that comes with change in relation to roles includes a lack of clarity around role, job responsibilities and role boundaries. This becomes evident 58

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when people both in and outside the organization do not know who has responsibility for what. Overlaps and gaps appear in the structure, cracks in the system triggered by hastily re-constructed roles and a rather piecemeal approach. As a customer or client you will probably have experienced being passed from pillar to post as the organization serving you struggles to ﬁnd out who exactly can help you with your enquiry. The frustration of external customers often parallels the frustration of those inside the organization, who cannot understand the decisions, often made from above, about a structure which seemingly gets in the way of, rather than supports the nature of the business. Project teams now exist in many organizations as a way of working more ﬂexibly on speciﬁc organizational objectives, pulling together people with the right skills and knowledge for a speciﬁc organizational outcome. Where multiple inputs are required from people across diverse functions and often locations, increased ambiguity is present and these can contribute to a range of conﬂicting needs and interests. Often, people are working on multiple projects and reporting in to several different project managers. The likelihood is they will also report in to a different functional manager. Kexsbom (2000) highlights a number of factors that are important to the management of virtual teams including: the clarity of the goals of the project team and priority of the project tasks, the management of interpersonal conﬂicts and the quality of the communication and information ﬂow. Kexsbom and others suggest that, in order for project teams to work together more productively, there are a number of helpful factors to consider: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Effective top-down communication through each project team for more timely decision making Management clear on the organizational priorities and directing the project teams accordingly Frequent meetings and review sessions to ensure alignment of project goals Increasing human relations training and team building activities – to encourage better understanding of the nature of teamwork Potential areas of conﬂict to be addressed in the initial project planning process Using a participative approach to team decision making, project planning, scheduling and controlling.

Some of this is about paying attention to the potential areas for conﬂict at the start of a project and discussing how they might be addressed before it is necessary to do this. Ideas within the team about how to raise potential areas of difference might also be helpfully discussed at this point, so that rather than seeing conﬂict as a problem if it surfaces, differences are welcomed as a constructive and necessary 59

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part of the project process. So, for example, if the project team identiﬁes that key people will be needed to work on different aspects of the project at the same time, discussions can take place about managing this effectively rather than reacting to the situation when the heat is on in the middle of the project.

Breaking of the psychological contract Many of our readers will be familiar with the concept of the psychological contract and it is mentioned here as it has direct relevance for considering issues in relation to change and conﬂict. In brief, the psychological contract is the unwritten agreement between employer and employee. Rather than the formal written contract governed by legislation, it is the implicit undertaking that, as an employer, I will provide certain beneﬁts and rights to you in return for certain behaviours and services carried out for the organization. As the employee, I expect certain commitments from you as an employer in return for my inputs. An example of these unwritten commitments is shown in Table 4.1, taken from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) factsheet on the psychological contract (CIPD, 2007).

Table 4.1 Unwritten commitments

Employees promise to

Employers promise to provide

Work hard

Pay commensurate with performance

Uphold company reputation

Opportunities for training and development Opportunities for promotion

Maintain high levels of attendance and punctuality Show loyalty to the organization Work extra hours when required Develop new skills and update old ones Be ﬂexible, for example, by taking on a colleague’s work Be courteous to clients and colleagues Be honest Come up with new ideas

Recognition for innovation or new idea Feedback on performance Interesting tasks An attractive beneﬁts package Respectful treatment Reasonable job security A pleasant and safe working environment

This material is taken from the CIPD factsheet The Psychological Contract (2007), with the permission of the publisher, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, London (www.cipd.co.uk)

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As long as the expectations on both sides are met, the psychological contract remains intact. However, you can already see the potential for conﬂict here and there are many examples where employers are deemed not to be living up to their side of the contract. The changing nature of the psychological contract is where the tension usually comes in. For example, you may not be able to offer an attractive beneﬁts package, but can you still offer people opportunities for training and development? One client we have worked with recently has had to make some very tough decisions in terms of relocation and redundancies. Training and development on the one hand may seem like a token gesture, but employees genuinely value the opportunity to meet with each other and discuss the realities of the business in the face of tough change. The content of the programmes in some ways is less important than the opportunity to meet and discuss the issues with colleagues going through the same experience. The nature of the psychological contract means it is rarely made explicit, although a good opportunity exists in the appraisal process to make explicit some of the assumptions held by both manager and employee. Senior managers could also make these more explicit when communicating change, particularly in terms of reassuring employees which aspects of the psychological contract will be unaffected.

Different personalities Being able to see our differences in terms of how we see the world and act within it is fundamental in our view to the success of change. Understanding differences in our customer and client groups can be the very thing that helps the organization to keep its competitive edge. Marketing specialists are skilled at analysing these trends and different requirements. For example, the trend towards greater consumer choice might mean the local shop needs to order something especially in to meet a customer’s individual need; some people will prefer to visit the supermarket and have human contact, others will prefer to shop on-line and save themselves time, perhaps not needing the interaction or contact in the same way. If we see and really value these differences, we might better be able to understand what needs to change and how we might support the process. By paying attention to individual needs during change as well as considering people as groups of employees, we are more likely to keep people interested, engaged and motivated, reducing the likelihood of poor performance and disciplinary situations. In terms of paying attention to different personalities through change, we can draw on a number of different theories to help our understanding. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) (Briggs Myers, 1980), for example, will help us 61

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understand how introducing change with our own preferences in mind, rather than the range of preferences others have can produce tension and conﬂict. As a simple example, a CEO with a preference for making decisions through ‘thinking’ rather than ‘feeling’ may focus on the logic behind changes, the goals, structure and task elements involved and give messages which stress the fairness and equability in the changes, whereas someone with a feeling preference may want to know how people’s needs will be dealt with and what the values are that underlie the changes. A challenge in engaging people with diverse needs during change is how to get the right balance, particularly around communicating changes in a way which meets the needs of everyone. An equally diverse and ﬂexible strategy which is regularly reviewed will be more likely to meet different needs with a healthy balance between giving information, asking questions and listening. Another aspect of MBTI that is worth noting is what might happen in relation to our natural preferences when under stress. ‘In the grip’ experiences are called such because our least preferred way of behaving can be triggered when our conscious energy is at a low level. This triggering of ‘other in us’ referred to by Carl Jung ‘always seems alien and unacceptable’, but ‘if we let ourselves be aggrieved the feeling sinks in, and we are the richer for this little bit of selfknowledge’ (Jung, 1970). These experiences can be uncomfortable and distressing when experienced in self and confusing at best if observed in other people acting out of character. According to Jung, one-sidedness (a predisposition to particular preferences) is normal or natural and the notion of balance in relation to this does not mean giving equal energy to everything. Rather, being at our best is when we allow our preferences to come to the fore. However, when these preferences are over-played, for example overly allowing our emotions (in the feelings preference) to inﬂuence our decision making, our inferior function may kick-in as a way of redressing the balance; a sort of early warning signal with the aim of self-regulation. For example: John’s MBTI preferences are ESTJ – so when he is feeling grounded and working at his best he takes charge readily, has a clear vision of the way that things should be and naturally steps into a leadership role. He is conﬁdent and outward going, good at planning and follows through, straightforward and honest. He takes his commitments seriously and is a good role model for standards within the organization. When the organization was faced with a number of signiﬁcant changes, including restructuring and redundancies directly affecting John’s team, he came under increased pressure to manage not only his own anxieties but also those of other team members. He seemed 62

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to be coping well on the surface with this stressful situation, still able to listen to team member’s concerns and get the work done as necessary. However, arguments at home increased with John becoming tense and irritable, liable to have unexpected outbursts which troubled him and his partner. It seemed there was no way of controlling these sudden emotional eruptions and the guilty feelings that followed. His chronic ‘grip’ experiences might include: easy loss of emotions, inﬂexibility, aggressive behaviour or withdrawal and avoidance of others. John’s least preferred or inferior function in the MBTI framework is that of ‘feeling’ which means under stress (particularly triggered for him by lack of control over time and tasks, changing procedures and poorly deﬁned criteria, a disorganized environment and incompetence in self or others), he is likely to become hypersensitive and prone to outbursts. One way to balance the potential for this is by John having enough control and structure over his work, being able to get closure on projects, having someone trusted to talk to about the situation, time alone to gain control, physical activity and focusing on the factual reality of the situation. Adapted from ‘In the Grip’ by Naomi Quenk (2000)

Differing perspectives on change – glass half empty or full? People would generally agree that it makes sense to have a positive attitude towards change rather than a glass half empty approach. There are pitfalls if those tasked with managing change appear to be unaware of the negative aspects. In particular, there may be many people in the organization who are not engaged and who end up as saboteurs because they feel their views are unappreciated or not paid attention to. The QO2® or Opportunity Orientation Proﬁle is one way to help individuals see the value of differences around change and assesses individuals through two primary scales: a propensity to see opportunities and a propensity to see obstacles which, through a series of questions, are assessed independently and then expressed as a ratio of one to another to provide an overall QO2® score. ■

■ ■

MTG energy – how much energy you put into ‘Moving Towards your Goals’. This is energy that gives us determination and enthusiasm to formulate and achieve our goals. Multipathways – the extent to which you ﬁnd ways around obstacles. The generation of lots of possible pathways and ultimate selection of one of them. Fault-ﬁnding – how good you are at seeing potential obstacles. This measures to what extent a person looks for faults in both proposals and people. 63

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■

Optimism – the extent to which you expect positive outcomes. Optimism is a characteristic that is the basis of positive thinking. It is a resource that gives people a generalized expectancy that they will succeed in their endeavours. Time focus – a measure of your psychological time and your orientation to the past, present or future. The subjective processing of time is investigated. (Reproduced with kind permission of TMS Development International Ltd, 2008 www.tmsdi.com.)

As with all ‘tools’, the questionnaire and results are most helpful if used as a catalyst for conversations and to highlight the beneﬁts of having different perspectives in the discussion around change for the best outcomes. There are many examples of senior managers in organizations who have huge amounts of energy, enthusiasm and drive in terms of directing change. Channelling energy into achieving goals would seem to be critical to the success of any change effort. However, there can be too much of a good thing in the sense of exhausting others through their efforts to keep up and it may cause burn out both in the individual charged with change and others around them. Too many options in the case of someone who is good at coming up with multiple pathways may mean a lack of awareness to a more obvious solution, something that could work very well because of the simplicity of its nature rather than despite it. Too much faultﬁnding can seem like nit picking and may slow things down unnecessarily. However, too little means real risks may not have been considered or given sufﬁcient air time. Optimism can be great in the right circumstances and there is perhaps a prevalent view that, in times of change, managers and those in HR need to be/appear optimistic about the changes ahead, despite any concerns they may hold on a more personal level. A predominant stance of ‘everything will be okay in the long term’ may not be helpful though, particularly if there is the likelihood of job losses and/or parts of the organization being subcontracted out. Time focus in this framework is about people’s predisposition to look backwards, forwards or stay pretty much ﬁrmly in the present. This can often be detected through the language people use. Change is perhaps more likely to happen effectively when a healthy balance is struck between all aspects. Again, those introducing change could usefully pay attention to people’s different preferences around this.

Cultural differences and sensitivities Culture will invariably be linked to conﬂict either overtly or implicitly. If we consider culture in the widest sense – differing organizational cultures can cause tension and conﬂict especially in times of mergers/joint ventures. Group cultures can also be the cause of conﬂict where values and behaviours differ and ideas 64

Change and Conﬂict – A Chicken and Egg Debate?

about what is acceptable and appropriate and what is not. On an individual level too, our personal sets of values, beliefs and behaviours can be the source of confusion and conﬂict with others. While there will always be differences in individual preferences, for international companies, the added dimension of change in a multicultural context might also be considered. Increased growth and the trend for outsourcing, particularly some of the HR functions, together with greater globalization, means many companies are now working across continents and employing a workforce from a wider range of culturally diverse backgrounds. In international companies, differences in practice and communication can cause a whole range of challenging situations. In a recent workshop with an international organization where cross-cultural issues were being discussed, participants easily found a common goal in placing blame at the parent organization’s feet. As the headquarters of this organization was outside Europe, they became an easy target for negativity, rather than looking to differences between the other European countries. There is always a risk of unhelpful stereotyping when raising differences in culture across countries, however, if done in an appropriate setting and discussed in the spirit of enquiry towards greater organizational learning, differences might be aired constructively. John Mole in his book ‘Mind Your Manners’ (Mole, 2005) highlights differences across country cultures in areas such as: business organization and structure; leadership; communication; humour and punctuality and suggests a framework (adapted below) that might be used for discussions on this topic.

Reﬂections on cross-cultural communication In the country origin of your part of the organization: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Do people use ﬁrst names or last names? Do they make jokes at meetings and presentations? Do people pay more attention to what you say or to what you write? Can you do business before developing good personal relationships? How important are socializing and hospitality? How important is punctuality? Does everything start exactly on time? Where do the most important conversations take place? In the ofﬁce or somewhere else? At meetings is there a detailed agenda or spontaneous discussion? Does everyone contribute equally or does the boss dominate? Does everyone have to agree on a decision or does the boss decide?

Taken from ‘Mind your Manners’ (John Mole, 2005)

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A classic debating point across different cultures is, for example, punctuality. Individuals have different preferences and patterns around this too, regardless of country of origin or country of work. However, if the assumptions and expectations can at least be raised to the surface, the potential sources of conﬂict can be paid some attention. Jokes and their appropriateness, for example, are often very different across cultures with the line of appropriateness only discovered in hindsight. The purpose of having conversations around some of the themes above is to highlight differences and share these as a source of information, rather than see them as something which needs to be altered in any way. Having said that, usually from the discussion a sense of what is important to the organization as a whole will evolve; a set of guiding principles about how things need to work in the organization so that time and energy are not wasted on misunderstandings. If, for example, one cultural assumption is that the decisions at meetings need to be made by the senior managers and most of the business of the organization is conducted through meetings, good ideas will potentially be lost – impacting on overall effectiveness. The international team working across cultures might decide on a guiding principle of: ‘using varied methods of communication accessible to all’ and debate what this would mean in practice. Abbassi and Hollman (1991) make recommendations about how to manage more effectively some of the challenges that come within multicultural organizations including: recognizing and acknowledging that there are differences in values and attitudes within corporate life; communicating respect for the culture and values of others; listening to the views of minority workers; avoiding stereotyping; providing workers with a sense of psychological safety – helping them for example, to acclimatize to any cultural norms; being empathetic but also being themselves; avoiding a projection of culture and values onto others and trusting instincts in dealing with employees from a different culture. Some of this is about giving ourselves permission to be human; knowing we bring a whole range of assumptions about others into any situation based on our own upbringing and personal culture and paying more conscious attention to this in our relationships with others.

Conﬂict triggering change So now if we turn the debate on its head and consider conﬂict from an alternative perspective, in what ways can conﬂict drive change (Figure 4.2)? And does there have to be some conﬂict in order for change to happen? There are some changes that might be beneﬁcial in life generally and in the workplace, not all within our conscious awareness. For example, people can commonly express surprise when 66

Change and Conﬂict – A Chicken and Egg Debate?

Change

Conflict

Figure 4.2 Conﬂict triggering change

confronted with an aspect of their behaviour that is impacting on others. This raising to the surface of issues not previously known can provoke tension and conﬂict. A resistance to change might be experienced on the other end of this behaviour which may have been unintentioned or outside of awareness. Both authors work regularly on personal effectiveness programmes where occasionally participants are ‘recommended’ to attend. On most occasions, people still come with a degree of openness to what might unfold, the feedback they might receive and the choices they then might make. Occasionally, resistance is apparent from the outset. The conﬂict has already started, back in the organization where a conversation may have been had, often with vague references to changes that might need to be made. The participant attends the programme in person but not necessarily in spirit. Change in our experience of these situations can either happen quickly with new insights in the moment: suddenly seeing in self what others may also see in you; or gradually, after the programme has ﬁnished, or not at all! Particularly, if the individual is perfectly happy with the way they behave and do not see the need for change. For change at an individual and group level to happen, there has to be some level of awareness raised and the motivation to change. Levels of awareness can be raised constructively or be the source of further unhelpful conﬂict. In the case of behavioural change, as in someone’s inappropriate behaviour in the organization, there can be a tendency to deal with the behaviour, for example, through a grievance procedure with little emphasis on learning more widely about what else might be contributing to the situation. The potential here is that an 67

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individual or team become the scapegoat; a quick ﬁx to the problem at a superﬁcial level rather than a wider exploration of the factors leading up to the behaviour, such as a long hours culture and increasing stress levels. In teams, where individual agendas seem to get in the way of the wider organizational goals, tensions and conﬂicts often go underground with avoidance in the shape of keeping heads down and looking busy at the risk of openly exploring what the sources of conﬂict might be.

Change equation One equation much quoted is based on Gleicher’s model (Gleicher in Beckhard and Harris, 1987): C ⫽ D ⫻ V ⫻ FS ⬎ £ If you haven’t come across this equation before the elements represent: Change (happens most effectively when the level of) Dissatisfaction ⫻ Vision ⫻ First Steps, combined are greater than the level of resistance to change or perceived cost. The ﬁrst part of this indicates that, in order for change to take place, a level of dissatisfaction needs to be present. On a personal level, most of us will have experienced the uncomfortable feeling of knowing when something is not working, whether that is in a relationship, in an area of work or more widely within an organization of which we are a part. On a physiological level, you could say this is the ﬁrst sign of stress as an adrenalin trigger for action. We are bombarded daily with examples of this in action at a global level. It is possible that action for change only happens when things reach a critical state; 9/11 is of course an example and global warming might be another. At the time of writing this chapter, the Communication Workers Union is planning a strike of Royal Mail employees. The issues around pay, pensions and ﬂexible working are the subject of the conﬂict with the union claiming management imposition of unagreed changes. Sometimes changes will be prompted by dissatisfaction within the organization and at other times by external factors. The NHS is one example where, along with all other public sector organizations change has been prompted by user dissatisfaction, long waiting lists and an altogether overburdened service which struggles to provide efﬁciency within the budgets allowed. Sometimes, the dissatisfaction in the organization or with the present status quo is very evident. In other situations, particularly if the dissatisfaction is not owned internally, there can be a level of complacency with how things have been done in the past. An approach which pushes the boundaries of comfort in some way and intentionally surfaces conﬂicts can usefully act as a catalyst for moving things on. 68

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Ways to do this might include inviting customers or others with a vested interest in the service to give their views on what’s not working within the organization; a staff satisfaction survey or, better still, a customer satisfaction survey and/or statistics on how the company is doing in relation to the competitors. Having different groups of these interested parties or stakeholders around the table or in the room to say how they see things from their perspectives can also be useful as a way of highlighting what’s not working. Real Time Strategic Change (Dannemiller and Jacobs, 1992) is a large group methodology based around the Beckhard and Harris equation which uses a conference approach to engage those involved in the change towards a common vision: C ⫽ D ⫻ V ⫻ FS ⬎ £ Once people in the organization have been brought together to discuss why things cannot remain as they are (dissatisfaction), work is done on co-creating a vision for the future. The vision might be set by the Executive team of the company with the conference providing a forum for others to input ideas towards this. Alternatively, the conference might provide an opportunity for the vision to be designed by those attending. ‘First steps’ is about the action that needs to be taken to realize the vision, so the strategy generation phase. This is often in the form of commitments between various departments within the organization in terms of what they intend to do towards achieving the vision. When the ﬁrst three elements of the equation are in place, people usually convert their energy from resistance to positive energy towards change. This leads us on to consider the dynamic nature of conﬂict.

The dynamic nature of conﬂict On a group or team level, some theory tells us that, unless groups have experienced the storming or confronting stage of development, they are unlikely to reach the required levels of trust to become a high performing team. Many team building events are designed around this premise with a view that if we have been through the tough times together and tested our different realities, we are more likely to engage in working together towards a common goal. Senior management teams (SMTs) are commonly cited as being dysfunctional in nature, as if they are somehow stuck in this ‘storming’ phase with differing personalities and agendas getting in the way of the challenges faced by the organization. All the potential tensions experienced by others in the organization will also be evident here but, perhaps because of the additional responsibility vested in senior managers, the anxieties and tensions are increased. However, there are some interesting assumptions here that the Executive Board or SMT should be aligned on 69

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all matters. In reality, there are likely to be times when managers at the senior level, much like teams elsewhere in the organization, are collaborating and other times when they are challenging each other and openly disagreeing about the way forward. It can take a third party intervention to ﬂush out some of the issues that might be around for managers at this level. Strategic away days are commonly used to help senior teams understand the challenges they face in taking the organization forward and in providing a coherent and joined up strategy for the organization despite differences of opinion about the priorities. On an intellectual level, many people would agree that some conﬂict is necessary for better decision making and creativity. However, the feelings it evokes are often too uncomfortable to make people actively pursue it. The following study by Boulding (in Higgins, 1991) highlights this. Several groups of managers were formed to solve a complex problem. They were told their performance would be judged by a panel of experts in terms of the quantity and quality of the solutions generated. The groups were identical in size and composition, with the exception that half of them included a ‘confederate’. Before the experiment began, the researcher instructed this person to play the role of ‘devil’s advocate’. This person was to challenge the group’s conclusions, forcing the others to examine critically their assumptions and the logic of their arguments. At the end of the problem-solving period, the recommendations made by both groups were compared. The groups with the devil’s advocates had performed signiﬁcantly better on the tasks. They had generated more alternatives and their proposals were judged as superior. After a short break, the groups were reassembled and told that they would be performing a similar task during the next session. However, before they began discussing the next problem they were given permission to eliminate one member. In every group containing the confederate, he or she was asked to leave. The fact that every high-performance group expelled their unique competitive advantage because that member made others feel uncomfortable demonstrates a widely shared reaction to conﬂict. ‘I know it has positive outcomes for the performance of the organization as a whole, but I don’t like how it makes me feel personally’. So a question here might be how to create an environment where people feel safe enough to harness the positive aspects of conﬂict and difference. The emotional aspects of conﬂict were covered in a little more detail in the previous chapter and are an important aspect of the book in our view as people’s feelings of vulnerability in times of change can prevent them from opening up to the creative possibilities that can come with conﬂicts. 70

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A metaphorical take on conﬂict Each of Gareth Morgan’s metaphors (highlighted in Chapter 2 and revisited here) encourages us to take a different view on conﬂict, its causes, symptoms, uses and resolution (Table 4.2). The issue here is not which attitude is ‘right’ but which do we hold at the moment, how useful is it? And what happens if we view conﬂict differently? Table 4.2 Perspectives on conﬂict

Metaphor

Perspective on conﬂict (examples)

Machines

Irrational and unnecessary. Causes to be identiﬁed and problems solved Create the spark for change, e.g. it is the grit in the oyster that makes the pearl Learning from conﬂict, using the information within it to improve how we manage change and relationships Perspective depends on the organization’s history, values and habits in relation to conﬂict Conﬂict is inevitable as individuals compete for scarce resources Conﬂict comes from within individuals in relation to past (childhood) experiences and unconscious or conscious processes inherent in our relationship with one another Differences between individual operators within any system will create change in emergent ways Power implies conﬂict between winners and losers and between dominant groups/individuals and subordinates

Organisms Brains Cultures Political systems Psychic prisons

Flux and transformation Instruments of domination

(Adapted from Morgan, 1998)

Power and politics Any literature on conﬂict would need to pay some attention to the concept of power within the organizational context and consider how this gets used or abused; stimulating creativity and productive change on the one hand or blocking energy and action on the other. Power is about inﬂuence and the ability to get things done or not; it is about who gets what, why, when and how. We are struck by the number of people, particularly in HR, who deny they have any power or are reluctant to use it to get things done. In terms of change, to recognize what power we and others have and to use it for the greater good of individuals and 71

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the organization overall is truly to act with integrity. Unproductive conﬂicts (and by this we mean conﬂicts where there is no progress or learning because no one involved is interested enough in the outcome or the people involved) can be resolved through using power. For example, someone might make an ‘executive decision’ to end entrenched viewpoints using their positional power or use the power of interpersonal persuasion for the same end. Conﬂicts can also be resolved by someone knowing who to get alongside by way of a coalition; so it is important to recognize the positive aspects of power in relation to conﬂict as well as the potential negative affects of power abuse. As someone in HR reading this, you probably have more sources of power available to you than others in the form of information, knowledge, resources, formal authority, incentives and pressures, networks (depending on how well you keep these up), understanding of the informal and formal systems, interpersonal and personal power. The list is not deﬁnitive. It is worth considering how well you keep up to date with the formal and informal systems, how you are building and keeping an edge in terms of your interpersonal relationships, and how well you manage yourself both in terms of emotional energy and stress levels and the work you are responsible for. Personal power has connections to the ability to manage self effectively and all aspects relating to your day-to-day behaviour. Do you feel and act in a way that supports yourself? As well as the roles you have in daily life. For example, manager, colleague, project leader, parent, child, sister, brother, community roles etc. Our ability to be clear about personal boundaries and what, for example, work–life balance means to us as individuals is an important aspect of being able to understand and work with intrapersonal and interpersonal tensions and conﬂicts. If you considered the questions at the beginning of this chapter and still need to act in relation to any conﬂicts that are around for you at the moment, add on the following questions to make the links to the aspects of power that might be relevant to you: ■ ■

■ ■ ■

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What organizational assumptions do we have around power? (e.g. we have to do it this way? Why? Who says? What would happen if we did not?) What are my own assumptions about the power of the people involved in this conﬂict? (e.g. senior manager – what s/he says goes? They know best? They need protecting because they are more vulnerable? – are these assumptions true? Where do they come from?) What are my assumptions about the way ahead? (e.g. we need to collaborate? Conﬂict must be avoided? Conﬂict is healthy? There is no way ahead?) What are my assumptions about my own sources of power? (e.g. I don’t have any? They are limited? Political behaviour is unhealthy?) What other, more enabling assumptions might I hold to free up greater choices for dealing with this situation?

Change and Conﬂict – A Chicken and Egg Debate?

To use Morgan’s metaphor of organizations as a political arena we might look at power as a source of advantage. This does not necessarily mean individual advantage over others and at the expense of the organization, but it would mean accepting that politics is part and parcel of everyday life at work. According to research by Roffey Park (Garrow and Stirling, 2007), organizational politics is on the increase and has replaced increasing workloads as the most signiﬁcant stressor; 44 percent (of a total of 490 managers across differing sectors) reported political behaviour as the main cause of conﬂict. Other sources of conﬂict cited were: ■ ■ ■ ■

Having different agendas (62 percent) Conﬂict at senior levels (42 percent) Competition for resources (35 percent) Personal clashes (30 percent).

The statistics around political behaviour depend to a large extent on people’s perception of politics and whether it is deemed to be acceptable or not.

What is the cost of conﬂict? Conﬂicts, if not realized productively, can leave an aftermath, an imprint with little understanding or learning shared. The proverbial ‘baggage’ carried around unpacked can mean changes in the organization in the future are harder to implement. Trust once lost is hard to regain and individuals who feel they have been badly treated by employers may look for a pay back either through abusing perks of the job, theft, absenteeism and/or working to rule. According to the CIPD (Managing conﬂict at work, 2007): ■

■

■

Conﬂict at work costs employers of 50 or fewer members of staff an average of 17 days in management time and nearly £3000 in costs associated with employment tribunal claims each year Each year conﬂict at work costs employers of between 51 and 250 employees an average of 72 days in management time and more than £13 000 in costs associated with tribunal claims Conﬂict at work costs employers of between 251 and 500 members of staff an average of almost 230 days in management time and £14 500 in costs associated with employment tribunal claims each year.

In addition to the ﬁnancial costs of unresolved conﬂicts, the other likely costs will include: lowering of motivation and morale, decreased productivity, lack of ability to be creative and adapt to future changes, increased stress and sick levels 73

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and decreased self-esteem and performance. For teams in conﬂicts which go unresolved it might mean an increase in unhelpful competitive activities, withholding of important knowledge and information, lack of focus on strategic goals and confusion over roles and responsibilities. For the company, the outward manifestations of this might mean increased customer complaints, decrease in professionalism, inability to stay ahead of market trends and more likelihood of aggressive competitive take-overs. The total costs of conﬂict can never be estimated through money alone.

Summary In this chapter, we have paid attention to the links between change and conﬂict with the aim of raising levels of understanding about the relationship between the two. There may still be an assumption that change and conﬂict need to be handled separately. However, in our view, it is less helpful to attend to any conﬂicts without taking into account the changes that might have triggered these, whether on an individual, group or organizational level. When conﬂict is seen as something separate from change there is a tendency to deal with it in a transactional way. For example, by disciplinary means or negotiation around the positions that people, groups or organizations take. This can result in perceptions of winners and losers. Equally, we might miss the potential within conﬂicts for learning and change. We have started to look at some possible strategies for working with conﬂicts and we continue to add frameworks and references in the following chapters, to expand our knowledge and understanding on these issues. We have raised some questions throughout this chapter to stimulate thought about the situations you ﬁnd yourself faced with. Another question that might be useful to reﬂect on is: ‘what learning presents itself through this conﬂict for me, others and the organization?’ As this book evolves, we move away from the notion of conﬂicts being mainly focused on cost and risk into a perspective on conﬂict and change as inextricably linked; providing a catalyst for growth and advancement.

74

5 Resolving Conﬂicts

Much of the ﬁrst part of this book has been used to explore change and conﬂict and understand the nature of the relationship between the two. We feel this exploration is worth time before looking at some of the ways in which conﬂict might be and is handled in organizations. Strategies for working with conﬂict as a dynamic energy are also explored later in the book. The aspects outlined here relate more to conﬂicts between individuals and supporting managers and HR specialists in the organization to work with conﬂict in a productive way. Here, we recognize that conﬂict happens for a variety of reasons, that it is inevitable in times of change, that it is not inherently negative, but rather the way it is recognized and handled can be unhelpful and unproductive. In Chapter 4, we touched on the intrapersonal and interpersonal aspects of behaviour in relation to conﬂict and we continue with these two core areas here. In particular, in terms of looking at aspects of the intrapersonal under the heading of self-management and interpersonal under the heading of relationship management, paying attention to: self-esteem, self-awareness, emotional resilience, empathy and behavioural ﬂexibility. These aspects of resolving conﬂict are included here partly for personal reﬂection and partly to consider from the organizational perspective in terms of what is being paid attention to in supporting others through change and conﬂict. As we take you through this journey about change and conﬂict, we are perhaps entering the neutral zone (Bridges, 2004). We look back by drawing on traditional methods of managing conﬂict based on our knowledge, experience and understanding of what many organizations take to be legitimate in this ﬁeld; and we look to the future in terms of considering the strategies that might be on the horizon as ways of understanding and working with change and conﬂict in the future. We will continue to draw on theory and frameworks from a number of sources to illustrate ways of handling conﬂicts once they have arisen. The emphasis on resolving conﬂicts once they have arisen continues into Chapter 6,

Change, Conﬂict and Community

where we look at more transformational aspects of managing conﬂicting interests with third party support. In this chapter, we address the following questions: ■ ■ ■ ■

What coping strategies do individuals adopt when faced with conﬂict? What other strategies might be useful to know about and develop? What are the potential methods that managers might use to resolve conﬂicts? How do organizations view conﬂict and what strategies are commonly used to deal with conﬂicts when they arise?

Individuals in conﬂict Figure 5.1 illustrates some possible choices available to people involved in disputes.

Conflict situation

Choice?

Reactive

Aggressive

• • • • •

Bullying behaviour Withdrawal of labour Strike action Sabotage Theft

Figure 5.1 Dealing with conﬂict

76

Responsive

Passive

• Avoid the person • Go off sick • Blame self

• • • •

Seek help Assert own needs Constructive dialogue Letting go

Resolving Conﬂicts

The following case study gives an example of a reactive approach to change.

Case study 5.1 A new Manager had been appointed in a Housing Association which had introduced rules and procedures to bring the organization into line with legislative requirements, particularly around health and safety. The style of management had changed considerably with the new incumbent, going from a manager who gave residents plenty of freedom to do as they pleased and come in and talk about their day-to-day issues on a regular basis, to the new manager who was less inclined to spend time with residents without prior appointment. The new policies and procedures had to be followed to comply with the Head Ofﬁce requirements and the paperwork involved in the administration of this meant little time for interaction. The new regimes and tighter control on resident’s behaviour had led to more overt cliques with some residents bullying others at meetings and in their day-to-day dealings with other residents and the new manager. Other residents adopted a strategy of avoidance, deciding not to come to meetings in case they were threatened by the more vocal residents. Case study 5.1 shows again the direct link between change and conﬂict. The newly introduced policies and procedures, although no doubt necessary, were brought in wholesale without the engagement of the people who were most widely affected by them. Once the feeling of control over their environment was affected, the residents were understandably unhappy. Others really wanted to continue the quiet life they had previously experienced within the home and were anxious about their fellow resident’s increasingly aggressive behaviour. The tricky thing here is the word ‘choice’ in the model (Figure 5.1). Often, people affected by change and in the grip of conﬂict (see Chapter 4) do not feel they have any choice. There is either a compulsion to act to do something rather than sit with any feelings of discomfort or people are frozen into a state of inactivity, as if suspended in time. This is classic ‘ﬁght–ﬂight’ syndrome. An example of this was seen recently on an assessment centre for senior managers who were carrying out an exercise and being tested on a range of competencies including their ability to manage change. Part of the exercise involved analysing complex data and then managing a series of changes in terms of the compilation of the group, time and information available. One of the managers could visibly be seen in ‘ﬂight’ mode, seemingly unable to do anything to manage the increased ambiguity that had arisen. Another manager seemingly energized by the rapidly introduced changes, was galvanized into doing something to move things forward. 77

Change, Conﬂict and Community

Empathy

Language

Behavioural flexibility

Relationship management

Self-management

Self-esteem

Self-awareness

Resilience

Figure 5.2 Intrapersonal and interpersonal aspects of conﬂict

We now look at the relationship between the intrapersonal and interpersonal, self-management and relationship management in the context of change and conﬂict. Figure 5.2 highlights how these differing elements link to each other, with aspects of self-management underpinning the outer behaviour we reﬂect through our relationships with others.

Self-management: self-esteem, self-awareness and emotional resilience Our ability to manage conﬂict is based on a wide range of factors. Three core aspects are shown in Figure 5.3 in the form of self-esteem, self-awareness and emotional resilience. Emotional resilience is shown as being nearest the surface in that it can be impacted by self-esteem and self-awareness and is often manifested in behaviour most visible to others.

Self-esteem Self-esteem has particular signiﬁcance in our view in relation to managing conﬂict. A deﬁnition here of self-esteem would be: valuing and having respect for 78

Resolving Conﬂicts Self-esteem Self-awareness Emotional resilience

Figure 5.3 Self-management

self; a sense of self-worth and self-acceptance. If individuals in the organization do not have a healthy respect for themselves, then they are unlikely to have a healthy respect for others. In this case, when differences of opinion arise, the likelihood of working towards an outcome which meets the needs of the people most affected is unlikely. Rather, self-preservation and protection of individual positions is more likely. Self-esteem is a complex issue because much of it is based on previous experience. Our sense of likeability of self and competence can either be in good or bad shape depending on those experiences. Through times of change, our selfesteem can take a knock, particularly if we feel our knowledge or skills, status or relationships or other aspects of working life, which have helped to deﬁne our sense of who we are, have changed. Individual sense of self-worth can be supported in the organization in a number of ways: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Encouraging a healthy work–life balance (bearing in mind this is different for different individuals) Personal development programmes One-to-one coaching A skilled and supportive manager Being given work which is in our range of competence or just stretching enough to allow room for development Positive feedback and encouragement Opportunities to take risks (rather than being pushed to take risks way outside of our comfort zone) Time for fun and relaxation 79

Change, Conﬂict and Community ■ ■ ■ ■

Time with colleagues to get to know others and share experiences Team celebrations to share in the successes during change Clarity around what is staying the same and what will be consistently valued Showing the person, or group of people, that they are cared about, that they matter.

Ultimately, self-esteem is the responsibility of the individual and paying attention to self cannot be something that people make happen for others. However, the behaviour of managers, colleagues, HR and the organizational norms overall can either contribute to a feeling of low self-esteem or encourage more positive feelings of self-worth. This aspect is given more attention in Chapter 9.

Self-awareness Self-awareness includes how we notice what is going on inside us; our thoughts and feelings, our physical sensations from feeling hot and cold, to experiencing discomfort in our bodies. We might experience an aching neck, tired limbs, sweating palms, tense forehead, lightness of body, openness of expression, our language patterns, speed, tone and intonation of how we speak, words we use, where we place an emphasis and what we ﬁnd ourselves doing or not doing in certain situations and with particular people. Self-awareness also includes an awareness of the impact we have on others. Individuals may be unaware of patterns of behaviour which might cause others a problem. Sometimes, it seems difﬁcult to think that a person who everyone else sees as being incredibly aggressive is doing it outside of their own awareness. However, because others often ﬁnd the behaviour difﬁcult to challenge, it is quite common for the feedback to be avoided and the individual to be unaware of the discussions going on around them. Our levels of self-awareness depend to an extent on the amount of reﬂection we do in relation to our behaviour. If we had no reﬂection on our actions at all we would be likely to career from one unsatisfactory situation to another. In the context of change and when the pressure is on in organizations, the speed and volume of work tends to increase. With these pressures, the amount of time to talk, reﬂect and consider actions tends to be limited. E-mails and, more commonly now, text messages are an example of knee jerk reactions to situations with little reﬂection. HR functions still tend to be overly busy with little time for strategic activity and we hear many anecdotal examples of people responding to requests quickly without necessarily considering the impact of the message on the other person. Without an opportunity for feedback and a discussion about the impact of behaviour, it is unlikely that our self-awareness is increased or behaviour modiﬁed. These feedback loops are the key to greater interpersonal effectiveness. 80

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The levels of self-awareness in the organization might be checked in the following ways: ■ ■ ■ ■

■

How much feedback is given on a day-to-day basis about relationships as well as the work? What is the quality of feedback that people get? What are the formal methods for giving and getting feedback in the organization? And how effective are they? If you were to describe your organization in terms of ability to give difﬁcult feedback how would you describe it? Pussycat (sweet but not very effective); tortoise (either asleep or too slow) or tiger (in there for the kill) – maybe there is a more positive metaphor!? What development methods pay attention to raising levels of self-awareness? And in what way? For example, 360 degree feedback? Development centres? Coaching? And how effective are they at encouraging different behaviours where necessary?

Emotional resilience Resilience could be described as the ability to withstand or recover quickly from difﬁcult conditions – emotional robustness. Resilience is built over time and includes an ability to stay grounded despite what happens around you. If someone has high resilience, it does not necessarily mean they will always be completely in control of their emotions; rather that they are less likely to have a pattern of unpredictable behaviour and more likely to have learnt how to stay resourceful in stressful situations. By resourceful in this context we mean able to access behaviour that is most likely to get their needs met. Resilience is impacted by factors within the individual but also the wider environment. So, if change is happening on a large scale within the organization at the same time as change at home and in someone’s wider life, their ability to stay resilient may well be affected. It also means that individuals have to be selective in terms of knowing what the priorities are in both work and home life and be able to concentrate energy on the areas that have most signiﬁcance to them at the time. For example, the difﬁcult behaviour of a colleague that needs to be tackled may pale into insigniﬁcance in comparison with problems with children at home. This requires self-awareness, positive self-esteem and the ability to be assertive around getting needs met. Managers and those in HR with responsibility for others need to pay attention particularly to their own ability to stay resilient in times of change. A checklist for this might include: ■

How much control and inﬂuence do you have over work for which you are responsible? 81

Change, Conﬂict and Community ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

What areas could you let go of that you have no control or inﬂuence over? What areas of work are high priorities right now that need your focus? What else are you doing to prioritize where you spend your time and energy? When was the last time you said ‘no’ to something you had not got the capacity or motivation to take on? Who would you consider to be in your direct team and how effective are the relationships in that group? What are you doing that is working well at the moment and giving you a sense of satisfaction? What support do you need at work? At home? Elsewhere? And how well are these support needs being met? What do you spend time doing just for you, separate from the roles you have in life? How could you give support to others to be more emotionally resilient through change? How well do you take care of your physical health and needs?

Relationship management: empathy, language and behavioural ﬂexibility To resolve conﬂicts effectively, the other element to the equation, in addition to being able to manage self, is how to manage and understand relationships with others.

Empathy Empathy is a word commonly used but perhaps little understood and understanding at an intellectual level is very different from actually having empathy with someone’s situation. Sympathy might mean we genuinely feel sorry for the other person and that can lead us to take more responsibility for their situation than is appropriate or necessary. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to put ourselves into the position of the other person for a period of time and feel what being in the situation from their perspective is like for them. So saying, ‘I hear what you say’, or even, ‘I see what you mean’, is not the same as empathy which is more likely to be shown in a parallel expression on someone’s face at a moment in time. Empathy is tricky because you either feel it or you do not. Sometimes, it might be more honest to say, ‘I don’t understand how this might feel for you’ and encourage the other person to say more. Actively listening with an open mind at this stage can help us to get closer to understanding. Even if we decide to let go of the situation without tackling it head on, some level of empathy or understanding of the other person might be useful. If someone really has no empathy 82

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for the other’s situation they are unlikely to want to move beyond a positional stance. This is covered more in the next chapter on mediation. There does not have to be an agreement that the other is right in order to have empathy, rather seeing that there is a truth being expressed from their point of view. Sometimes this means taking a long hard look at what is actually being said and what might lie behind it, including the history and perspective from which the other person comes. Employer and trade union discussions would be a good example in our experience where historically there has been little empathy on the part of management to see it from a trade union side perspective and vice versa. In reconciliation processes, such as victim offender mediation, being able to empathize with the other’s situation is an important part of the process of healing. Rather than trying to fake empathy, some ways in which this might be developed include: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Actively seeking out different perspectives and ways of doing things Spending time with people of different ages, genders, backgrounds, ethnicity, cultures, religious beliefs, life experiences etc. Inviting alternative viewpoints and actively listening to them Suspending judgement and keeping an open mind Sitting with the discomfort on hearing someone’s alternative view without interrupting them, noticing the judgements that might come up Asking open questions and keeping open to hear the answers Finding out more about the situation and the other person or people involved to get a broader understanding Paying greater attention to the non-verbal clues Holding a positive assumption about the person in front of you and their intention.

Clues to people’s emotions usually happen at the non-verbal level so, by becoming more skilled at noticing other people’s behavioural patterns, we are more likely to be able to have empathy with them. Matching and mirroring are methods used in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) to help us get alongside the behavioural patterns that might be used by others, helping to build rapport, but also helping us to understand how they might physically be feeling. ‘Perceptual positioning’ is a way of acting out another person’s perspective. Case study 5.2 highlights this method. The method can be adapted so that someone in conﬂict can work through the three positions on their own – writing them down or through coaching. Case study 5.2 is adapted from a facilitated process used on a personal development programme. It is worth noting that both authors and others who use this method need to be experienced in facilitating as it may bring up a range of emotions for the person participating. 83

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Case study 5.2 Sally wanted to work on a difﬁcult relationship she had at work with her boss (Alan). She found Alan was always making demands on her time, seemed unaware of the pressure he was putting on her, never available, often critical and, most recently, had given her a really challenging project to do with hardly any guidelines. She felt he was just waiting for her to ‘trip up’ so he could criticize her again. Her last report was border-line and she was now really anxious about her next performance appraisal, feeling like she was being tested but not supported to get a better result next time. Sally was invited to work through the issues using perceptual positions. Two chairs were placed opposite each other and in the ﬁrst chair (First position) Sally was asked to say how things were from her own reality, her own view of the situation including what she thought and how she felt about the situation, about Alan and about any other factors around the situation that might be having an impact. Then she was invited to sit on the opposite chair (Second position) and, in doing so, to let go of her assumptions, views, feelings and thoughts as Sally and to really imagine stepping into Alan’s shoes. From this perspective she was invited to think in the way he might be thinking, experience what he might be feeling and express what he might want to say about the situation, about Sally and about anything else that was impacting on his perspective of the situation. This was understandably difﬁcult for Sally and, at times, she slipped back into speaking as herself rather than as Alan, but after a while she let go of her own position really to see things through his eyes. From Alan’s perspective he was overloaded, worried about his own boss criticizing him and wanted to be able to rely on Sally to deliver a good piece of work on the project. He felt (through Sally’s perception) worried about not having enough good people on the section he could rely on and concerned about the time it might take to support Sally sufﬁciently. He was annoyed at Sally’s lack of initiative in taking things forward without continually checking back with him. Third position: Sally was then invited to shake off (literally stand up and move around) Alan and move to a position further away in the room where she could become more detached about the situation. From this benevolent, neutral perspective she was invited to comment on the situation with less emotion. From here she could see that Sally had not checked out assumptions about what Alan wanted and had not been clear with him about the support she 84

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would ﬁnd helpful. She thought Alan needed to demonstrate his trust in Sally more overtly and that he could be more open about his intentions and needs with Sally. Having looked at the situation from these three perspectives, Sally felt in a more resourceful position to have a conversation with Alan. A further stage in Case study 5.2 would be to invite Sally once again to take the ﬁrst person perspective and act out the conversation she now wanted to have with Alan, checking in to see how he might receive it from time to time and what his likely response might be, until she felt satisﬁed enough with her preparation. Of course, the actual conversation may go very differently, but Sally is more likely to be able to empathize with Alan’s position having thought it through in this way. Some people can very readily associate with how they see the situation from a ﬁrst person perspective but are less able to step into the second position and see it from the other’s point of view. For other people, the reverse may be true or they may feel more comfortable in the third position which is more detached and less emotional but less able to associate into the ﬁrst and second positions. This awareness of patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour within us is a useful starting point for being more interpersonally effective. Some blockers to empathy include: constant self-focus – so, if when listening or paying attention to the other we are thinking about self (what we think, want to say and how we might be appearing to the other), we are probably missing paying attention to how they are sitting, looking, expressing and feeling about the situation. Dogmatism would be another blocker in terms of thinking we have all the right answers and must express these to everyone else. Low self-esteem and selfawareness can also inhibit people’s ability to empathize with others. So again, developing people’s ability to relate well to others in a way which does not raise awareness of self is likely to be limited in results. There may also be patterns from people’s past that get in the way of them being able to empathize with others, particularly around abusive childhoods and/ or difﬁcult relationships which have not been resolved and for which counselling might be appropriate. Within an organizational setting, it will be important to pay attention to where individuals can access support of this kind, for example, through welfare or access to external counsellors.

Language ‘Ability to manage ambiguity’ might be a key competence for managers or change agents and is often an area for development in terms of more effectively 85

Change, Conﬂict and Community

managing change. This is an interesting issue in that we do not always share a common understanding of what exactly ‘ambiguity’ means, and it can mean that the cause of the ambiguity remains unquestioned. Language can be a contributing factor to further ambiguity, particularly in times of change and the language people use can unintentionally escalate tense situations and provoke irritation and anger in others. If the intention behind the words is unclear, uncertainty and confusion may mean others misinterpret the meaning and see conﬂict that was not intended. There is no easy answer to getting beyond this as the complexity of language and ways in which we communicate differ so much from individual to individual. There are, however, some useful ideas we can draw on to help make language in potential conﬂicts more constructive. By looking at how we and others might generalize, delete and distort information we can become more consciously aware of language which might trigger conﬂicts (O’Connor, 2001). All three are essential parts of our everyday communication and we recognize that language in itself has limitations. We cannot possibly hope to communicate everything in a way which will be absolutely clear and transparent to other people and it may not be appropriate to do so. However, if our aim during change is to help people’s understanding and support productive conversations, avoiding the unnecessary triggering of uncomfortable feelings, it might be useful to pay attention to these other aspects of language. Generalizations

Generalizations happen when we apply rules from a single example to a much wider context. They can be a useful shorthand, a way of chunking information to help us learn new rules and ways of being and belonging in organizations. Generalizations can help meet some of our needs for inclusion, for example: ‘we all need a hug from time to time’. However, generalizations can also add to the confusion that might be around in times of change. For example, ‘we all know that the changes we are experiencing in the organization at the moment are necessary’ or ‘none of us would consciously choose to have these changes in place if we had another option’. While the intention behind these phrases could well be to show empathy with how people might feel, and some of you may well agree with the statements, they are likely to be limited. (Notice in this last sentence the use of less concrete language, e.g. ‘could’ and ‘might’. The use of these more tentative words allows for individual differences and the possibility that receivers of the information may not agree). When managers and people in HR use generalized statements in the context of change, they may actually serve to distance people rather than bring them closer together. We can choose to pay attention to generalizations that we might make during change and avoid unhelpful generalizations. We can also choose to 86

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challenge unhelpful generalizations made by others through our questioning. An example of this might be: ‘Who in particular in this organization knows that the changes are necessary?’ and ‘Who might not know about the changes and why they are necessary?’ Deletions

Deletions are sometimes described as the ‘blind spots’ in our experience. Literally, the pieces of information we are unaware that we leave out when giving or receiving information. We do not include everything we are thinking in what we say because it would take too long and would not necessarily help the other person to understand any better. We also select out information we receive, through whatever format, to help stop us getting overloaded. We select and discard information both as the giver and the receiver and this both helps us in times of change and can cause conﬂict. An example might be: ‘we need to decide what we are going to do about that’. It is not clear from this statement who the ‘we’ referred to is and what the ‘that’ in question is. Another example at a macro level might be the information sent out by the senior management team about changes taking place in the organization. For example, forgetting to include how the changes will affect processes already in place. One way to avoid unhelpful deletions is to check out information being passed on to others with a representative of that group to see how it might come across. Asking the questions of ourselves that others might ask us can also be a way around this. For example, ‘what information would people need to know in IT to be able to work with this change effectively?’ Distortions

Distortions are about applying more weight to some things than others. A classic example is that of Chinese whispers. If you have ever played the game where one piece of information starts off at one end of a group and is passed around to see how much the information stays in tact and how much has changed in the transfer, you will understand the concept of distortions. Again, it is not of itself a good or bad thing, just something that happens through human nature. Stories get embellished all the time to add interest and often humour and can be the source of much enjoyment. However, again in times of change, it can be useful to pay attention to distortions which we might make unintentionally or which are being made more generally within the organization. A recent example of distorted information was apparent in a focus group discussion where one person’s story of how change had been communicated in the past was very different from the others present. They had not been included in a key stage of the process (possibly true) but the statement that ‘all senior managers had colluded in 87

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keeping the changes a secret from the staff ’ was certainly not the experience of others. The use of complex equivalents is one example of a distortion where two statements are made with the second seemingly a consequence of the ﬁrst. For example: ‘we haven’t been told anything about the restructure (therefore) HR are trying to keep the lid on it’. Questions that might help uncover distortions would include: ‘How does not hearing anything mean HR are trying to keep the lid on it?’ or ‘Does that necessarily mean that HR are trying to keep things quiet?’ In this way, some of the underlying assumptions can be clariﬁed. Language to help resolve conﬂict

Marshall Rosenberg’s work on Non-Violent Communication (2003) approaches communication by encouraging us to use compassion as a motivation for our discussions with others rather than acting out of fear, guilt, shame, blame or threat. It aims to be cooperative, conscious and compassionate and is broken down into two key aspects: ■ ■

Empathic listening: which includes observing, feelings, needs and requests of the other person and Honestly expressing: observations, feelings, needs and requests.

By being clear about the needs we have and supporting others to be clear about their own needs, the language becomes clearer and cleaner; less likely to confuse ourselves or others. On the Centre for Non-Violent Communication’s website there is some information to help people identify needs and feelings with the aim of ‘strengthening our ability to inspire compassion from others and to respond compassionately to others and to ourselves’ (www.cnvc.org). When listening to understand the other person, we can usefully ask questions which help them say more about what the issues might be from their perspective. Part of honestly expressing is about making a clear statement which says enough about our own needs and feelings. Table 5.1 shows two examples of language which might inﬂame the situation through either judgements or general lack of clarity. The questions asked to clarify the meaning and the statements made will depend on the context, but hopefully the principles underlying this are clear. ‘What would working well as a team look like?’ is an example of a question which helps the other person to re-frame the situation or see it differently. Rather than focusing on what is not working, turning the situation on its head. The statements might not be phrased in words which feel comfortable or natural and certainly written in black and white seem rather formal. However, the intention behind these statements is to take greater personal responsibility for how we are feeling and seeing the situation rather than make judgements and assumptions 88

Resolving Conﬂicts Table 5.1 Clearer and cleaner language

Statement

Questions to clarify

Clearer statements

We’re not working well as a team

What would working well as a team look like? How could the team work together better? What do you need others to do? Or a reﬂective statement might be: It sounds like teamwork is important to you

I feel frustrated when decisions are made without being asked for my views Only two people in this team are doing a 7 hour day Information (speciﬁcally) has not been passed on by the deadline on this project

There are too many diverse opinions here to come to any kind of consensus

Which, if any opinions really count here? If we weren’t looking for consensus what else might we be looking for? What are the differences you’ve picked up so far?

Only three people out of 12 have said that productivity is the most important factor here I’m anxious that we have half an hour left and there seem to be four different views around the table I’m feeling lost about where to go with this next

which might provoke a defensive reaction in others. To say for example, ‘I feel lost about where to go with this next’ is a statement from the heart which reﬂects the humanity of the individual and dares the risk of feeling vulnerable. On the other end, it feels quite different from someone saying, ‘You’re going round in circles here’, which implies that others are to blame in some way and that the individual making the statement has no responsibility for the behaviour. This is all about choice and the quality of the conversations we have with others. We can choose to use language which deals with the immediate issue but does not necessarily change the nature of the relationship or use more honest language which discloses personal feelings and potentially changes the nature of the relationship for the future.

Behavioural ﬂexibility When conﬂicts have been raised to the surface, again there are a number of ways these might be dealt with. Styles of handling conﬂict have been categorized over the years and we include one model here which might prove useful for understanding 89

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HIGH Collaborating

Competing

Asserting own needs

Compromising

Avoiding

LOW

Accommodating

Attention to other’s needs

HIGH

Figure 5.4 Conﬂict handling styles. (Adapted from Thomas-Kilmann)

patterns and opening up options. The model shown in Figure 5.4 is adapted from Thomas-Kilmann (1974). The behaviours on the model might be used at a conscious or unconscious level and individuals might ﬁnd themselves using one or two of the ways of handling conﬂict more than others. All are useful in certain circumstances, however, a propensity to always try to solve conﬂicts through collaboration (for example) might mean a lot of time and energy is spent on trying to reach mutually beneﬁcial outcomes when it is not necessary in terms of the task and/or the relationships. In brief, the behaviours are described below. Avoiding

This style or approach is about a low attention to own needs and a low attention to other people’s needs. It includes walking away from the situation, not getting involved, and withdrawing, possibly physically and/or verbally. This behaviour means the conﬂict does not get addressed directly by the individual and could include sidestepping the issue or postponing a discussion until a later and/or better time. It is sometimes likened to a lose-lose strategy but, in our view, it only falls into this description if it becomes a habitual pattern where neither person has really beneﬁted from hearing the viewpoints on both sides. Learning in this 90

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scenario might take place if the individual consciously considers: whose problem is it? What situations are beyond my control and inﬂuence? What might be the beneﬁcial effects of my avoiding any involvement in this conﬂict? Accommodating

This style or approach is where the individual puts other’s needs at the forefront of the discussion or decision and relinquishes their own needs in the process. At a conscious level it may be that the individual has decided their own needs are not important enough in the wider context. Alternatively, the issues may be more clearly important to the other person. This approach can be helpful in terms of building long-term relationships. Learning in this scenario might take place if the individual consciously considers: what do I need in terms of a relationship from this person? What are the needs of the other in this situation? How important is it to them? How important is it for me to get my needs met here? What might be the beneﬁcial effects of my accommodating the other’s needs here? Competing

Competing is about a high assertion of own needs and low attention to the needs of others. This might be where an individual uses their power (which could be through a number of sources) to achieve their goals and get their objectives met. If used consciously and assertively, it is likely to be transparent and could be used to make sure organizational objectives are met which may not meet the needs of all employees. Learning in this scenario might take place if the individual consciously considers: what are the non-negotiable decisions that have to be carried out regardless of their popularity with people in the organization? What sources of power can I use to push this decision through? How important is getting the task done regardless of the needs of others in this situation? What might be the beneﬁcial effects of my standing up for my own needs at the potential expense of others? Compromising

Compromising is about striving for a middle ground, splitting the difference and meeting in part the needs of all involved. Here the relationships and the task are likely to be equally important and at a conscious level some ‘fall back’ position might be acceptable to those involved in the situation. This often happens in negotiations with the trade unions, for example, where positions are stated at the outset and then a compromise is worked towards. Again, some people have a natural tendency to want to get a compromise whether this is appropriate to 91

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the situation or not. If, for example I have a need to be liked, I am more likely to accommodate the other or let go of some of my needs in order to maintain the relationship. Learning in this scenario might take place if the individual consciously considers: what’s my bottom line? How much leeway is there in terms of really getting all my/our needs met? What position of power is the other person coming from? And how likely are they to want or be able to meet all my needs? What might be the beneﬁcial effects of agreeing the common ground between us and meeting some or both of our needs? Collaborating

The ﬁnal style or set of behaviours outlined here is that of collaborating. This is high on asserting own needs and high on paying attention to the other person’s needs. At a conscious level, it might be used where there is no room for compromise, where the relationship with the other is really key and where the decisions to be made are critically important. It will tend to be more time consuming than the other approaches so needs to be weighed up in terms of time versus importance. Where long-term decisions which affect the organization are under consideration, collaborating may be the only appropriate style to consider. Learning in this scenario might take place if the individual consciously considers: what are the long-term likely effects if this conﬂict does not get resolved? How are relationships affected? And what are the needs of the key people involved? How straightforward or complex is the situation and what ‘answers’ if any, are readily to hand? What might be the beneﬁcial effects of spending time by collaborating with others involved to reach a mutually beneﬁcial outcome? Some examples are provided below with implications in terms of patterns of behaviour for those in HR.

George

High on accommodating – low on competing Implications for George here might be spending a lot of time in developing a relationship with others, listening carefully to what others want and/or acquiescing to their needs. Accommodating is useful when the outcomes are not that important to you or the person involved in the conﬂict and you want to build a long-term relationship. It may be that the HR strategy or business needs of the organization are not stressed sufﬁciently in this situation. For example, when George is involved in disciplinary situations, he may ﬁnd himself going more into the role of the counsellor rather than nipping things in the bud by pointing out breaches in procedure or policy. 92

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Amy

High on collaborating and compromising – low on avoiding This might be very appropriate to the role Amy has in HR, particularly if working as a Business Partner alongside managers in the business and engaging in dialogue about the business needs; good for aligning HR and business strategy. However, there may be times when Amy takes on the problem of managers rather than leaving them to ﬁnd solutions for themselves. As prioritization of the work of HR is key to effective performance, she may need to be more discriminating about the conﬂicts she involves herself in and those she leaves to others. Steve

High on competing and avoiding and low on all others. Steve is likely to be seen as passive–aggressive in his behaviour. In that, when faced with conﬂict or differences of opinion he is likely either to take a win-lose approach, forcing issues when it may not be appropriate or avoiding a conversation altogether. Competing as a way of handling conﬂict is likely to be most appropriate when there is a legislative or policy requirement for something to happen in a particular way. If used as a predominant approach to handling conﬂict it may be seen as unnecessarily aggressive. Having ﬂexibility in our approach to handling conﬂicts, being clear about our needs and the outcomes we want and need in the situation is more likely to produce effective results, particularly in times of change. Flexibility is particularly important in the HR role and modelling this for others in the organization.

Key steps to handling conﬂict The following ten points summarize some of the steps outlined in the preceding paragraphs around handling conﬂict: 1. Pay attention ﬁrst to self and own levels of self-awareness and self-esteem 2. Establish what’s important and manage boundaries in terms of where to put energy 3. Identify what can be inﬂuenced and be prepared to let go of things that cannot be controlled 4. Pay attention to what is working as well as what is not 5. Build an ability to empathize with others and really see things from their perspective 6. Use language which is clear and speciﬁc and avoid unhelpful generalizations about others 93

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7. Notice feelings and needs within self and others and value the contribution they bring to the conversation 8. Use questions to uncover what the real issues are 9. Re-frame the situation for example from a different, more positive perspective 10. Increase behavioural ﬂexibility to include different ways to handle conﬂict.

Supporting others in conﬂict As highlighted in the earlier section on conﬂict handling patterns, we may ﬁnd we have a pattern or are working with others who have a pattern of getting involved in conﬂicts when they do not need to. Sorting out other people’s conﬂicts is sometimes an assumption we make linked to our role of manager or HR contact. When people ask for our help, it is worth considering how best we can help them, rather than assuming we need to sort the problem out for them. Conﬂicts tend to be resolved best when managed directly between those involved if at all possible. Coaching and ﬁrst level counselling are useful approaches for supporting others in conﬂict. Before doing anything though, some questions to consider: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Whose problem is it? Who is most directly impacted by the behaviour? And who might be indirectly impacted by the behaviour? How, if at all, have they dealt with the situation so far? What seems to be working? And what are the blocks to their continued negotiations? Whose responsibility is it to help resolve the situation? Anyone beyond the individuals concerned? If so, what is their role in relation to the situation? What help have they asked for? What help, if any, are you in a position to offer?

Figure 5.5 is adapted from the work of Heron (1992) and illustrates how our behaviour in the present can be distorted by our past experiences, particularly under stress. The roles we play out, as demonstrated in Figure 5.5, might include perceived persecutor or rescuer which tend to come from a parental stance – either critical or nurturing but both equally unhelpful if overplayed. Rebellious and victim-like behaviour are more likely to appear as child-like behaviours and can trigger the other two. For example, a rebellious child is likely to provoke the criticism of the parent while a vulnerable child who feels like a victim could provoke either a nurturing or controlling parent. 94

Resolving Conﬂicts PRESENT

Rebel

PRESENT

Rescuer

PAST

Persecutor

PRESENT

Victim

PRESENT

Figure 5.5 Past experiences impacting present behaviour

In supporting others with conﬂict we might ﬁnd we either notice these patterns of behaviour in others or become aware of a pattern in ourselves that unwittingly allows the conﬂict to continue rather than helps it to work through more productively. For example, a pattern might include a game (Berne, 1966) from a ‘victim’ perspective such as ‘yes but’ in which the person who is offered options for doing something differently always seems to have a reason for not considering it. If the person they are in dialogue with has a pattern around rescuing, the circle can go on as in the example conversation below: ‘Why don’t you just speak to Mike and see if he will help you out more often if you are getting overloaded’ (rescuer) ‘Yes I could but I have spoken to him before and it didn’t work last time’ (victim) ‘Well I am sure if you asked him again he would listen to you – especially if he knew how you felt about the situation’ (rescuer) ‘It’s just so difﬁcult at the moment, I’ve got so much on and I don’t want to trouble anybody’ (victim) ‘Shall I talk to him for you?’ (Rescuer) And so on. In this situation, of course, Mike is the persecutor but the roles could swap at any time. It may be that the person in rescuing mode has a conversation with Mike from a persecutor perspective and then Mike switches to victim and so on. This ‘drama triangle’ continues for as long as each person continues with the game. A way out of this situation is to notice the hooks and not get 95

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pulled into the invitation. The term ‘hooks’ in this context means a behaviour which triggers an emotional reaction in us linked to a person and/or situation from the past. Hooks might include a certain look, tone of voice, phrase or layout of a room, which someone uses either intentionally or not. The example conversation given earlier might run differently like this: ‘I’ve spoken to Mike before and it didn’t work last time, it’s just really difﬁcult at the moment with so much on… I don’t want to trouble him’ (victim) ‘So what are your other options?’ This question may not end the game completely but it is a potential turning point in the conversation and useful for signalling that you will not be pulled into rescue mode. In relating to others, we are not generally in the role of counsellor and some more ingrained patterns of behaviour might only be fully understood by someone with experience and qualiﬁcation in psychology. However, if we concentrate on dealing with present patterns of behaviour, we might notice that someone is, for example, often putting themselves in the role of victim, which might mean a conﬂict continues for longer than is helpful. The persecutor in an organizational context can also be perceived as: the government, the executive team, ﬁnance, audit, or other functions within the organization, partner organizations and so on. In this scenario, we might ﬁnd that whole sections of the organization or people in the organization overall put themselves into ‘victim’ category. Seemingly powerless to act and feeling like they have no control or inﬂuence over anything. As people involved in supporting change, one way out of this situation is to hold up the mirror of reality to what power people actually have to make decisions, inﬂuence outcomes and take responsibility.

Critical skills – coaching and feedback There are a whole range of skills that we could include in this book which are key for people in HR and managers who might need to support others in times of change and conﬂict and some of these are picked up in Chapter 7 on learning through change. Here, we say a little about two other skills which we feel are very helpful for resolving conﬂicts: coaching and feedback. Coaching skills

Most managers in your organizations will probably have been on training programmes that cover the skills of listening, questioning and giving and receiving feedback. If these skills are not covered, it is worth giving them some attention, not just at the management levels but to develop these skills for all staff as skills 96

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in relationship management for front line staff will help people to resolve conﬂicts for themselves. In our experience, there are still few managers who have really developed good listening and questioning skills to coach others in a way which leaves the coachee in control of the outcomes. Being able to let go of the solution is easier said than done and for many managers and those in HR being seen to be adding value is often judged to be done through giving the answer rather than prompting others to come to their own conclusions. The GROW framework (Landsberg, 2003) is a popular and useful model for non-directive coaching. We like it and include it here because it leaves the person being coached in charge of the outcome, it is easy to remember, to teach and to learn, can be applied at macro and micro levels to teams and individuals and works in practice. It also links well to change because it pays attention to the past, present and future. The framework includes an example below linked to a situation of conﬂict involving contractors not delivering to the required standards when a contract has changed. The questions are examples of how a manager might coach the individual to understand the situation better and work out choices for resolving the issues.

Goal – What do you want to discuss speciﬁcally in relation to this situation? This might also include questions about the goal in relation to the required standards such as: what are the standards you are expecting of the contractor? What would the contract look like if the contractors were working in the way we expect? Reality – How has the contract changed from their perspective? What do they need to do differently than they did before? Where are they meeting the standards? Which are the areas you are most concerned about? Examples here are useful in the form of critical incidents to illustrate how the individual or group perceives the current reality. Look out at this stage for the generalizations, distortions and deletions referred to earlier in this chapter. Options – This idea generation phase of the framework helps the individual to see the choices they have. Sometimes in situations of conﬂict it may seem that there is little or no choice – just by asking the question: what other options might there be for dealing with this situation? The individual may free themselves up to think more creatively. In a group situation, this phase becomes the idea generation stage and may involve a range of creative methods. The person coaching at this stage helps the individual or group to decide which of the options might be most viable given the advantages and potential disadvantages. 97

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Way forward – Leads into ﬁrst steps for action: timescales and strategies for making something happen. Alternatively, at this stage you may ﬁnd there is no motivation to do anything, in which case you might need to go back to the goal or other phases in the framework to see what is stopping them from moving forward. Questions here might include: how can you help the contractors to meet our needs? How can we monitor this more closely in the future? What if anything do you need me to do to support you on this?

This is intended to be used ﬂexibly and so the stages may be revisited as seems appropriate in the conversation. The conversation can also happen over a longer period of time with the goal being discussed in one session and other stages at a later date. With the managers we have worked with, there is often a temptation to wrap things up quickly, make them neat and arrive at a solution as quickly as possible. This style of coaching works best if the pace is dictated by the person talking and sufﬁcient time is given to exploration as well as possible solutions. This style of coaching only really works well when the individual is prepared to be coached! If there actually is a performance management issue, a different conversation might be more appropriate where clear feedback is given about the performance discrepancy. Feedback skills

We want to move away from the notion that feedback has to be delivered in a prescribed way in order for it to be helpful. Our readers are likely to be very familiar with frameworks that are commonly used in organizations such as the ‘feedback sandwich’. This framework advocates giving balanced feedback in the form of ﬁrst giving praise, followed by developmental feedback or constructive criticism in terms of an area for improvement, followed by praise. The intention here is for a constructive conversation in which performance is judged as whole rather than homing in on negatives. However, it can become an overly formulaic way of having a conversation which means the individual is waiting for the negative each time. Another commonly used framework for feedback is that of ‘behaviour, effects and feelings’ with an emphasis on delivering feedback which not only points out the behaviour of the individual, but places particular emphasis on the effects of that behaviour and how we might have felt about the effects. This and other similar frameworks can be very useful for managers to help them construct the feedback in a way which focuses on the speciﬁcs rather than the personality of the individual involved. Having said all of this, in our time working with managers on programmes which aim to help them deliver feedback 98

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constructively, the biggest barrier is probably that of conﬁdence to have the conversation in the ﬁrst place. ‘The ﬁrst place’ being at the time or as soon as possible after the manager becomes aware that the behaviour has caused a problem either for other people or in terms of getting the job done. People in HR are commonly overloaded with ‘disciplinary’ issues because managers feel unable or unwilling to have these conversations at the appropriate time. A useful start in both reﬂecting on the level of capability in the management population and the level of capability of the individual in terms of their performance is to consider: ‘Is this a competence issue?’ or a ‘conﬁdence issue?’ Do managers have the necessary knowledge and skills to carry out the conversations? Or is it more about a reluctance to say what might be difﬁcult for someone to hear? There is often a lack of any feedback in organizations including positive messages and so this may mean giving developmental feedback becomes more difﬁcult. Encouraging managers to give more positive feedback may help them to develop conﬁdence in having the more challenging conversations around poor performance as well as being important in its own right. Managers may ﬁnd themselves searching for the appropriate framework or form of words and never getting around to having the conversation. The ability to be congruent, notice reactions, to think and feel before acting is important and also the ability to tell it how it is, rather than try to mind read what the intention might have been for the other person. Some other less obvious ways of confronting behaviour which is causing a challenge includes acting out (visibly showing someone an expression they may have had); using humour, although this carries obvious risks; asking them how they think someone else might experience their behaviour and provocative therapy. These all need careful handling and, in the case of the last example, are more likely to be successful if used by a skilled practitioner. Provocative therapy (Farelly and Brandsma, 1989) uses exaggeration, humour, afﬁrmations and challenge to shift someone’s perception of themselves and/or the situation into a different place. Although controversial, provocative therapy takes an interesting stance in an underlying assumption that people are probably more robust than they and others think they are. Where there is an assumption made by managers or HR that people need careful handling, this can lead to an overly protective stance with unhelpful patterns of behaviour (in relation to the individual and those around them) going unchallenged.

Nipping things in the bud Many grievances are borne out by changes being introduced without appropriate engagement of the individuals concerned. For example, someone’s performance rating may change from good to poor without involving them early enough in the 99

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discussions throughout the year. Another example may be changes to work practice which affects someone’s performance. The performance issue may become the source of a grievance, particularly if the individual feels they have been unfairly treated by the manager. If there is an increase in grievance procedures within the organization, it is worth paying attention to the following questions in relation to change: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

■ ■

How clear are roles, performance standards, targets and expected behaviours in relation to the changes being made within the organization? How well developed are managers in carrying out appraisals, giving feedback and coaching members of their team? What attention is being given to issues of performance management by managers? If they are not being tackled – what’s getting in the way? Is this a knowledge, skills or attitude gap? Or all three? For example, are managers trained in appraisal discussions? Coaching? Assertion? Giving and receiving feedback? Employment law and diversity issues? – all of these have relevance for change and conﬂict resolution What development is given to staff at all levels in managing relationships with others? How do people at all levels in the organization know what is expected of them in terms of their relationships with others? And how are they developed to use these behaviours on a day-to-day basis?

We look at increasing organizational capacity to resolve conﬂicts later in the book by using a range of participative approaches including learning through change.

Summary In this chapter, we have paid attention to some strategies for resolving conﬂicts between individuals with an emphasis on increasing individual capacity for understanding and resolving conﬂict. We have paid attention to the importance of understanding and managing self and the relationships we have with others. Our ability to survive in today’s fast paced organizations depends, not just on knowledge and competence in relation to the task aspects of our work, but increasingly on our capacity to relate well to others. The more attention that can be paid to supporting individuals to understand their own patterns of behaviour, and how they can develop themselves to be more effective in their intrapersonal and interpersonal skills, the less likelihood there is of unhelpful conﬂicts escalating. Supporting 100

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others to be better equipped to handle the situation for themselves will always, in our view, be more helpful than sorting the situation out for them. Coaching, counselling and mentoring are all useful ways in which individuals can be supported to see the choices they may have. Although we have not covered counselling and mentoring here, we recognize these approaches as being a valuable addition and recommend resources at the end of this book on these approaches. Themes started here are continued in the next chapter, which pays attention to third party interventions through mediation and facilitation.

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6 From Conﬂict to Collaboration In the previous chapter, we looked at different strategies that might be adopted within the organization to support conﬂicts. Here, we look at what value might be added by bringing in a third party. Mediation is a process that is on the increase in organizations as a legitimate way of helping individuals resolve conﬂicts for themselves. It is commonly used between two individuals who have not been able to solve their differences, but can also involve other people or ‘parties’ who have a vested interest in the issues and are in some way impacted by them. For example, it is possible to use mediation when several colleagues are not working together well because of differences. The frameworks and principles of mediation can also be applied when working with teams and across teams and in larger systemic issues. Later in the chapter, we look at some aspects of facilitation for supporting more than two people in conﬂict. The aspect of conﬂicts between multiple parties is also referred to in Chapter 10 through the process of stakeholder dialogue. Questions addressed in this chapter include: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

What can mediation offer as a way of supporting change and conﬂict? How does it differ from other methods of dispute resolution? How has thinking developed over the years in relation to mediation? Which organizations are using mediation and why? What does the mediation process look like? How can facilitation skills support those in conﬂict? How can you use mediation in your organization?

When conﬂicts get stuck A third party intervention is often considered when a conﬂict becomes entrenched in some way or stuck. However, the processes outlined in this chapter are more effective when different and potentially competing interests are ﬁrst highlighted. Once a history of conﬂict has become embedded, it is harder to work

From Conﬂict to Collaboration

with a process of collaboration. Within rigid structures, (such as hierarchies, where power is vested in those who are more senior in the organization who are often seen to make all the decisions), the outcomes of conﬂict can be transitory. Where power is deemed to be even, negotiation and cooperation are more likely. Figure 6.1 (Sidaway, 2005) highlights this. PROCESS OF CONFLICT

PROCESS OF COOPERATION

History of conflict Resistance to change Powerful defending status quo

History of cooperation Adaptation to change Power shared

Latent phase Ideology maintains coherence of rival interest groups Weaker parties organize to gain influence Lack of information contributes to uncertainty Little direct communication between interest groups

Availability of information reduced uncertainty Regular communication between interest groups

Escalation Trigger, e.g. pre-emptive attempt to change legal status of resource Active phase Tactics of interest groups Challengers formulate their case as an issue of principle, citing superior legislation to gain legitimacy Discourse confrontational via the media Coalition building to increase power

Tactics of interest groups Difference in beliefs respected Sensitivity shown to needs of others Discourse conciliatory using media to inform the wider public

Rigid decision making Resistance to change Resulting balance of power favours victor

Flexible decision making Accommodates change Power shared

Outcome transitory

Outcome durable

Figure 6.1 Process of conﬂict and cooperation. From: ‘Resolving environmental disputes’: Roger Sidaway, 2005 publisher Earthscan, p. 51

Linked to these diagrams is the notion that the outcome of any conﬂict will be inﬂuenced by the balance of power between the competing interest groups. Where there is a history that power has been used to defend the status quo, new interest groups can build their position to gain legitimacy and coalitions with other groups to build their power. For example, disputes where one trade union joins forces with another for a more powerful defence against changes to working conditions or terms of employment. 103

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Mediation as a way of resolving disputes Mediation is a term that is now well known as an intervention in speciﬁc situations of conﬂict. The most well known is in relation to global peace talks and the work in the international arena. However, mediation has been used for many years in the areas of neighbourhood disputes, family and couple issues, victim offender and in schools and for young people. More recently, the process of mediation has been introduced into workplace settings as an alternative way to resolve conﬂicts. Mediation is a process of alternative dispute resolution in which a neutral third party assists two or more people to negotiate an agreement, with concrete effects, on a matter of common interest. The third party is neutral in the sense that they are outside of the dispute and will facilitate the negotiation for the common interest of those involved. Mediation is not legally binding and so has less formality and cost attached to it than more formal proceedings such as litigation and arbitration. People who want their ‘day in court’ and for someone with legal authority to make a decision about who is right and wrong are unlikely to be satisﬁed with the process. However, going through a mediation process does not mean other options are closed off. The increase in mediation as a method for dispute resolution has come about partly because of the increasing cost of resolving internal disputes between employees through more formal procedures such as industrial tribunals. This increasing cost includes the amount of time it takes in organizations to investigate complaints of bullying and harassment, not to mention the stress and, in some cases, trauma linked to ﬁling formal complaints. According to Personnel Today (2006): UK employers are now spending £210m a year on employment tribunal claims, according to research from the think-tank that advises the government on discrimination in the workplace … the ﬁgure is set to rise by 70 percent to £360m in 2007… Around 30 000 legal actions – most claiming unfair dismissal, unequal pay or sex discrimination – are ﬁled with the employment tribunal service each year Also, recent legislation (introduced in October 2004) stipulated that before employment disputes were taken to an Industrial Tribunal, three steps had to be undertaken: 1. The grievance should be put in writing 2. A meeting must be held to discuss the problem and arrive at a decision 3. An offer of an appeal meeting should be made if required. 104

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In October 2006, The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) conducted a survey across all sectors to produce a report on managing conﬂict at work (CIPD, 2007). From the 790 replies they received, the following statistics were compiled in relation to mediation: ■

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Only 30 percent of employers train any employees in mediation skills. This is much more common among public services organizations (53 percent) than among employers in the three other main sectors – particularly manufacturing and production (15 percent) One in four respondent organizations used internal mediation (using members of staff trained in mediation skills) to resolve individual employment disputes in the last 12 months About a ﬁfth of respondents report that their organizations used external mediation services (e.g. ACAS) to resolve individual employment disputes in the last 12 months Organizations with up to 1000 employees report comparatively fewer employment tribunal claims than organizations of comparable size that do not provide such training. Organizations with more than 10 000 employees and providing mediation training report about a quarter of the number of tribunal claims received by organizations of this size that do not invest in this sort of training.

Although the survey provides evidence that some organizations providing mediation training receive fewer employment tribunal claims, the number of claims are marginally higher in organizations that provide training with between 1000 and 10 000 employees. However, as with all statistics, they are limited in telling us whether the cost of using mediators or training people internally is really worth it to the organization as there are many aspects that will not be captured in the statistics. We aim to bring these out later in the chapter. Mediation seems to be used more widely in the public than private sector, partly perhaps because the public sector is under closer scrutiny to demonstrate reasonable and fair treatment of employees.

So what does the process of mediation look like? Mediation aims to support changes in behaviour, through resolving conﬂicts and helping individuals to make realistic, workable agreements. It also seeks to maintain parity between the individuals involved and be seen to treat people fairly and so is transparent in this respect. Those involved in the conﬂicts are encouraged to communicate directly with each other (after a period of communicating through the mediator), exchange 105

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feelings, ideas and perceptions and participate fully in making decisions about the way forward. It is a voluntary process, focused on the future and conﬁdential. Mediation will, of course, not be suitable in every situation of conﬂict. However, in many situations, it can provide a low cost, informal and empowering process which enables individuals and groups to take responsibility for their own behaviours and actions; and to make assertive requests of others with the help of an independent third party.

Styles of mediation The term mediation is used to describe quite a wide range of approaches including: facilitative, evaluative, rights-based and transformative mediation. ■

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Facilitative or ‘interest-based’ mediation describes a process in which the mediator does not direct the parties towards any particular settlement. In the purist sense, a facilitative mediation would include the mediator taking charge of the process, while the parties involved in the dispute are in charge of the content. This is also sometimes called interest-based mediation. This approach is often taken in the community mediation arena with neighbourhood disputes. Evaluative mediation is the opposite of the above. Here, the mediator makes suggestions as to the likely outcome of the dispute. Clients who are looking for a mediator to direct them towards a resolution would probably be more satisﬁed with an evaluative approach than a facilitative one. This style of mediation has some links to conciliation and may be used in couple counselling following or at the time of divorce. Rights-based mediation in which the mediator ensures that any mediated agreement reﬂects statutory rights and legal entitlements. Again divorce settlements would come under this category as well as some employment law and industrial disputes. Transformative mediation deals not only with the settlement of an immediate dispute in terms of solution focus, but also seeks to help the disputing parties understand their own situation and needs and those of the other person or people involved. If the people involved in the dispute get to a stage where they can really see things differently, both from their own and the other’s perspective (and this does not necessarily mean agreeing that they are right), then it could be said to be a transformative process.

Whichever style of mediation is adopted, there are some fundamental principles which underpin the process of mediation including: ■

Neutrality – the mediator needs to be outside the arena of the dispute. Not connected with either the issues or the people involved. This can be tricky when

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people inside the organization (particularly those in HR) are mediating either informally or formally. People working inside the organization will never be seen to be as neutral as someone coming from the outside, with no previous knowledge of the organization or the dispute or preconceived ideas of the history and context. The mediator needs to be seen to be acting impartially without taking sides or making judgements in one person or party’s favour. An underlying belief linked to this is that people usually operate in a certain way because some need is not being met. The mediator is not there to ﬁx people, rather to provide an environment and opportunity for people to come to their own understanding of the situation and ﬁnd resolutions that suit all involved Conﬁdentiality – can be a big issue, particularly for resolving conﬂicts in an organizational setting. The question here for someone involved in a dispute is, ‘can I really trust the individual(s) mediating this conﬂict to maintain conﬁdentiality?’ Personal responsibility – coming from a belief that everyone has the capacity to think and make decisions about what would best meet their needs. Sometimes people may need help in this process, but having this belief helps the mediator to respect the people in dispute and not wade into giving solutions that might be inappropriate. In mediation, the people involved speak for themselves, think for themselves and decide for themselves. The hard work and the outcome belong to the people in dispute. (This principle is more aligned to interest based and transformative mediation than the other approaches) Freedom of choice – there are always choices and these choices will have consequences. Sometimes in mediation, it can seem that people are ‘stuck’ in some way; either in their deﬁnition of the problem or in the ways they see for going forward. One of the roles of the mediator is to help free up the thinking of one or all involved to look at alternatives and to evaluate the likely impact of these choices Capacity to change – sometimes mediation will include an element of coaching – particularly in the early stages when each person will have a separate meeting. It may be that coaching helps someone to view the situation differently and frees them up to make personal changes which do not involve the other person. If the people involved want change enough then they are more likely to adjust their own behaviour towards that end Voluntary – an important aspect of mediation is that it feels non-threatening to the people involved. So many of the legal proceedings are confusing and complicated – leaving those involved in disputes feeling bewildered and powerless. The process of mediation by contrast should be voluntary and participants (rather than parties) need to feel they have the ability to leave the process when it is not working for them. 107

Change, Conﬂict and Community Referral – (formal or informal)

Stakeholder analysis/issues

Follow up

Face-to-face or shuttle mediation?

Separate meetings – to establish outcomes

Review of options

Figure 6.2 The stages of mediation

The stages of mediation Typical stages of mediation (Figure 6.2) are outlined here in brief. Stage one: referral

When the people in dispute contact someone to ask for a third party intervention or when mediation is suggested by someone. In the work context this might be a referral by HR, or by a manager. Stage two: stakeholder analysis

Depending on the issues involved, there may be a number of people linked to the dispute. For example, where team communication has broken down, it will be important to know who has an opinion on the issue and is related to the dispute in some way. Knowing who to talk to at this stage is more important than knowing all the issues. There is a danger that we start to pre-judge what the issues are rather than leave the people involved to decide for themselves. 108

From Conﬂict to Collaboration Stage three: separate meetings

The mediator will meet with each of the people involved in the dispute, to listen and facilitate their understanding of the situation and to explain how mediation might assist. This meeting also provides an opportunity to see if the situation is suitable for mediation. Questions asked at this stage might include: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

What is bothering you most about this situation right now? How do you think mediation might help with what you are experiencing? What do you want from the situation for the future? What do you think the issues might be for (the other person or people)? What else is having an impact on the situation? If the other person is not willing to meet face to face what are your other options? What would be the best outcome? And the worst? How important is it to you to resolve this situation?

There is always a danger with questions that it can feel like an interrogation and more formal than is helpful for those involved. The mediator can help put participants at ease by balancing the questions with active listening, self-disclosure, appropriate feedback and an explanation of the voluntariness of the process. Stage four: review of the options

Stage four is often done at the same time as stage three in discussion with the people involved. However, it can be useful to let people think about whether mediation is the right approach for them and it also gives the mediator time to think about the suitability of the issues for mediation having talked to the other stakeholders. If all are willing to go ahead, a face-to-face meeting can then be planned. Stage ﬁve: face-to-face or shuttle mediation

Providing all participants are willing to go ahead and circumstances seem favourable, a meeting is arranged for a face-to-face discussion with the mediator(s). If one or more people do not want to take part, rather than putting further pressure on them in what is probably an already stressful situation, it is usual to work with those most willing to take part in the process. A staged approach again gives people time to consider their options. In this way, mediation is an evolutionary process where change can and often does happen from the ﬁrst meeting with someone. Shuttle mediation (where the mediator acts as the go-between to 109

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facilitate discussions from a distance) may be possible between some involved if face-to-face mediation is not suitable. Shuttle mediation is never the preferred option, rather a back up if there is no possibility of a face-to-face meeting. One of the main beneﬁts of the face-to-face meeting is hearing the real concerns and feelings of those involved in the dispute rather than through a third party and from a distance. A fundamental part of the mediation process is distinguishing ‘positions’ from underlying interests. ■

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Positions – Are the negotiating stance someone expresses through demands or solutions, e.g. more pay, shorter working hours, increased productivity, harassment to stop etc. These usually start off as non-negotiable and can seem intractable. Interests – What is underlying their position and why is it important to them? For example, better work–life balance, to be able to manage, greater direction, to feel competent, interesting work, to be listened to etc. How these needs are met is usually the negotiable area. By asking questions, what is really important is surfaced and the choices for resolving the conﬂict are increased. Basic needs – These are fundamental to all human beings and will be underlying the interests expressed in the mediation. They include: security, companionship, health, respect, safety, warmth, rest, comfort, etc and are nonnegotiable. Again, how some of these needs are met is negotiable.

At the face-to-face meeting, a staged process is introduced whereby, after guidelines for the discussion have been agreed, each person is asked to listen to the other uninterrupted. The guidelines or ground rules are usually proposed by the mediators and then agreed and tailored as necessary by the participants, although some mediators will ask the participants to decide on the ground rules themselves. They might include: ■ ■ ■

■ ■

Listening: one person speaking at a time Patience: people are asked to stay in the room to discuss problems as they arise Conﬁdentiality (and note taking): apart from the agreement, anything said stays in the room. The procedure about where and how any notes are kept is agreed Respect: avoid accusation blame and abusive language Control: people may be angry or upset, and they and mediators can call a break, but the mediator will use various kinds of control to keep both sides working as constructively as possible. For example, by interrupting if language gets abusive, or moving people to the future if they keep going back to the past

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Voluntariness: people may decide the session is not working for them – and they are asked to stay in the area if this is the case, so that a side meeting (known as a caucus meeting) can take place if possible.

The mediators summarize the points, in particular highlighting any underlying interests that have not been directly expressed. An agenda of issues raised by all participants is then agreed and worked through until a satisfactory outcome is achieved. One meeting is often sufﬁcient to deal with the issues, but this depends on the complexity of the conﬂict and what outcomes the people involved are seeking. During the meeting, the mediators will monitor air time, ask questions, summarize points made and encourage dialogue between the people involved. How the mediation progresses depends on the type of mediation, but there is usually a balance to be struck between tangible task outcomes and relationship outcomes (e.g. agreeing to acknowledge each other in the morning). Time out might be called either by the mediator if things get too heated or by one or all of the participants. This can provide a useful opportunity to take stock and consider/reconsider options for going forward.

Stage six: follow up

A follow up is not always necessary, but this stage may include a written understanding or agreement between the people involved. Further meetings may also be arranged if it seems that other issues need more time to work through. Normally, because mediation focuses on the future, actions can be agreed relatively quickly. There are advantages and disadvantages to having a written agreement or understanding. It puts a more formal emphasis on the discussions and committing actions to paper can mean people are more likely to stick to what they have agreed. However, a good deal of mediation is about establishing a level of trust between people which may not have been present before. More successful mediations often end with a verbal understanding rather than a more formal agreement with a primary outcome of expressing feelings and getting heard. Some very subtle signs will sometimes tell you that things have shifted in the relationship and these are often on a felt, rather than expressed level. Some examples of phrases that might reﬂect this shift in the conversation are given later in the chapter.

One or two mediators? In community mediation, the practice is for two mediators to work with the people involved for a number of reasons: to reﬂect diversity (where possible 111

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mixed gender, racial backgrounds and age is preferable though not always possible); to model working together in an open collaborative way; and to support the different preferences and needs of those involved in the dispute. For example, one person may feel more able to relate to one of the mediators than the other. Working with a colleague also means getting ‘hooked’ into the issues is less likely. There is also a potential safety issue when dealing with people in conﬂict, although this is less likely in workplace mediations where rules of behaviour are more apparent. In workplace mediations, it is not always necessary to have two mediators and there will not always be the luxury of people available, so it can work perfectly well with one mediator.

To Mediate or not to mediate Sometimes mediation can seem like a panacea for all conﬂict situations everywhere. However, before deciding whether or not this is the most suitable way forward, it would be useful to consider the following circumstances. Mediation tends to be most favourable when: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Ongoing relationships are important Those involved want to retain control of the outcome There is no great difference in power between disputants Speed is important (although there must be sufﬁcient time to work through the mediation process) Conﬁdentiality is important One or all involved need the opportunity to let off steam Those involved have stopped (or never started) communicating with each other and are prepared to use an impartial third party to help them communicate People have neither the skill nor desire to negotiate effectively without some outside help People cannot ﬁnd a solution to a dispute themselves but do want to settle Other options for resolving the dispute have been considered but are less desirable than mediation Not dealing with the dispute is unacceptable to both parties The personal safety of either party does not depend on the outcome of the agreement The people involved are participating voluntarily All perceive the mediator as unbiased The issues are speciﬁc and the outcomes (or at least some of them) within the control of those involved in the dispute.

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On the other hand, mediation is least favourable when: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

There is a great imbalance of power between parties A higher authority judgement is required Legal action is already being carried out Matters of basic rights are at stake, such as personal safety The people involved are not willing to participate One or both parties feel unsafe The parties are not willing to talk to each other even through a third party Positions on both sides are extreme and have hardened.

Having said that, even some of the above are debatable and we would encourage approaching mediation with an open mind. As long as the potential difﬁculties with any of the above are considered, it does not necessarily mean mediation should be ruled out. For example, mediation is possible in situations where the initial stages of more formal grievance procedures have been started and can have successful results in terms of heading off any more formal action. Certainly, if the people involved are not willing to talk to each other with the support of a mediator it is unlikely to go ahead. The choices available to the participants need to be emphasized with mediation as one which might help. It never negates their choice for a more formal route if they still decide to exercise this. In cases of perceived bullying or harassment at work, organizational policy may also dictate the appropriate route to take.

Beneﬁts of mediation For people involved in a dispute, whether at work or in their wider lives, the stress of the situation is often heightened by a lack of control over what happens. As soon as a third party is called in to tackle the issue, the danger of losing control of the end result can become a reality, particularly when legal action is taken. In a work context, most people know that as soon as they talk to someone in HR about the situation, whether that be bullying, adversely changing job requirements or stress from a home situation, the situation is escalated to more formal levels and potentially taken out of their hands. The emphasis in mediation is keeping the responsibility and ownership with the individuals concerned so that they can make informed choices and feel more empowered to resolve the issues directly. The conﬁdential and voluntary nature of the process means people are more likely to feel they have some control over the situation. Sometimes, more formal methods can relieve the stress of the situation for the individual and the pursuit of these routes to deal with the dispute should always be considered in addition to mediation. As mentioned earlier, not every situation is suitable for 113

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mediation and so other routes should be discussed with individuals or the groups involved. Other routes might include methods highlighted in Chapter 5, one-toone coaching, mentoring, training and/or grievance procedures. If the people involved in the dispute decide they want to try mediation as a way of settling differences, a number of beneﬁts might be realized as case study 6.1 highlights.

Case study 6.1 A line manager (Beth) asked for the support of a mediator when conﬂicts between two team members (Dave and Liz) had started to affect others in the team. She was not aware of the history between these two people but had noticed a gradual deterioration in their relationship to the extent that one was being left out of conversations about work, there were often ‘slanging’ matches across the open plan ofﬁce, work had deteriorated and there was generally a lot of tension and bad feeling in the dayto-day atmosphere. Although the line manager had tried to talk to both people about what she had observed, there was reluctance for either to say what was going on. The line manager suspected some jealousy around a recent project that had been given to one of them but had not been able to get to the bottom of the issues. Both individuals were open to the idea of mediation, although Dave was not convinced it would make any difference. The mediator met both individuals separately for a couple of hours each so they could talk about how they viewed the relationship, what they might want to happen differently in the future and what their choices were. In particular, it was important to encourage Dave to see mediation as a choice with potential for change, rather than an absolute solution. Dave said he wanted to do more interesting work and felt he was being overlooked for promotion because the scope of his role was limited. He felt Liz was the ‘favourite’ and knew she was close friends with Beth. In the ﬁrst discussion with Liz, she said she found Dave intimidating and she didn’t know why he had been behaving so aggressively lately. His behaviour in front of other team members made her feel uncomfortable – particularly criticizing her work ‘all the time’. In the face-to-face meeting which they agreed to, both were encouraged by the mediator (through active listening and open questions) to express the issues of individual and joint interest including: opportunities for interesting work and projects, opportunities for advancement, relationships with Beth and others in the team and relationships with each other. They agreed they 114

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needed a joint meeting with Beth to suggest ways in which work could be more fairly distributed in the team so that more people could beneﬁt from interesting and challenging projects.

Beneﬁts to individuals ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Increased understanding about conﬂict and how the situation has arisen Greater control over what happens The opportunity to be heard, perhaps for the ﬁrst time The opportunity to hear what the other person wants to happen A chance to ofﬂoad feelings about the situation and the impact on them Feel supported by the organization without someone else taking over To know the process is conﬁdential To have the services of someone neutral to provide boundaries for the discussion with the other person/people in the dispute Increased conﬁdence and skill in dealing with disputes in the future.

In times of change, conﬂicts between teams and groups in the organization can escalate. Competition over scarce resources, increased anxiety over threats to jobs and a lack of clarity about the future direction of the organization can all mean that conﬂict and tension either simmer under the surface or more overtly bubble over the top. Mediation as a method for helping groups to talk to each other and understand differing perspectives can be extremely valuable. Mediation might be used either overtly or woven in to other interventions, such as team building. Using the principles of the mediation process, the facilitator, particularly if they are trained in mediation, can help the team with a number of issues that might be causing the conﬂict. The case study below highlights this.

Case study 6.2 A manager (Bill) had recently taken on a newly formed HR team after a restructure. Challenges were starting to present themselves on a number of fronts including: lack of conﬁdence in the manager shown by people not turning up for meetings; overtly criticizing any attempts by him to exercise any authority; team members still working on old projects rather than attempting to work together and see what the interdependencies were; service users complaining that people were not returning phone calls or answering e-mails promptly enough. A mediator is asked to help resolve the conﬂicts that are starting to emerge in the team. 115

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An initial meeting was held with Bill to tease out underlying interests from his perspective, which included: to feel competent in his role as a manager, to be listened to, to be able to meet the standards needed by internal clients, support of team members and good working relationships. Two group discussions were then run for the team members. (In mediation, the normal process is for individual meetings. However, in certain circumstances, particularly where there are a number of people involved, a group discussion can be equally effective. Mediators need to be mindful of the potential for power imbalances and concerns individuals might have about being open and honest in front of others. Ground rules will help here and careful thought about the relationships between individuals before any meetings.) Using the principles of mediation at each meeting, the ground rules were outlined and each person in the team had the opportunity to speak, uninterrupted, to say how they felt about being in the team at this time of change, what they needed from each other and from their manager and what they wanted for the future. Each person’s viewpoint was summarized by the mediator and underlying interests clariﬁed. The interests from the team’s perspectives included: wanting to feel less confused about who would be responsible for what in the team, fair allocation of work and opportunities, to feel their contributions would be valued and valid, to help shape the team and the services they needed to provide, to be listened to and taken seriously, to feel competent in the new areas they would need to take on. An ‘event’ was then held over a day to reﬂect back interests heard from all team members and the manager, ask what else since then they had reﬂected on in terms of what was important to them (individuals all commented on this aspect as their views may have changed since the last discussions) and to engage them in deciding how to go forward so that interests of all involved could be met. At this joint problem solving stage, a number of interactive methods were brought in such as brainstorming, post it note exercises, listening and feedback to each other to build the relationships and understanding across the team.

Beneﬁts to teams and groups ■ ■ ■ ■

A new or renewed sense of direction and purpose A shared strategy and process for moving forward A clearer understanding of the individuals in the team and what their issues and motivations are Greater understanding of how the team ﬁts into the overall purpose and direction of the organization

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An opportunity to discuss key issues facing the team A joint approach to problem solving and ideas generation An opportunity to give feedback to each other Greater clarity on the roles and responsibilities of individuals within the team – including the leadership roles A greater sense of belonging An opportunity to get to know others in the same or other team on a more human level.

Facilitation skills When conﬂict involves more than two people, as in the example highlighted above, the use of either a facilitator or a mediator trained in facilitation skills can be useful. If you are considering using a mediator for group conﬂicts, it is worth checking their experience in working with more than two people and what methods they would suggest using to help the group reach a good outcome. An experienced facilitator will normally have a range of tools and methods they can draw on to help groups work together productively. However, they may not have the background or understanding of the issues involved when people are experiencing conﬂict, so you might need to check this out too. Some facilitation skills in addition to those outlined previously for one-to-one mediation will include: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Contracting Exploring underlying interests Generating ideas to move forward Evaluating the options Agreeing an action plan Summarizing and closure.

Contracting Much as in face-to-face mediation where the ground rules are agreed, in a meeting with more than two people, the contract or ground rules are usually agreed before and/or at the meeting. Even if the agenda is agreed beforehand, it is useful to go over this again at the meeting, so that everyone is clear about why they are there. This contract might include: ■ ■

The content or agenda including the issues which each person wants to discuss The ground rules and ways of working 117

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The procedure that will be followed – for example, the duration of the meeting, who will be speaking and when, methods for including everyone’s views.

As in face-to-face mediation between two people, it is important with group facilitation that each person has the opportunity to speak and be heard at the beginning. The facilitator will need to decide who starts this process ﬁrst as the people involved will be sensitive to any possible issues around impartiality and neutrality. One option is to ask who would like to start the process; however, if there are dominant personalities in the room, the facilitator may decide to ask the quieter people to speak ﬁrst. They will also need to monitor the boundaries at this stage and ensure that people can speak uninterrupted so that all the issues and perspectives are heard before moving on to the next stage. In situations where individuals have seemingly opposed views, it can be helpful to have two facilitators present, to pay attention to the needs and expressions of everyone at the discussion. They might have a starting question such as: ‘What would need to be resolved for you today if this meeting were to be successful?’ by inviting people to have a vision of a successful end point, they are also being invited to believe that the issues can be resolved.

Exploring the underlying interests When all the issues are on the table, there is scope to explore in a little more detail how people see things from their perspective. To start this process, the facilitator might ask another question (if people have not already jumped into the process!) such as, ‘what reﬂections/comments do people have about the issues others have raised?’ This stage again will be similar to the face-to-face mediation process, except will need more careful monitoring by the mediator/facilitators with more people to observe, bring in and potentially close down. The following skills can be used to help open people/groups up and are particularly useful at the beginning of any discussion: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Listening actively and summarizing the points made to ensure they feel heard Asking open questions, particularly ‘what’ and ‘how’, but also using phrases such us ‘say more about that’ and ‘give others an example of what you mean’ Matching and mirroring – tone, pace, volume, energy, expressions, words and so on to build and stay in rapport Empathizing without necessarily agreeing, for example, ‘you feel the standards are being unfairly applied to your area of the Division’ Avoiding being evaluative and/or belittling the issue Making clear your role and intention as the facilitator.

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The last point is similar to face-to-face mediation in that the facilitator is not there to do all the work for the group, rather to support individuals and the group overall to ﬁnd solutions for themselves. People and/or the discussion may also need to be closed down, when, for example, things are getting too heated or the discussion needs to be moved on. Here are some possible ways: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Change the subject matter Direct attention away from the individual or issue by avoiding eye contact and/or moving body language Change level at which discussion is taking place – so, for example, from positions to underlying interests Change the type of activity or orientation, i.e. from experiencing emotion to thinking/doing Acknowledge the emotion and move on.

In group situations, establishing joint interests will still be important to help participants see the potential for moving forward on common ground. The example shown in Figure 6.3 in relation to a new reception area in one organization highlights this.

TEAM A

TEAM B Position

Position

Not wanting to give away more space than they have to

Interests

• Sufficient quiet to do the work • Enough personal space • Efficient communication between each other • Smooth transition/ work flow

Need to site the reception area somewhere in existing space of team A

Joint interests

• Meeting the needs of customers • Most effective use of available space • Maintaining the professional image of the Department

Interests • Ease of access for customers • Making best use of limited resources • Pressure from senior managers to do something • Concern for image of the Department

Figure 6.3 Positions and interests

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The skilled facilitator will be looking out for the appropriate time to move the discussion into the next phase. This is once the energy in the group starts to change and signals have been made to demonstrate that people are starting to listen to each other. These signals (which are useful to look out for in any situations of conﬂict as a potential turning point) might include: ■

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Offers: e.g. one person says, ‘You’ve no idea how cramped we are for space in our ofﬁce as it is let alone with taking on more people!’ (Come and see what it’s like for me) Concessions: ‘Well, we could probably put some of the IT equipment in our back ofﬁce’ Expressions of regret/apologies: ‘I think I could take some of the blame for that’ Expressions of new insights: ‘I didn’t know that was the position for you/your team’ Recognizing other’s needs or feelings: ‘I can see that would be a challenge’ Expressing a positive view: (about the other people involved, or the mediation process) Highlighting common ground: ‘We all want to create a bit more space and a better reception area for our clients/customers’ Disclosing feelings: ‘I get upset when I hear people saying it looks so unprofessional’.

At these turning points, when people are starting to express thoughts and feelings in a more constructive way, they may also start to see each other as human beings, rather than obstructions to achieving what they want. After checking out that the group is ready to move to generating options, there are a number of methods that might be used to take things forward.

Generating ideas for moving forward The facilitator here will be using the ideas and energy of the group to bring out different ways of meeting their diverse interests and needs, offering suggestions if necessary but, more likely, to be asking good questions and giving space for people to think and generate their own ideas. ■

Brainstorming – if carried out as intended in the sense of non-evaluation of ideas, brainstorming can still be a really useful way to give people permission to say what they think without the fear of being judged. The important part of brainstorming is to encourage people to stay open enough to the possibility of other ways of resolving seemingly opposing interests. For example, one issue might be how to create more space for customers with less accommodation

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■

■

available. All ideas are recorded before being evaluated. The evaluation stage is usually more structured. The use of ‘how to’ questions is really helpful at this stage and to get the focus of the question right in the sense of the outcome that would meet the joint interests of all concerned. So, in the example given earlier, the how to questions might include: ■ How to make the most use of available space? ■ How to maintain the professional image of the Department in the reception area? ■ How to give people in team A sufﬁcient space to work and provide a good reception area for customers? Post it exercises – might be used to enable group members to contribute conﬁdentially. The key issues which have emerged could be put up as headings on a piece of ﬂip chart for each issue. People are then asked to put their ideas up for resolving each issue. The facilitator can then review the ideas with the group in the same way as they might for a group brainstorm. Problem checklists – each group might be given a ﬂip chart with the following headings: ■ Main problem and what you want to achieve ■ Three things that are causing the problem in your view ■ What are the effects of the problem for you? ■ What would be the beneﬁts of solving this problem to you? ■ What would be the perfect solution?/Your ideal? ■ What are you prepared to do towards resolving this issue?

Questions in this example could be tailored depending on the issues for the people involved.

Evaluating the options Once the ideas generation stage is complete, the next stage would normally be that of evaluation. It can be helpful to hold back evaluation of ideas until they are all on the table. Sometimes, the best idea comes only after people feel comfortable to suggest them, knowing that they will not be evaluated until the end. Other methods can be used at this stage to evaluate the ideas of the group such as: ■ ■ ■

Flip charts for each group to say what they see as being the key strengths and weaknesses of each suggestion A voting system could be used – such as stars or ticks against the items that are most popular to implement People might be invited to choose their top two or three ideas and then these are explored in more detail 121

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Action planning The action plan (which is really the agreement of the group) needs to be agreed by all participants and will usually include: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Actions to be taken and by whom How and when each step will take place What support has been agreed where applicable Contingency plans (if appropriate) What people should continue doing where it’s working as well as what they will agree to do differently.

Whether or not the action plan is written up is a matter for the group to decide. The facilitator can helpfully point out the options around this and potential issues to think about if something is either written down or not. A group reluctant to formalize actions may indicate a lack of commitment to carry them out. Noticing lack of energy towards actions and reﬂecting this back to the group might surface other issues which have not been fully explored.

Summarizing and closure Closure is a really important part of the process in mediation and group facilitation. The mediators or facilitators of the process will normally sum up the key actions which have been agreed and ensure that people feel appreciated for the effort they have put into the process. They may also want to ask people for their own reﬂections on the process, but need to be careful not to open up the discussion and issues again at this stage.

Internal or external mediators or facilitators? For an organization, the use of mediators as a way of resolving internal disputes can seem resource intensive and costly. If external mediators are used, there is the cost of employing people either on a ‘case by case’ or time basis. If internal mediators are to be used, there is the cost of training, setting up the administrative and other support mechanisms for the service, cost of time involved for the mediations (both from the mediator’s and participant perspectives) and time for supervision. Also, there are some people in the organization who may feel threatened by the introduction of a service which they feel impacts on their present role in some way, for example, any trade union ofﬁcials and HR personnel who may feel this is already part of their job. These are some of the considerations to be taken 122

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into account, but the beneﬁts in the long term for organizations who invest the time and attention in mediation as an alternative method for resolving disputes can be many and varied including:

Beneﬁts to the organization ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Essential skills of good communication, listening and questioning are embedded throughout the organization Cost effective ways of resolving conﬂicts are introduced Decreased necessity to use formal grievance procedures People’s awareness of the needs of others are heightened Cultural change can be stimulated as dialogue provides new insights into individual and organizational issues.

The list here is perhaps less lengthy than under the other sections, but the beneﬁts can be considerably more wide reaching. Cultural change is something many organizations struggle with and those organizations wanting to encourage greater responsibility, openness, trust, dialogue, interpersonal awareness and sensitivity may ﬁnd that mediation is one intervention that will help them along this route. As with any of the methods and approaches we outline in this book, there is a danger of overreliance on one method to solve all issues. Our view is that a more helpful approach might be to consider several methods in the light of the outcomes you want to achieve. If you are thinking about the possibility of setting something up in your own organization to support people in conﬂict, the following questions might help you to consider the issues: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

How many formal and informal disputes are lodged each year with HR? How many cases go to tribunal each year? What is the cost to the organization of dealing with formal and informal disputes? Are staff trained in managing conﬂicts? What evaluation (if any) have you done to see if their training in this area is effective? What management development do people get more generally in the organization? What attention is paid to managing relationships effectively in the organization? Is resolving disputes and conﬂict part of the competence set for managers in the organization? Are relationship management skills part of the competence set and training programmes for all staff?

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What would the introduction of a mediation service give you that you do not already have? Which beneﬁts (of those listed earlier in this chapter) are you most concerned to achieve through this process? If you are thinking of home-grown mediators:

■ ■ ■ ■ ■

How neutral will the mediators be seen to be? How much time will it take? And what will be the cost of training them in the skills? Do you have anyone already with a base line skill set that could be called upon? What is the culture of the organization? And how will this support or hinder the introduction of mediation? Who most needs to develop skills in this area? How does it link to core competencies required of them to carry out their role?

The options around mediation as a skill set for people in the organization are quite wide including: ■ ■ ■ ■

Building in mediation skills to existing training programmes Separate modules in mediation skills for relevant staff members Training a speciﬁc number of people in more depth to become workplace mediators A combination of mediation skills training and working alongside skilled mediators in other organizations.

A case study on the use of mediation in an NHS Trust can be found in the second section of this book. Organizations and other resources on this topic can be found at the end of the book.

Summary The skills of mediation and facilitation can be hugely useful to develop in organizations as a way of helping to head off potential conﬂict and as a way of managing conﬂicts constructively once they arise. With more recently introduced legislation, there is an increased responsibility on employers for managing conﬂicts locally prior to tribunals. Many conﬂicts at work arise out of an inability or unwillingness of the people involved to listen and really hear other 124

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people’s points of view. These more facilitative approaches offer a way of surfacing differences quickly and cost effectively; heightening people’s understanding of what contributes to conﬂict; and developing skills in resolving conﬂicts more effectively if they occur in the future. When applied to teams and multiple party issues, mediation offers a framework for getting all the views heard and a greater likelihood of reaching an outcome that serves the diverse needs of different stakeholders. Organizations that want to develop these skills have a range of choices available to them including sessions to train the skills integrated into existing management development programmes, short modular programmes on mediation and facilitation skills and more in-depth training for in-house mediators and facilitators. As with any of the approaches we outline in this book, no one approach or method is necessarily the panacea for agreed outcomes where diverse interests are involved. Rather, a considered approach, taking into account the nature of the differences, the background and context and the scope for meeting varied interests against the backdrop of the needs of the business, will give you greater choice and potential for moving things forward.

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7 Learning Through Change Our focus in this chapter is on how individuals and the organization as a whole can learn through change, creating a culture of learning. We will see how change, conﬂict and learning are interconnected processes. As a start, it is worth asking yourself how much learning, as a business process, is integrated with change and conﬂict processes in your organization. Any disruption in a system offers us tremendous potential for growth, new understanding and development, yet we are often so caught up with the action of any change, the tasks to be done, that we, collectively and individually, can sometimes pay scant attention to learning about how we are doing what we are doing. We have the opportunity, for example to ask ourselves: ■ ■ ■

How have people been experiencing the change? What is contributing to people’s experience (either positively or negatively)? What are we learning as an organization about ourselves and how we handle/ manage change?

Certain methodologies can really help encourage a more reﬂective stance on not just ‘what’ is being changed but also ‘how’ things are transforming. If we accept that change is not just a mechanistic process but rather a transition that people experience with all the emotions and potential baggage that comes with that, then attention needs to be paid at multiple levels. There is an opportunity here to open up new possibilities and new ideas for how the organization can work, as well as forging new relationships and constructing a belief in the organization and its capacity to adapt and ﬂourish. We have worked with HR departments which are highly effective at reﬂecting on the change process after procedures have been completed, and working with managers to identify improvements for the future. What is perhaps even more challenging is to ﬁnd the time and energy to look at these issues to a degree of depth while we are in the midst of change. As change becomes simply a part of the day to day, with often no noticeable ‘end’ point, the challenge is to keep learning as we go along.

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In practical terms, we need to understand how we can manage change better, how we can avoid making the same mistakes, how we can learn from what works and how we can move on from change and conﬂict. This chapter will address the following questions: ■ ■ ■ ■

What is the nature of the relationship between change, conﬂict and learning? How do we create a learning culture for the organization? How can we enable individuals to learn effectively through change and conﬂict? What are some practical steps that can be taken to support learning through change?

Change, conﬂict and learning Change, conﬂict and learning are interconnected processes. Understanding this is a valuable tool in approaching conﬂict positively and creating a learning environment. We have already explored the nature of change and conﬂict in previous chapters. Here we will ﬁrst look at ways of understanding individual and organizational learning, before reviewing the links between change, conﬂict and learning.

How do we learn? Learning is by no means a straightforward area to understand. Even within the ﬁeld of psychology, where a great deal of study on learning has taken place, there are clear differences in perspectives. The classic approaches, each with their advantages and limitations, are as follows: ■

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Behaviourist approaches which work on the basis of stimulus and response: people will adapt if the reward or punishment is sufﬁcient. Learning here takes place only in behavioural terms, in what a person says or does, rather than in what they privately believe or feel. Some approaches to organizational change take this perspective, working on the principle that, by changing processes and structures and providing incentives (or negative consequences), people will adapt and change, learning the new behaviours needed. Conﬂict can also be managed in this way, where we learn to behave in different ways to get a different outcome without addressing the issue at a deeper level. Cognitive approaches work at the level of how we think: the focus here is on problem solving and analysis as a route to learning. For example, we might learn to become better at conﬂict resolution by understanding more of the theory behind why conﬂict happens, or by working out why a certain person may 127

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behave in a certain way. Many aspects of change work on this level, where discussions are held on an intellectual level to enable people to understand and work with the change, cognitively learning new approaches in the process. Humanist approaches work on the basis of who people are, how they see themselves in relation to their work or life. Learning to deal more effectively with conﬂict here might involve an individual understanding more deeply why conﬂict is particularly uncomfortable for them and developing their belief in themselves to respond to it positively. Through change, people may be encouraged to examine their personal values and consider how they ﬁt with those of the organization, how they feel about the changes and how they can maximize their own growth through the process.

These approaches are commonly used in organizations and can integrate well as a way of addressing different types of learning needs and different audiences. The example below shows three approaches to the same learning event; in this case a lack of communication meant that the different assumptions about learning were not discussed and differences in approach led to confusion and conﬂict. A leadership development programme ran into difﬁculty. Among the reasons, were the underlying differences in beliefs about learning between three of the stakeholders of the programme, who held very different views and preferences for how learning could take place. The HR manager was very focused on delivering speciﬁc behaviour change amongst a group of managers. A list of competences and behaviours had been agreed as part of the change programme and she wanted a consultant to design a training programme to deliver changes in behaviour. She anticipated a programme where managers would be taught ways for dealing with people, with tools, techniques, practice and feedback. On return to work, people would be assessed on behaviours and this would form part of their competence-based pay. Her perspective on learning was behaviourist. The trainer designing the programme, understood the need for behaviour change. From talking to the potential participants, his belief was that they needed to raise their levels of self-awareness and identify for themselves where they would need to change behaviours. In order to be more people focused, they would need to decide the extent to which they valued others at work. This was about who they were, not just what they did. The plan was to teach skills, at the same time as encouraging personal reﬂection. The trainer’s primary focus to learning was humanist. The participants’ previous experience of training events had been academically focused. They were used to and enjoyed debate and discussion, 128

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with high levels of intellectual stimulation. They resisted approaches which focused on practice, experiential learning or personal growth. The participants’ perspective on learning was cognitive. These differences of opinion emerged forcefully in the ﬁrst module. The HR manager, attending in an observation role was unhappy with the amount of discussions taking place about theories. The trainer was working hard to enable the participants to ﬁnd ways, both intellectually and emotionally, to relate to the needed changes in behaviour. Discussion after the event led to a redesigned programme which more successfully and more openly merged the three approaches to learning. An essential aspect of working with learning in organizations is to perceive it as part of everyday experience, rather than something contained within certain learning events. Perhaps the most widely known individual model of learning is that of David Kolb (1984), who identiﬁed how individuals learn from experience. He described a dynamic process that occurs between: ■ ■

‘prehension’, that is ‘grasping or taking hold of experience in the world’ and ‘transformation’, that is doing something with that experience.

He tells us that we can experience the world either through action or through internal understanding. We can then change our relationship with that experience either through doing something with it externally, or through internal reﬂection. The model is often drawn as a cycle, moving from: ■ ■ ■ ■

experience to reﬂection on the experience, to forming a theory about what has happened, to planning for change, ﬁnally returning back to experience.

Our experience of working with managers from all types of organizations highlights the organizational pressures working against taking space to reﬂect or to understand an experience. Having said that, time is not necessarily the issue here, perhaps discipline is: a few moments of reﬂection, can, for example, save the time and cost of repeating a mistake. This relates to even relatively ‘low’ levels of learning, for example, how to solve a simple problem. The need is even greater when it comes to the kind of learning that can support more signiﬁcant personal change, where a deeper level of reﬂection, often called critical reﬂection, is required. In this type of learning: The learner must reﬂect on the very assumptions that support his or her beliefs about and perspectives of the world. This reﬂection leads to a fundamental change in the learner’s mental models, which is then integrated into 129

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his or her life, producing change that is not only recognized by the learner but also by those with whom the learner interacts. (Henderson, 2002) This reﬂection can take place at an organizational level, with, for example, teams engaging in dialogue processes (see later in this chapter). It is important to note that the expression ‘critical reﬂection’ does not mean simply to look for fault or to be critical of others. It means carefully to examine, to critique ourselves and our beliefs. We shall return later to critical reﬂection, which is considered by some to be the essential foundation for transformational change in organizations. While attention to individual learning processes in organizations is important, there is increasing recognition of the social dimension of learning. This is more than just a case of learning better with others. Learning itself is arguably a process that relies on relationships: ‘learning in short, takes place among and through people’ (Gherardi and Nicolini, 1998). As we interact, we create meaning and we, therefore, learn about the world around us and our place within it. An example of this comes from the work of Lave and Wenger (1991), whose book in the early 1990s created a wave of interest in communities of practice. They studied communities to understand how learning was transferred between new members of an organization (or craft/profession) and those with experience. The process they argue is a combination of individual learning and social processes of integration. Newcomers are, to begin with, on the periphery of the organization; as they interact with the more experienced members, they learn the language (or jargon) and approaches which enable them to be taken in and accepted into the organization. At the same time, they will make changes to the organization’s way of working and, consequently, the organization itself learns through this social process. In his description of how famous jazz performers have learnt their craft, Frank Barrett refers to ‘provocative learning relationships’ (Barrett, 2006) where individuals take risks, make mistakes and together integrate new ways of playing. Part of the social construction of learning is also how we deﬁne ourselves, and each other (Holzman, 2006). For example, you may often hear people say something like, ‘I can’t do that, that’s not who I am’. We often see ourselves as relatively ‘ﬁxed’, as a certain type within a psychometric framework, or a certain kind of person. It is also, however, not uncommon to learn that people can be very different with their families outside of work, for example, the manager who is aggressive and dominant at work, but passive and easy going at home. There is an opportunity, therefore, to consider other identities for ourselves, in relation to others, and to allow that other people, are not necessarily as ‘ﬁxed’ as we may think. Who we are, from a social construction viewpoint, is a result of who we are with, and how we relate to ourselves and others in different situations, rather than ﬁxed objects like machines, who learn by adding skills or behaviours like new hardware. This gives 130

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us creative possibilities for learning, in that we are capable of a great deal more than our conﬁned views of ourselves individually or collectively often allow. Joe was working with a coach to improve his relationship with his team members. As part of the process, he held discussions with his team to ask them to tell him how they experienced him, including what they enjoyed about working with him. He was surprised at the positive qualities they saw in him and discussed with his coach how this had given him a different view of himself and how he could be when he was with other people. One of his learning goals became to bring more of this identity to work. The goal was agreed with the team, so that they could also encourage him to bring more of his positive nature to meetings. A critical question for organizations over the years has become whether or not the organization as a whole can learn. In order to adapt and change and stay ahead, learning becomes the business critical process. Is it actually possible to develop processes whereby the whole organization can learn? Some of the responses to this question are very systematic, relying on data, feedback and decision-making processes to leverage the knowledge resident within the organization. Related to this are knowledge management systems, where individuals are encouraged to capture and share learning. The more interactive the IT processes get for this, the more positive the result is said to be. The danger, however, is that knowledge, or ‘know-how’ gets mistaken for the wisdom to understand the consequences of using that knowledge (Ackoff, 1999). Processes can be developed which encourage all within the organization to work within a way that enables the organization continually to learn and improve. One example of this is Toyota, where managers are rigorously trained in the kaizen (continuous improvement) approach. Individuals within teams are encouraged to ﬂag problems and issues, and to join with colleagues methodically to question what is happening in the situation and ﬁnd a solution for all to implement. By deﬁnition, transformational change, as we saw in Chapter 2, demands a deeper level of learning. Argyris and Schon (1978) looked at both individual learning and transformational change as part of the same process, where the organization learns because individuals learn. They identiﬁed three types of learning: ■ ■

Single-loop learning, where a problem is resolved, but the existing assumptions remain in place. This would sufﬁce for transactional change. Double-loop learning, which looks at underlying causes and seeks to understand why a problem exists in the ﬁrst place. It involves critical reﬂection and 131

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creative thinking, looking for new approaches, challenging assumptions and using different principles to create transformational change. Deutero-learning, which works at an even more signiﬁcant level of learning by reviewing the process of learning itself.

The answer to many organizational challenges in relation to change should, therefore, be straightforward. We ‘simply’ need to encourage transformational learning, where people critically reﬂect on what they are doing and how they are doing it, looking for alternative mindsets and approaches to solve problems and maximize opportunities in different ways. While much academic research points in this direction, clearly, in practice, the challenges are great, otherwise working with change would not be so problematic. In practice: ■

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Double-loop learning asks a lot of us as individuals: to have the courage to question ourselves, to be prepared to challenge the understanding and knowing that we have built up over years of experience, and accept that everything can be open to question. This can be uncomfortable and unsettling. Double-loop learning challenges managerial wishes for control and order. By questioning at deep levels, the level of unpredictability increases, yet so do the opportunities for growth and change, both at an individual and organizational level.

Issues of power and politics are integral to organizational and individual learning. Passionate learners and creatives can often become frustrated by the blocks put in the way of a ‘good idea’ when they do not realize how much of what is acceptable within an organization is based not on rational progress, but on individual needs, fears, insecurities, agendas, whims, ambitions, dreams, that is, based on the choices and behaviour of human beings in uncertain situations. Again, Argyris (1994) highlights some examples of how this works. He notes how many methods apparently designed to enable managers to understand more about what is happening in an organization and to have effective two-way communication with staff, actually avoid any chance of double-loop learning. Engagement surveys, for example, ask employees to provide information about how things are, but do not ask them to consider why things are the way they are, or to think more deeply about their own role and responsibility to ﬁnd meaningful solutions. Management by walking around tends to seek to present a positive image of the managers and staff, rather than to ask the questions that would enable people at all levels to reﬂect on what is happening in the organization. There is most often a code of politeness that avoids making anyone at any level uncomfortable in these situations, let alone risk real differences of opinion. Conversations need to break through this barrier in order to create deeper learning and change. 132

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Developing a learning culture for change, therefore, involves, in some way, creating spaces where people can engage in double-loop learning. While this is certainly possible to do on learning events, ﬁnding opportunities in everyday practice is perhaps one of the most powerful approaches to create. We will look at speciﬁc approaches for this later in this chapter.

Learning and change As we have seen already, learning is directly related to change in organizations. According to some writers, as individuals learn, so does the organization. Other approaches to change make assumptions that individuals will learn in response to the changes. There is an argument that this approach creates compliance, whereas enabling individuals to make their own sense of changes, to reﬂect critically on themselves in relation to the changes has more chance of creating commitment (Henderson, 2002). It is also possible, however, that it will lead to other decisions, such as increased resistance, or leaving the organization. Critical reﬂection is potentially liberating and the agenda and direction of learning is unpredictable. Is it possible to learn without it resulting in change? The answer to this is yes, if we think of change as being only that which is observable. I may, for example, decide, after a process of learning, that I will not change what I am doing. Internally, however, there may be levels of change that I am only partly conscious of. We often have a problem in organizations with these more subtle varieties of learning. Most often, we are looking for some kind of action, or evidence of change as a result, even if it is greater conﬁdence from deciding that my communication skills are ﬁne as they are. While we need to be careful to not become hostages to our need for action and deliverables, we do generally need investment in learning to make some kind of practical difference. Conversely, is it possible to change without learning? Do we have to go through learning in order to create changes, for ourselves as individuals, or for the organization? We can certainly adapt to situations, without learning. I can, for example, change my work patterns in compliance with my own changing needs, or at the instigation of someone else. In order to make the change sustainable, however, I am likely to need to learn something to make that happen.

Learning and conﬂict Tension, or conﬂict, can be said to be an intrinsic part of the learning process, particularly in relation to transformational learning, but also in relation to ‘lower order’ learning. We relate to events, or triggers, that present a difference from our own understanding or approach. The trigger, mild or powerful, then creates the tension that inspires learning. As we have noted in previous chapters, intrapersonal 133

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and interpersonal conﬂict create stimuli for learning. Similarly, for organizations, learning can be seen as an ongoing process of adaption to the tensions the organization experiences within its environment. The avoidance of conﬂict can be a signiﬁcant barrier to organizational learning, particularly to more signiﬁcant double-loop learning. As we have seen, we all have ‘defensive routines’ (Argyris, 1994) which can disrupt the possibilities for us to be open to challenging questions and thought. Strength based approaches to learning, which encourage individuals or organizations to amplify the positive can also be tension creating in that they ask us to move on from old positions and ways of being. Conﬂict and tension in learning, therefore, plays a role in many different ways. Finally, how we view conﬂict affects the degree to which we are open to learning from it. Rothman and Friedman (2001) suggest that we can view conﬂict through three different ‘frames’, each of which offers a different type of learning: ■

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Conﬂict over resources: conﬂict here is about competition over tangible objects (e.g. money). The focus is on ﬁnding a solution which is adequate for both parties, or it may be that there are winners and losers. The potential for learning is limited, since we are simply likely to appease, or resolve the situation in the short term, rather than understand at a deeper level what has occurred. An example would be where industrial action takes place, with managers and unions arguing via the media about who is right and wrong. In private, negotiations take place over the pay agreement, but there may be no discussion of how the situation has become so problematic. Conﬂict over interests: this frame offers the opportunity to understand the interests and positions behind the demands of those we are in conﬂict with. Rothman and Friedman relate this to single-loop learning, where the problem is resolved for the immediate situation. An example would be where a team is in conﬂict following a restructure. By listening to different interests and needs, the team is able to understand ways to compromise and move beyond simply reacting to each other’s behaviour. The drawback of this approach is that, sometimes, solutions are not possible to ﬁnd and the underlying causes or differences may not be surfaced. (Although, as we saw in the previous chapter, some forms of mediation do take a more transformational approach to uncovering interests, surfacing and working with differences.) Conﬂict over identity: this frame sees conﬂict in the light of differences over how individuals or groups perceive themselves, the meaning they attach to their situation, who they are, rather than what they want. Taking this approach to conﬂict is equated to double-loop learning where individuals and groups are asked to engage with conﬂict, rather than to resolve it, to live with difference and disagreement, rather than trying to ﬁnd solutions. By not trying to solve conﬂict

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as a problem, individuals can become open to the deeper levels of learning it provides, about themselves, about others, about difference, about relationships and so on. Many of the approaches covered in the remainder of this chapter can be used to encourage taking this frame on learning from conﬂict.

Developing a learning culture Much has been written about creating learning cultures in the last 15 to 20 years. Here, we offer suggestions from our experience and perspectives on organizations. Integrating learning, change and conﬂict

As we suggested previously, we see learning, change and conﬂict as interrelated processes (Figure 7.1). From the exploration of learning above, we suggest ﬁve elements which can unify the processes and, therefore, are valuable ingredients to incorporate into strategies for learning: ■

Critical reﬂection: where individuals and groups reﬂect not just on their behaviour, but on their assumptions about themselves and the world around them

Change

Critical reflection Difference Social construction Action Emergence

Conflict

Learning

Figure 7.1 Integrating learning, change and conﬂict

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Difference: a stimulus of some kind is needed for learning; this can be tension, conﬂict, different opinions, different environments, cultures and so on Social construction: recognizing that learning is a social activity, that we need each other to learn and that we make sense of the world together Action: recognizing a need for learning to be useful in some way Emergence: embracing the emergent nature of learning, whatever goals and plans we use as aids along the way and recognizing that the best learning is often unpredictable.

All of the approaches that we look at in the remainder of this chapter use these ingredients.

Focus on intention

If senior managers, HR and line managers have the intention to learn with their colleagues at all levels, then processes and approaches are more likely to be built with learning as an outcome. If the intention conversely is on control, measurement and compliance, then processes and learning interventions will develop to mirror that intent. In particular, the more decisions are made after critical reﬂection the more learning oriented the organization becomes.

Educate individuals and the organization about learning as a business process

In the changing complex world we live in, the learning agenda itself is evershifting: one day I need to be conﬁdent in managing relationships with customers, the next I am on a change project, working with colleagues to discover how to develop a strategy for our products, at the same time as living with the uncertainty of whether or not I will have a job at the end of it. The art of learning itself and the ability to handle ourselves through ongoing change becomes fundamental. There is a tendency within HR at times to focus on deliverables, such as training events, rather than the learning process, encouraging selfdirected learning and discussions within the organization about how learning is working.

Recognize the depth of learning that may be needed

The ability for people to recognize the extent of the learning challenge that may be present for them can prove a great boost in speeding up the process of learning. We often use the ‘Logical Levels’ model from the world of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) to highlight this issue for our clients (Dilts/Bateson 136

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in Knight, 2002). For example, the learning processes that an individual works through while developing as a leader could look something like this: At the intrapersonal level: ■

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Self-identity: do I perceive myself to be a leader? As a child others were called ‘natural leaders’, but I wasn’t, I preferred to observe than tell people what to do. At work, I don’t have formal leadership responsibilities so I have not considered myself one there. I am being asked to rethink this and this is causing internal conﬂict for me. Values and beliefs: I believe that people can take responsibility for themselves and it’s not for me to try to direct things. Leadership, when I think about it, isn’t a word I trust, it makes me think of authoritarian approaches and I don’t believe in that. It seems to be about having a bit of an ego, and that’s not me. I believe my best way of contributing to this organization is through the knowledge I bring. How do I reconcile that with being on a leadership programme? At the interpersonal level:

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Skills and capabilities – I’m a good listener and I can clearly explain complicated technical points. I involve people in generating ideas at team meetings. I am organized and always deliver. I feel less competent to deal with feelings. Behaviours – I have a fairly inscrutable expression that people mistake for disinterest; except when I am angry and then I go red and raise my voice. Feedback from colleagues has shown that they ﬁnd me intimidating, which shocks me. I would like to be more sensitive to people, but I don’t know how. At the extrapersonal level:

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Environment – I have a great deal of knowledge about my technical area, but know less about what is going on in other areas of the organization, or what some of the issues are facing us at a more strategic level. We keep being told to be better leaders, but the reasoning behind this is unclear to me. Every time we have another change programme, we have another group of consultants developing our leadership skills, which is confusing. I need more understanding of what is going on around here.

Congruence between these levels is an essential part of the process, whether that is for an individual, a team or an organization. On a practical level pay attention to the following: ■

Discuss the extent of the challenge of change for individuals and groups in different areas. 137

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Has the extent of the challenge of change been underestimated? Do we need to learn to be better at what we currently do, or do we need to make a fundamental shift in how we act or think about what we do? Are people able to access support at the appropriate level for their learning needs, for example, tools/skills, self-awareness, depth of critical reﬂection, environmental data?

Working with values and beliefs

Many change programmes set out to establish new values for the organization, or perhaps to bring renewed life to existing ones. Often this then leads to the need for individuals and groups to examine their own values and beliefs. It needs to be remembered that this is one choice when it comes to working with culture. Some change methods very purposefully steer clear of values and beliefs (see for example Future Search from Weisbord and Janoff 2000, covered in the following chapter). When we consider learning new values and challenging or reinforcing beliefs we need to be aware of the following: ■

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Values are created through discussion and interaction and have meaning in connection with relationships and experience. We learn about them through social interaction. Senior managers often have the beneﬁt of discussions around strategic values; the wise ones understand that it is ongoing discussions, not a glossy printed sheet of the outcome, that will enable others to also attach meaning to those values. Individuals will still make choices about whether the organization’s values are ones that they feel they can adopt, commit to, live with, ignore or campaign against. Individual reﬂection on current values and beliefs can open new doors in terms of developing skills and new behaviours, but the exact outcome of this learning is not predictable. You cannot teach or persuade people to learn and adopt a new set of values. In fact, the attempt is often a source of conﬂict somewhere in the organizational system. You can, however, stimulate, provoke, challenge, inspire, coach, facilitate and counsel them to ﬁnd their own way to make sense of the values they hold in relation to those espoused and used in practice around them. And ﬁnally, the judgement for us about whether an individual or group needs to ‘relearn’ values is about effectiveness. Is the person achieving what is required in a manner which is acceptable (i.e. within the framework of the legal and moral responsibilities of the organization) and which is ‘working’? They may not ‘live’ the organization’s current values, but what do they bring to the whole?

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A senior manager we worked with was an expert in his ﬁeld; people worked for him because he was (and still is) inspiring. He did not, however, follow the rules; in fact, part of his brilliance was his ability to be adaptive and create tailor-made propositions for clients. In terms of leadership style, he was directive, although he would enjoy debates and discussion with his staff as a way of coming up with ideas and innovations. He had little regard for corporate HR policy per se, but a very strong sense of ethics and loyalty to people he knew would do a good job, whether within his own department or elsewhere. He promoted people who, within the rest of the culture, may easily have been overlooked. In essence, this leader created a culture that was pertinent and appropriate to his business and his people, and it worked, highly successfully. Attempts to bring him into line with a wider corporate culture made little sense: his predominant values were about his people and his clients, with much less time and energy for Head Ofﬁce initiatives to bring in, for example, stricter performance management controls, or competency frameworks emphasizing involvement and ritualized team brieﬁngs. Those working around him had the sense to honour the values he held, rather than attempting to change him into a more ‘corporately minded’ individual for the sake of it.

Take a complexity perspective on a learning culture

In recent research into learning and complexity, Sharon Varney (2007) suggests an approach which considers ‘local interaction instead of experts, emergence rather than planning and control and spontaneous self-organization as being the source of new patterns and deep changes’. The box below provides two contrasting examples of a learning event, by way of illustration of the differences this approach might involve.

Learning event A A group of managers were told that they were to attend a leadership development programme in support of the new change initiative the chief executive was leading. Attendance was compulsory and individuals were to clear space in their diaries to attend. The programme was led by an expert on change and leadership who provided stimulating lectures about the subject, with an opportunity for questions and some discussion about how the theories applied to their organization and roles. Managers were asked to draw up 139

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action plans as a result of the programme identifying what they would do differently and agree these with their line managers.

Learning event B When discussing the changes taking place in their organization, a group of managers realized that they needed more opportunity to learn from each other about how to make the changes stick. Their HR business partner suggested an event that would enable managers to discuss issues relevant to the changes, with some input by an expert where they considered it would be useful. Individuals attended voluntarily and established an agenda for the day that would give them some useful insights into new approaches to change as well as time for discussion of key managerial issues important to them in relation to change. Discussions continued after the event and changes were both planned for and emerged in response to situations that arose.

Varney (2007) suggests paying attention to the conditions for learning, speciﬁcally: 1. Space: ■ What is happening in the organizational context, what is important to people, what are they talking about? ■ What containers for learning are there, where people have the opportunity to explore and reﬂect (e.g. a learning event, time with a colleague, a room for thinking in) ■ What opportunity do people have for making connections with others with different views and experiences to increase their learning. 2. Stimulus: ■ What catalysts for learning are available? People need something ‘different’ to the norm to get their attention, to help them see things differently. ■ How can people be enabled to focus learning on the content that matters most to them, so that they work on what is real and important for them? 3. Self: ■ How can conﬁdence be supported so that people can manage their anxiety in relation to change and uncertainty? The remainder of this chapter will look at speciﬁc approaches that can be used to encourage learning, in everyday situations and as learning interventions or events. 140

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Learning interventions Learning through conversation To be adaptable and ﬂexible, organizations need to make the most out of the times when people are together, to heighten individual and collective abilities to think clearly, rather than just react. In this way, people can be more open to the process of change and understand differences and potential conﬂict. Opportunities for deeper reﬂection are required, in order to ﬁnd ways to achieve transformational change. The way that conversations are used can be instrumental in achieving this. A thinking environment

One powerful tool focuses on how to maximize peoples’ abilities to think and thereby bringing learning and listening to difference to the heart of conversations. Nancy Kline (1998), in her book Time to Think: listening to ignite the human mind, outlines a framework to get the most from interactions and communications, based on 10 components of a thinking environment. These are: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Attention – paying quality attention and truly listening Equality – everyone has their turn Ease – rather than ‘urgency’, letting go of being task-driven Appreciation – giving ﬁve times as much praise as criticism Encouragement – rather than competition Feelings – expressing and listening to the intelligence inherent in emotions Information – appropriate information, given at the appropriate time Diversity – being real about the diversity within groups rather than pretending homogeneity Incisive questions – to ‘remove limiting assumptions’ Place – a physical setting that says ‘you matter’ to people. The quality of everything human beings do depends on the thinking we do ﬁrst. Creating a Thinking Environment, therefore, is the ﬁrst responsibility of leadership. Every subsequent act gains quality from there. (Kline, 1998) The principles of a thinking environment can be applied in a number of ways:

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meeting with a colleague on a regular basis as part of personal development and handling change in team building situations: the executive team of a Primary Care Trust for example, used a short version of the process at the beginning and end of certain 141

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meetings as a way of focusing time and attention on each other, their thinking and the task in hand more effectively. Nancy’s website (www.timetothink.com) includes a useful online questionnaire that assesses the degree to which you are creating a thinking environment in your work and life. Dialogue

Many conversations are characterized by ‘discussion’. Dialogue offers an alternative. Table 7.1 uses the work of David Bohm (1996) and William Isaacs (1999) to highlight the differences. Dialogue … is about a shared inquiry, a way of thinking and reﬂecting together. It is not something you do to another person. It is something you do with people. Indeed, a large part of learning this has to do with learning to shift your attitudes about relationships with others, so that we gradually give up the effort to make them understand us, and come to a greater understanding of ourselves and each other. (Isaacs, 1999) Table 7.1 Difference between discussion and dialogue

Discussion

Dialogue

David Bohm (1996)

The root meaning is ‘to break This literally means ‘through the things up’ meaning of the word’, that is, ‘a The object of a discussion is stream of meaning ﬂowing among to win; people ‘score points and through us and between us’ with ideas’ There are no winners and losers as The focus is on analysis such, rather, all win as all participate There are ‘non-negotiables and The conversation is ‘deeply serious’, untouchables’ in the discussion, all areas are explored. places where everyone knows the conversation cannot go.

William Isaacs (1999)

Focuses on: decisions, closure, completion

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Opens up possibilities, options and choices ‘Evoking insight’ ‘Reordering knowledge’ ﬁnding other ways to understand and to question ‘the taken for granted assumptions’ ‘implies that you no longer take your own position as ﬁnal’.

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Dialogue is really aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively. (Bohm, 1996) Isaacs outlines the basic elements of a dialogue session (Senge et al., 1994) as: ■ ■ ■ ■

Invitation: people have a choice whether or not to join in Generative listening: listening deeply for what is said, not said, what is underneath the words, the feeling, listening to who the person is Observe the observer: observe yourself and the team, pay attention to all that is around Suspending assumptions: assumptions need to be ‘surfaced’, ‘displayed’ and then ‘inquired’ into.

Dialogue can be used as a ‘tool’ on a team event or meeting for example, or it can be a way of having a conversation more informally. This latter use is even more powerful than simply waiting for the next team event to be able to talk in a different way. Moments here and there of conversations with a different ﬂavour can add immeasurably to a group or organization’s learning. The spirit of dialogue is also a key part of many current approaches to working with change, such as Appreciative Inquiry, Future Search and Open Space (see the next chapter for further information on these). Ultimately, the difference between a dialogue and a discussion needs to be experienced to be understood. The pace, tone, feel and experience of dialogue is substantially different to a discussion. For those used to decisive conversations, dialogue can feel ponderous and uncomfortable. For others, dialogue has a sense of ‘coming home’, a refreshing change to the usual debate and discussion. You may ﬁnd it helpful to ask yourselves the following question to check whether you are experiencing discussion or dialogue: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

How important does it seem to be to impress others in this discussion, with answers or knowledge and so on? How important does it feel to be ‘right’? How understood do I feel? How much do I think people are listening to me? How much am I really listening to others, both what they are saying and how they are saying it? How much are we being deﬁnitive and decisive in our statements, rather than open and curious? What is the pace of this conversation? Is it fast and action oriented or is it more exploratory? How much am I listening to myself and what I am thinking? How aware am I of how I am feeling and am I sharing that? 143

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How much are we questioning our assumptions? Or are we assuming that how we see everything is probably right? What reaction do I get when I say something like, ‘I’m wondering why we are having this conversation’ or ‘what would happen if we suspended our assumptions about that?’

Although the style of a dialogue may seem slower (it is not ‘action-oriented’), the quality of thinking can be substantially better and, therefore, decisions that emerge and certainly the learning acquired along the way may be of higher quality. We are not saying, however, that dialogue is better than debate, or vice versa, rather that each have their qualities and the use of one (usually discussion) at the continual expense of the other is itself limiting (Hosking and McNamee, 2006).

Coaching In Chapter 5, we touched on coaching as a way of supporting others with conﬂict, here we pay attention to coaching in a little more depth. As a learning approach, coaching is becoming increasingly popular. This is not surprising: we work in organizations of high stress, fast pace and heavy workloads. Communication is becoming ever more ‘virtual’ as we rely more and more on e-mail, blackberries, teleconferences, hot-desking, working from home and so on. In the midst of all that, we somewhere need the support, challenge and space for interaction with someone who has the time and the skill to focus on an individual’s learning needs. In times of change, uncertainty and conﬂict, the value of coaching is perhaps immeasurable. Although there are different forms of coaching, they are all different forms of conversation, enabling reﬂection and learning in relation to change and/or conﬂict. By coaching we mean: ■ ■

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a conversation between two people focused on performance and learning ‘the process relies on collaboration and is based on three components: technical help, personal support, and individual challenge … held together by an emotional bond between the … coach and the … coachee. Because coaching is a person-to-person experience, this sort of bond must be present – and it must be positive if coaching is to succeed.’ (Harvard Business School Press, 2004) An exchange where the coachee is enabled to learn and resolve issues for themselves; the coach may point out options, but sense making and decisions for action lie with the coachee.

There are at least four different types of coaching pertinent to change and conﬂict situations each with their beneﬁts and drawbacks. 144

Learning Through Change 1. Line manager coaching ■

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Involves: use of coaching skills by line managers to support, challenge and develop staff. Can be done during a meeting, for example at quarterly reviews, or can involve 5-minute conversations where the manager enables the individual to reﬂect and decide on a course of action. Beneﬁts: highly effective in terms of on-the-spot learning, improving job performance, adapting to change and building effective working relationships; effective coaching can save time in the long run because it increasingly enables individuals to ﬁnd their own solutions and saves repeated conversations for managers on the same issue. Can help resolve conﬂicts when used to look at how relationships operate rather than simply focus on outcomes and tasks. Skilful coaching by line managers can promote critical reﬂection and transformational change, especially when the manager is open to joining in with the reﬂection themselves. Drawbacks: investment required to develop the skills of managers to a point where coaching really pays dividends; crisis management in times of change (or on an ongoing basis where that becomes the norm) can lead managers to believe that they do not have the time to spend coaching staff: it takes a leap of faith for some managers to adopt and believe in the approach, as it appears quicker to tell people what to do. Tips: invest in skills development where needed, that focuses on ﬂexible styles, coachee-centred approaches, with plenty of opportunity for practice, review and feedback. Highlight coaching as a style of management as well as a skill that can be used both in moments by the coffee machine and as in more formal settings.

2. Peer coaching ■

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Involves: use of coaching skills between colleagues to help support each other and foster learning in a team or across teams. Usually informal, though some organizations set up speciﬁc ‘buddy’ systems for people who have attended the same training programme or for new starters. Also often part of a service offered from members of the HR department, whether on an informal or formal basis. Some managers use this actively as a way of providing learning opportunities for new staff. Could be more utilized in change situations to enable individuals to handle uncertainty and learn through change. Beneﬁts: again, very powerful in terms of developing the organization’s ability to learn quickly and respond to events; provides in-the-moment support; can develop relationships within teams and across units; can enable learning from differences and conﬂicts. 145

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■

Drawbacks: again, it makes sense to invest in people’s skills, but the same issue applies in terms of people’s perceptions of time, even though they are likely to be supporting each other informally anyhow. Can potentially lead people to embed opinions when peer support is restricted to teams in isolation of managers and other colleagues. Tips: take opportunities to identify and discuss how colleagues can support each other through change; role model skills through line managers; provide skills training as part of change programmes where appropriate.

3. Executive or external coaching ■

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Involves: external coaches are increasingly used at senior levels, providing a sounding board, technical expertise, personal growth, focus, or a ‘critical friend’. This has extended in many organizations to the use of coaches for managers at all levels in speciﬁc situations. Beneﬁts: providing the discipline of learning through change; an ‘objective’ view and feedback; personal insights and stretch in an environment where it is safe for a manager to talk freely. Depth of learning can be substantial. Enables individuals to step back from colleagues and reframe conﬂicts, tensions and relationships. Offers a different perspective from outside the organization. Some approaches involve the wider team and colleagues in goal setting, feedback and review to enable a more systemic approach to be taken to learning. Drawbacks: learning can occur in silos with individuals not sharing their learning or insights; cost; need to manage perceptions of why coaches are used: in some organizations assignment of a coach means that an individual is ‘failing’ in some way; sometimes used by line managers in avoidance of giving direct feedback to staff themselves; heavy organizational reliance on coaching may infer a lack of communication and ‘care’ within the organization. Tips: many organizations have developed a preferred supplier list so that there is some central coordination of who has coaches and for what purpose; make sure coaches do not work in isolation of what is going on in the organization and balance this with a clarity that coaches are there for individuals’ needs, not to reinforce organizational ‘messages’; ensure there is a good mix of styles and approaches and that all coaches have some form of supervision; in times of change, encouragement of learning between individuals becomes an even better use of the investment (some coaches use approaches which build this into their process of working with a client). Organizations sometimes offer internal coaches: be realistic about this, it is often tried but people rarely prefer this option if an external is available.

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Learning Through Change 4. Team Coaching ■

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Involves: a facilitator, or ideally, the team leader/manager in using coaching skills to enable a team to work and learn together. This can be done in any setting where the group or sections of the group are together. (Approaches to this are suggested in the next chapter.) Beneﬁts: from a learning point of view, the encouragement of learning as a way of working together is very powerful. The climate of the team can be created through the skills and attitude of the leader, with time spent together becoming more productive. In times of change and/or conﬂict, teams can learn to challenge their own assumptions and reﬂect on the work they do and how they do it. Drawbacks: similar issues to line coaching: costs involved in developing skills, and faith by the manager that any time taken on learning will have merit. Tips: develop the skills of line managers and individuals in team coaching; use facilitators when an external stimulus would be useful; work with managers on their beliefs around learning so that any team coaching is experienced as genuine.

A public sector organization was due to merge within 18 months with another organization. The training and development department wanted to provide a tranche of managers (who had previously not had access to coaching), with an intervention that would enable them to identify their own learning needs, provide better support to their teams and colleagues and be supported in their transition to the new organization. A team of consultants was selected from two different organizations, so that a variety of styles of coaching could be offered to participants in the programme. Each individual could select their own coach from a list suggested to them in relation to the needs identiﬁed. They then had 9 hours of coaching to use over a 6-month period in whatever way they chose. Line managers were involved at an early stage with the coach and participant to agree learning needs. Evaluation of the programme demonstrated that individuals were able to adapt better to change and found ways to support the change process in the organization more effectively.

Communities of practice We referred to communities of practice and the work of Lave and Wenger previously in this chapter. Their study of how people learned in social settings has inspired the adoption of ‘communities of practice’ as vehicles to promote organizational learning. Groups are encouraged to join together to share knowledge, practice, ideas and learning about arenas speciﬁc to their profession or the organization’s work. 147

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Examples of communities of practice include: ■ ■ ■

professional bodies, where learning is encouraged, for example, the CIPD network groups formed by people from different organizations to share learning, for example, an HR network speciﬁcally for people from the ﬁnancial services arena specialists from within an organization, spread across a matrix or global structure, for example, researchers in a pharmaceutical company.

The essence of a community of practice is that it works because people want to be there: they volunteer to attend or even to create the community. Meetings are relatively informal, with participants adopting working methods as relevant and useful for the group. Communities of practice can be encouraged and supported within organizations, but mandating attendance tends to work against the spirit of the community of learning and turns the event into simply another meeting. It is the self-determination, ﬂuidity and openness of the community which make it work. Wenger and Snyder (2000) advise that, ‘although communities of practice are fundamentally informal and self-organizing, they beneﬁt from cultivation. Like gardens, they respond to attention that respects their nature’. Speciﬁcally, they suggest: ■

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‘identifying potential communities’: it is likely that groups are already forming, or that there are natural collections of people who have a cause to get together. Being observant and paying attention to where natural groups are forming and listening to issues and concerns can enable HR or managers to see where communities of practice can emerge from ‘providing the infrastructure’: groups can then be given the means to meet, whether that means time, budget, location and so on ‘using non-traditional methods to measure value’: the value of a community of practice is in the conversation, the learning and the increased understanding that people gain. There are also examples of where groups have come up with great business ideas as well. Success cannot be measured through traditional goal setting and evaluation, it can, however, be understood through conversations with those involved, listening to what difference the community is making for them.

Networks within organizations are a powerful source of learning for people, whether or not they are labelled and cultivated as ‘communities of practice’. Individuals acquire knowledge and understanding about their profession or role, the wider organization and the external environment through connections with others. There are, of course, different kinds of networks, playing different roles in learning. Roan and Rooney (2006) identify three types: ■

support networks: these provide emotional support and enable conversations that go beyond the obvious, often generating more reﬂective forms of learning

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political networks: where organizational information and knowledge relevant to the job function is shared old boy networks: where access is limited, perspectives are simpliﬁed and learning, therefore, minimal.

From an HR and leadership perspective, it makes sense to encourage networking and provide opportunities for people to gather and share learning, ideas and information on different levels.

Master classes When time feels of the essence, managers often resist training programmes of any length, regardless of their quality and appropriateness. Another option, useful at any time, is to run shorter events, such as ‘Master classes’ or ‘Learning lunches’. The value of these and how they can be used is best outlined with an example. A ﬁnancial services company was facing demanding challenges in maintaining its market position. As part of this, they realized that they needed to sharpen their practice as leaders in a number of areas. They had succeeded for years due to hard work, long hours and a tight knit group of managers who had worked closely together. If they were to take on bigger challenges they would need to ﬁnd other ways of working, bringing along the next level of managers with them. The initial intention was to attend training programmes on speciﬁc areas of activity and learning, but it soon became evident that they would not be able to make the time for these programmes. Instead, they established a series of Master classes on business processes such as managing mergers, creativity and innovation, leadership and learning. These classes ran for 2 hours every 6 weeks or so. The invited audience were the senior management team, including the CEO and the next level of senior/middle managers. Anyone unable to attend could send a deputy from their team. Each session had a content expert and a facilitator, so that the information could be processed in group discussions. Over time, the discussions became longer, to the point where the ﬁnal Master class was primarily discussion. The sessions provided a burst of stimulation, an opportunity for thinking, and a forum for debate and discussion about issues from within a different perspective than would have happened in normal management meetings. Even though not everyone could attend every session, the Master classes created an ongoing discussion among a broad group of managers that fed into individual and collective learning and practice. At the same time, it opened up a space in which differences could be shared and tensions and anxieties within the organization explored. 149

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Learning sets One of the most powerful processes that we have used to further individual development through times of change is that of learning sets, which many organizations now use as an element of a broader development programme. Participants typically come from senior or middle management levels, as well as sometimes from high potential groups. These small groups of between four and six people will meet at regular intervals to support each other and the organization towards making changes on a personal, group and organizational level. The sets can meet for any number of sessions but usually work most effectively when there is a time-bound commitment on both the part of individuals within the groups and the organization overall. Individuals bring their own content to the meetings, often drawn from a personal learning contract agreed with the set and worked on by the individual over the course of the programme. Alternatively, individuals can work on issues that are most alive for them at the time of the meeting, for example, how to handle a particular individual during a change of structure, how to engage stakeholders across the organization in developing new approaches. In some forms of ‘action’ learning, the focus is on a speciﬁc project, agreed by a sponsor within the organization. The structure of the set is for individuals to have an allocated amount of time each during which they discuss the matter they wish to work on and receive support and challenge from their colleagues in the set, as well as their set advisor. Learning sets are particularly beneﬁcial in changing environments because: ■

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They allow for ﬂexibility in the ‘curriculum’ of the programme, since individuals direct their own learning with the support of their colleagues, consequently, as changes emerge, individuals have the freedom to work with their needs pertinent to the situation They create space for critical reﬂection, exploration, learning from different opinions and ideas, sharing information about changes and learning from a variety of experiences Individuals develop their coaching skills as they work together and enhance their ability to manage their own learning Sets are usually formed of individuals from across functions and learning is, therefore, shared across the organization and relationships are enhanced as a result. People discover how much they have in common, and learn, often to their surprise, as much from working on others’ issues as they do on their own.

The success of learning sets as a method for supporting organizational change is dependent on a number of factors: ■

Individual openness to the process and to learning from each other in this way, at least a willingness to ‘give it a go’

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Individuals having a degree of control or inﬂuence over the changes that are being implemented, otherwise the temptation is for the set to simply become a place to air frustrations Realistic expectations from the process on the part of both participants and sponsors. One organization for example, expected, rather ambitiously, that a group of high potentials would be able to change the organization’s culture as a result of the set process Line manager commitment to individuals taking time out of busy workplaces, usually 1 day every 6 weeks over 6 months Facilitative expertise on the part of the ‘set advisor’ to create an environment where the set can learn about themselves, their organization and how to work together effectively.

Because the experience in these learning sets often reﬂects a dynamic that is present in the organization, good facilitation can help surface some of the tensions and conﬂicts in a way which might not otherwise happen. In this way, the learning set helps to make a useful and legitimate avenue for people to express any conﬂict they experience through change. Skilful facilitation is required to allow the group sufﬁcient time to vent some of their frustrations before supporting them to move forward and work with conﬂict and change. Part of this process may be in highlighting what they have the ability to inﬂuence and what they might legitimately let go of.

Training and development programmes It is, of course, very common for a change programme to include, somewhere in the process, training and development for managers and often staff at all levels. This is an expensive and time hungry process which very often pays enormous dividends in terms of effecting change, in a way which enhances the organization’s culture and performance, as well as its current and future capacity for change. There are also, however, plenty of stories about how investing in training and development has missed the point, been an expensive waste of time and actually worsened the conﬂicts involved in terms of people’s degree of engagement with the process; all good reasons for thinking carefully about the position of training and development within the change agenda. In this section, we provide our ‘top tips’ for making the most of training development programmes to enable people to learn through change. 1. Focus on what people really need. Before assuming that training and development somehow holds the key to help us manage change more effectively we need to be clear what needs training can speciﬁcally help with. A discussion 151

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2.

3.

4.

5.

with employees most likely to be affected by the changes may be sufﬁcient to identify the likely skills or knowledge needed and then options around this can be given further consideration. Be careful about assumptions about ‘failing’ in change management. Training and development programmes are sometimes set up because there is a perception that people are not doing what is expected of them in the change process. For example, the assumption can be that individuals do not have the skills, or have the wrong attitude, or do not really understand how to manage change ‘properly’ and, therefore, need ‘ﬁxing’ in some way. There may, of course, be any number of aspects within the organizational system that are enabling or stiﬂing changes. We have worked with organizations where the communication process has been so negligible that people simply did not know what was being asked of them. In addition, change is not simply an individual process: attention needs to be paid to the whole system rather than ‘scapegoating’ individuals or levels of management. It is also expensive to assume that previous change programmes did not work because the ‘wrong’ training consultants were used and if we just get the ‘right’ ones the change will happen. We have worked with some individuals who have been sent on frequent leadership and change programmes as part of different organizational initiatives, but without corresponding attention to the other aspects of the system, little changes. Have realistic expectations. Training and development programmes are important and supportive of change, but not a panacea for all organizational needs in relation to it. Keep the programmes ﬁrmly part of a strategy for learning, rather than them being the whole strategy. Other processes need to be worked on to support individual and organizational readiness and adaptability, in fact, at some level, every process in the organization needs attention. It is very seductive, in a world where tangible delivery is prized highly, to set up an impressive development programme and believe that the ‘job is in hand’, both for HR people and managers alike. There is nothing more tempting in times of complexity and change to delegate something complicated, such as learning how to be better at change, to a deliverable and manageable series of events, but training and development is just one part of the process. Engage stakeholders. The more genuine ownership there is through the organization of a training and development programme related to change, the more chance it has of being useful to the organization’s purpose. If the process is a hard ‘sell’, is the organization really ready for the approach or is other work needed ﬁrst? Deﬁne leadership, but not too rigidly. Change programmes often result in a ‘leadership’ programme of some kind. This expression tends to be a ‘bucket’ label in that it includes so many aspects of behaviour. In some organizations, the leadership need is for more people to take initiative, in some it is for managers to

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empower staff and let go of control, in others more people are needed to consider the strategic picture of the organization. What is key for us is that there is an understanding of the type of leadership required in the organization, for the context that the individuals are in. While competency frameworks are helpful in this, we ﬁnd that by discussing and understanding leadership choices, managers and staff at all levels are able to make their own judgements about what is required; making this judgement is in itself the starting point of leadership. In a world where change happens so fast, it becomes problematic to try to deﬁne behaviour too rigidly. What we need are leaders able to focus on the overall objective and behave in ways that support the objective and the way that the organization can best work. 6. Work in partnership with external consultants. Costly as they can be, external consultants do provide the advantage of experience from a range of other organizations and expertise that may not be present in the organization. Some do’s and don’ts around using consultants are: ■ Balance using externals with tapping into and developing the internal talent already available ■ Build an ongoing partnership relationship with consultants: collaborate rather than abdicating or dictating. Consultants can sometimes be left to work on programmes in isolation, without the ongoing picture of the organization as a backdrop. They can sometimes be too revered and their approaches left unchallenged. Conversely, if you feel the need to tell them how to do their work, why have you hired them in the ﬁrst place? ■ Don’t rely on consultants to ring the changes rather than having effective communication internally ■ Discuss how consultants believe change can happen for individuals, teams and the organization and how this ﬁts or not with your organization’s perspective ■ Get knowledgeable about providers, what they offer and the principles they hold about change and learning. 7. The process is a powerful message. Pay careful attention to how people are involved in decisions about training and development programmes at times of change. We have seen conﬂict and uncertainty ﬂare up in situations where the situation could have been calmer had the groundwork been done more effectively. A particular ﬂashpoint is making attendance on a programme compulsory across a layer of management, which is often an approach in direct conﬂict with the statements of values and future ambitions of the organization. For example, ‘we need leaders who inspire and empower their staff ’ and therefore ‘you will attend a development programme on this date’ (i.e. ‘regardless of what you really need or think’). The reasons for doing this are understandable, but if the fear is that too many people will not attend otherwise, then there is higher 153

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priority work to do than delivering a training and development programme and there are other choices about providing the learning structures that people need. 8. Integrating learning back into the organization. It is important to ensure that leadership development programmes are supported within the organization, by senior managers, line managers, staff, in fact as wide a group as possible. This means more than a senior manager turning up and doing an evening speech. Managers making changes in how they lead need reinforcement of the importance of the changes and encouragement back at work to keep making the changes.

Summary Learning, change and conﬂict are interconnected processes, with learning providing the tools of transformation. This is particularly through critical reﬂection, at an individual level and even more powerfully as a collective and social process. In order to learn effectively through change, there is a need to trust and work with the emergent nature of learning, rather than simply planning for it. Conﬂict, tension and differences provide stimulus and opportunities for learning. A learning culture can be encouraged through identifying opportunities for learning at a number of different levels and through encouraging learning as an approach in all interactions. Finally, we have explored speciﬁc learning interventions that are effective in enabling people to learn through change and conﬂict: the thinking environment, dialogue, coaching, communities of practice, master classes, learning sets and, with caution, training events. In the next chapter, we will look at larger group processes, which also provide opportunities for organizational learning.

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8 Energizing the Organization

Introduction Change is exciting, unpredictable, enriching, full of growth and possibility; it is energizing. In some situations, yes, change brings difﬁculty and even tragedy. It can be fraught with conﬂict, outrage, anger, argument, disappointment, fear and loss. At the same time, it can offer us so much more. In every change, there is potential for growth. Yet, sometimes, we spend so much energy looking at the down side of change, that we miss the wonder of it. Our attitude towards change, and how we work together as a result to create change, is fundamental in creating, or limiting, our possibilities. If we stretch our resolve, our courage, our trust and our imaginations, the human mind and spirit is capable of incredible changes, changes that we could not even perhaps have dreamt of. It is what deﬁnes us as human beings. Consider examples from your own life that you have found exciting or useful. There are political examples (the end of Apartheid in South Africa), technological (being able to turn on a mobile phone and talk or e-mail or text across the world), personal (learning from successes and mistakes to become a better consultant) and many others. We need to be wary of the popularity of the belief that ‘change is painful’ because the more we believe that, the more true it becomes. One thing we do know about change is that it is full of the unpredictable. That gives us challenges as individuals and as organizations since we feel we need in some way to be able to deﬁne, control, measure, quantify, direct, focus what is achieved. We need to prove to ourselves or others that we can manage what happens and turn in the results expected. To accept that we cannot fully predict what may happen, despite our experience and intelligence, is one of the most challenging aspects of change within our modern organizations. It has been said that, metaphorically, we live in times of ‘permanent whitewater’ (Vaill, 1989), where the way ahead is full of the unpredictable, rather

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than the calm rivers we were used to in the past. The methods we use to navigate need to adapt. White-water rafts are at their best when there is a team of rafters, each able to take the initiative and quickly respond to whatever they are faced with. Each person needs to have a sense of direction and a view out of the boat, while communicating with their fellow rafters. It feels sometimes that we are still trying to navigate unpredictable waters on a rowing boat, with a cox shouting instructions in the belief that they can see the way ahead. Worse still, some organizations seem to have reverted to a slave galley, where most people are in the dark and a few important people crack whips and keep trying to look good on the top deck. The question we are really asking you to consider in this chapter is, what happens if we accept that we are not all knowing or all controlling, but need to ﬁnd ways to work with each other that enable us to navigate rapids and ﬁnd slip-streams? How can we enjoy the unpredictability of change and the conﬂicts and tensions within it? How can we release the energy within ourselves and others for creating and maximizing opportunities? Speciﬁcally then, our questions for this chapter are: ■ ■ ■

How do we harness the energy within our organizations towards a positive, creative outcome? How do we let go of control enough to release energy, without falling into chaos? How do we focus our differences of opinion and needs on common ground? How do we use conﬂict and difference positively? We will look at:

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Frameworks and approaches for managers and change agents in achieving this on an ongoing (daily) basis Change methodologies and mindsets that are particularly effective at energizing people through change and ﬁnding common ground to do so.

What do we mean by ‘energy’? Energy is rather a subtle, intangible word that we can understand in different ways. As Spoth (2006) points out, it can be divided between ‘gross’ energy which people display physically or ‘subtle’ energy, drawn from feelings and thoughts. In addition, subtle energy includes the less obvious type of biological energy that we experience, more or less without knowing, from individuals and groups. (This type of energy is often treated with scepticism in the West, but forms a key part of many Eastern approaches, for example, in relation to the different chakras.) 156

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Spoth (2006) provides a deﬁnition of energy which is practical for our purpose in this chapter: The vital force that enables every complex system – whether at the level of the individual, subgroup, group, organization, community, or even beyond – to do its work and fulﬁl its purpose. In the case of living beings, this energy is deﬁned as the potential force for action. In traditional approaches to change, attention is paid to tangibles, such as outputs, initiatives, decisions, products, behaviours. Change is, however, also very much about energy: are our collective efforts going in the direction we would wish, are we motivated to make a difference, are we ﬁnding creative solutions, are we using our disagreements productively? We use expressions like are we ‘up for it’ and ‘are we willing to go the extra mile’ in recognition of the energy it takes to change. In our deﬁnition, an energized organization is one that achieves its purpose through harnessing the abilities and contribution of its members. It is adaptable and responsive to change, as well as being an innovative initiator of change. It ﬁnds ways of enlivening the get-up-and-go, power, will, motivation, enthusiasm, creativity and determination of a group of people towards a goal. It gains value from both agreement and disagreement, accepting both as a powerful part of improvement and progress. Conﬂict is embraced and seen as a natural part of working. Energized organizations are neither over-controlled, nor totally chaotic, although they may feel like both at times as the organizational system checks and balances itself. At their most powerful, energized organizations are not necessarily comfortable or easy places to work: a lot may be required in terms of effort and emotion; they are perhaps not for everyone, or for every business, however, appealing and potentially successful. So, what examples have we seen of energized organizations? ■

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Start-up organizations classically begin with a great deal of energy as the founders put in tireless effort to establish something new, attracting and enthusing those who join with the same energy and commitment. The challenge often comes when the organization grows in size and individuals experience less of the immediacy of the energy of the founders Some organizations maintain the notion of a close band of committed individuals in the way that they run their organization, or parts of it. One of Richard Branson’s ﬁrst premises of business was to keep units of enterprise to 50 people or less (Jackson, 1995) We all know of areas within larger organizations where there is an energy, a buzz. Sometimes we relate that to the function of the area, labelling them perhaps ‘the creatives’. Sometimes, it seems to be something about the manager, 157

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their approach and the people that work for them, whatever the function. Clearly, there are practices that enable managers, leaders and change agents to create an atmosphere in which change is positive and conﬂict is used creatively. We will look at what some of these might be in this chapter Finally, there are examples of organizations that have found ways of energizing their employees in pursuit of change and in resolution, or harnessing, of differences. Our case study on O2 at the end of the book is one such example.

Approaches for managers and change agents Here, we look at some tools and frameworks that line managers, HR practitioners and change agents can use in working with the energy of a group. We will cover: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Facilitative leadership Understanding creativity Change through conversation Managing on the ‘edge of chaos’ Personal presence.

Facilitative leadership Facilitators are used widely in organizations to help groups move their energy in some way. As a style of leadership and team behaviour, being facilitative in approach can enable honest, creative and focused discussions to be a daily experience. For HR practitioners working with change, facilitative leadership skills are critical. Facilitative leadership can be deﬁned as: an enlightened style of leadership where the leader guides the development of a group or team. This leader uses participatory techniques that actually combine the role of facilitator and Leader. The facilitative leader assists the team in establishing interpersonal skills, allowing them to ultimately improve their performance. Information is shared between all members. Utilizing this input from all of the team members generates processes for new ideas on improving business. Overall there is an atmosphere of trust and respect which is essential for developing high performance organizations. (Brome, 2006) Being facilitative: means functioning with a mindset of serving others, allowing the group and the situation ‘to be in control’. As a manager, this emphasis on people skills 158

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is powerful. Instead of having to ‘know’, you need to build the capacity for more people to be ‘in the know’. (Wilson et al., 2003) Facilitative leadership involves the manager in making choices about his/her own behaviour, in relation to both the task and the individual or group in front of them. This means paying attention to climate issues, such as patterns of communication, undercurrents, feelings, the unspoken as well as the spoken. It also means considering what ways of working (procedures) will be most productive in enabling a team of people to generate ideas, enthusiasm and so on. This is illustrated in the ‘iceberg’ model (Figure 8.1) from Roffey Park Institute, where the more obvious elements of what occurs in a group are ‘above the water’ and those harder to pinpoint, but essential to effective working, are below the water. Procedures are sometimes obvious (e.g. an agenda) and sometimes not (e.g. the unspoken rule that the senior manager has the last word). The facilitative leader is aware of and intervenes at each of these levels. For example: ■ ■ ■

Task: ‘our goal is to achieve 90% customer satisfaction in the next quarter’ Procedure: ‘Let’s spend 15 minutes just coming up with ideas, without challenging any of them’ Climate: ‘I know we have differences of opinion, let’s make sure we listen to them all. How do you feel about the ideas so far?’

Task

Process: Procedure

Process: Climate

Figure 8.1 Iceberg model. Reproduced by kind permission of Roffey Park Institute

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This model applies most obviously in group settings, when a leader is, for example, holding a team meeting. It also, however, represents the dynamic that exists in one-to-one situations. Many managers are interested and aware of what occurs at a task and procedure level, but use their observation and curiosity less in relation to underlying climate issues. In addition, the facilitative leader behaves in a way that enables others to contribute by judging when to tell people what to do and when to leave them to decide. John Heron (1999), a leading writer and practitioner in the ﬁeld of facilitation, describes three ‘modes’ that facilitators can use: hierarchical, cooperative and autonomous. Table 8.1 describes these choices. Table 8.1 Modes of facilitation (from the work of John Heron)

Mode

Uses

Examples

Hierarchical Directive Leader takes the power Leader does things for the group Leader’s views dominate Leader decides

There is a need to lay out the goals and constraints of a task There is a crisis The leader knows ‘best’ and the group needs to be directed

This is what is needed now These are our constraints Get out immediately, there’s a ﬁre Be as creative as you can Do it like this

Collegiate approach wanted where leader and group contribute equally Leader and group both have ideas and knowledge to share Group needs to build conﬁdence in its ability to be autonomous

What do we need to do now? This is my suggestion – what do you think? How could we make this work more effectively? What other thoughts do we have? Let’s hear what everyone wants from this meeting

Cooperative Power is shared Leader as guide Views from leader and the group Joint decisions Collaborative

Autonomous Non-directive Need to develop and maximize Group has freedom beneﬁt from group’s capacity Group decides to learn and innovate Group self-direction Maximum buy-in is needed Leader creates the Participation and self-direction conditions is desired

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You decide What do you want to do about it? Saying nothing What do you need from me? Let me know how you get on

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Some points to note about these modes are: ■ ■

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The objective here is to use all three modes ﬂexibly, rather than rigidly keeping to one approach. Every manager has a different way of displaying each mode and has a different impact with it. So, managers need to raise their self-awareness about what works for them in different situations. The manager needs to decide what has to be done a certain way (i.e. following their direction) and where there is scope for involvement, and self-direction by team members. The key here is about providing a container for energy. If it is too restrictive, the group’s contribution will be too restrained, if it is too loose, the task may not be achieved. (We will talk more about this idea later in this chapter, see ‘Managing on the Edge of Chaos’). It is absolutely possible for a manager to get creative results simply by being directive, but it is necessary for there to be enough room for discretion for individuals to work within. Our observation is that directive leaders who get creative results tend to incorporate both task and process elements into their direction, for example, ‘use your initiative’ or ‘stop arguing with each other and listen to ideas’. There tends to be a worrying dominance of hierarchical behaviour in most organizations. Our experience with managers and HR professionals suggests that this is related to the increased pressures to deliver within short time frames. The beneﬁts, however, are short term. The costs are: increased dependence as people get used to simply being told what to do, dysfunctional interactions as individuals compete to have things ‘their way’, power games, lack of ownership and involvement, reduced creativity and ﬂexibility (and therefore ability to change) and, eventually, increased experiences of bullying. As the leader moves towards the cooperative and autonomous modes, he or she is effectively saying ‘I trust you’, ‘you have an equally valuable and important contribution to make’ and ‘we are in this together’.

David was responsible for leading a project on a new training programme on Innovation that would be offered to clients. The subject was one that he was very enthusiastic about and had researched into very carefully. He was asked to put together a project team which would design the content and then deliver the programmes. The individuals chosen for the project had different levels of expertise for the programme and were interested in different aspects of it. David’s approach was to work in a facilitative way with the project team to create a design that all were enthusiastic about and would enable them to contribute their different skills and knowledge. His ﬁrst step was to 161

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have individual discussions with each member of the team, so that he could understand more about the range of ideas and skills, be clear with them about the parameters of the project (such as budget and timeframes) and start the process of generating ideas about the programme before they met together. At the ﬁrst meeting, he encouraged everyone to talk about their dreams and ambitions for the programme, so that they could establish some principles for what they wanted to create. There were differences in views as he expected. Some needed encouragement to speak up and stick with their ideas. He made sure that everyone was listened to and got the group to notice where they were in agreement and where they were not. David suggested that they put together a list of questions that the team would need to answer as it worked through the project and was encouraged by the range of ideas and options the group was generating about the programme.

Facilitation is a powerful tool for making the most of differences and encouraging any conﬂict to be positively used within a group. The facilitative leader can: ■

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Set the climate for working through their behaviour and body language. This includes, for example, making it clear that all views are needed, by asking for and listening to suggestions from all. Perhaps most signiﬁcantly, managers need to react with interest and curiosity to opinions, exploring multiple perspectives, especially when they are contrary to their own views. Create space for discussion: use time for exploration and expansion, not just for efﬁciency and decision making. Encourage dialogue, not just debate (as we explored in Chapter 7) and resist ‘either/or’ thinking. Be curious and listen carefully. Do not just assume that the useful ideas and opinions will come from the ‘star’ team members. Normalize disagreement: make it clear what principles the group can work to, such as ‘listen to competing and contradictory ideas’. Give feedback directed at the group as a whole, as well as individuals, for example: ‘this is great thinking’. Neither run from nor emphasize conﬂict: notice its energy, be respectful of feelings, pay attention to what the group can learn from different opinions and emotions. Be conﬁdent of the value of conﬂict and apply learning from previous chapters in this book. Demonstrate trust in the group’s ability to handle disagreement and ﬁnd workable approaches. Ensure that you are comfortable yourself with difference and disagreement. Let go of needing to be ‘right’ and ‘in control’. Be prepared to talk about and honour feelings: this can be done in many ways; it does not have to be squirm-inducing. One of the most emotionally literate management teams we have worked with was in the construction industry,

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where they were very adept at simply and directly saying how they felt about each other and what was going on, without it becoming a big deal.

Understanding creativity Innovation, adaptation and creativity are essential aspects of change. They are the processes that will lead us to ﬁnd new or improved ways of achieving what we need to. Implementation means ﬁnding actions and approaches that will work, so that we can turn the ambitions and goals behind our change process into reality. To do that, we need to be able to think in new ways, be open to new possibilities; otherwise we will simply reshape what has gone before. Transactional change needs small steps and improvements to make a difference. Transformational change requires us to adopt new ways of thinking. Both need ideas, that is, creativity. It makes sense then to understand something about how the process works. Creativity needs conﬂict

It has become something of a truism to say that creativity needs conﬂict in order to work, but what do we really mean by this? Jerry Hirshberg was the founder and President of Nissan Design International and talks from signiﬁcant experience when he advises on how differences can be used: We needed to ﬁnd ways to reduce the friction without destroying the very ingredients that might be essential to the vibrancy of the process; without in other words, disrupting our disruptiveness. (Hirshberg, 1998) He tells the story of how managers from the USA and Japan experienced cultural clashes about what was most critical when designing a new model: being ﬁrst in the market or producing the best product. Robust discussions led to an understanding that there was a need to ﬁnd a way to do both, rather than sitting with an ‘either/or’ mentality, or as Hirshberg (1998) describes it, they needed to manage ‘polarity’. He points out how essential it is that leaders are able both to identify and bring together polarized viewpoints, not necessarily through compromise, but through incorporating one idea into another. By understanding the viewpoints of colleagues, Nissan at that time were able to produce a high quality vehicle that was quickly out to market. The conﬂict enabled individuals to think in a different way: using the tension and disruption (what Hirshberg calls ‘creative abrasion’) in their thinking as a way of ﬁnding new design elements within a product. Understanding the value of conﬂict from a creative viewpoint can serve to normalize disagreement, making it acceptable and desirable, rather than a perceived threat. Leaders who prefer to have like-minded individuals around them, or seek harmony and constant compromise, do themselves and their organization a huge 163

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disservice. People do not come in perfect packages and the process of creativity demands our recognition that every contribution, however challenging, adds to the quality of the end result. For example, the role of Monitor/Evaluator in Belbin’s team types model (Belbin, 1996) provides an essential ingredient of questioning and critique, but not necessarily in a way that is sensitive and careful. The tendency in times of change is for people, especially managers and HR practitioners, to be overly sensitive to how this critiquing occurs. By giving a valid space for concerns, disagreement is aired in a more productive manner, rather than being subdued and potentially turned into stronger opposition as a result of not being heard. Within some organizational cultures, there is too much ‘abrasion’ and the challenge is to encourage and recognize those whose strengths are in valuing and building on others’ ideas, honouring feelings or focusing on common ground. Creativity is collective

If we want to do something differently, to improve it, to ﬁx it, we need at some point to happen on the idea that will make the difference for us. In order to do that, we need to be open to options, to possibilities and encourage divergent thinking. Then we need to make a decision about which direction to go in. If we take the approach that this means ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in terms of ideas, we will hamper our ability to construct something new. When discussion becomes a power struggle, we are less likely to hit on an idea that will really work. A danger within organizations is that creativity is simpliﬁed into an individual process, that an individual is either able to come up with new ideas, or adaptations, or they are not. They are either worth listening to, or they are not. They either have the answer, or they do not. Innovation is not as neat as this. The best solutions are co-created with different individuals playing different roles, consciously or otherwise. We can take a systemic view of creativity, looking at the whole system to understand how the process works between people, with the individual’s abilities or otherwise simply being a fraction of the whole. Figure 8.2 illustrates three key components of this process (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988). The ‘Field’ refers to the gatekeepers of an organization or process, those people who are able to encourage or stiﬂe ideas. They may also have the ﬁnal ‘say’ in whether an idea is acceptable or not. This might include, for example, the senior manager of a project, the supervisor of a customer service team, the functional head in a matrix organization or an individual’s work colleagues. If they accept the idea, it becomes part of the accepted way of working, the ‘Domain’. The ‘Domain’ refers to the context of the situation, including, for example, the organization’s culture and processes, the external environment and the specialist 164

Energizing the Organization Social system

Culture

Field (social organization of domain)

Retains selected variants

Domain (symbol system)

Transmits structured information and action

Produces variation and change

Person

Genetic pool and personal experiences

Figure 8.2 The locus of creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988)

area of knowledge (e.g. accountancy or human resources). Individuals need information about this arena in order to come up with ways to make variations (or innovations) within it. The ‘Person’ relates to the individual and how they manage their own creativity and capacity to innovate. Given the right conditions, the individual can produce changes to how things are done. To enable creativity, line managers and change agents need to pay attention to each part of the process, that is: Individual: ■ ■ ■ ■

Do individuals have the personal conﬁdence and technical competence needed to innovate and adapt as required? Do individuals have the personal skills, courage and conﬁdence to get their ideas and suggestions across even where this may cause conﬂict? Do they have the resources and authority to do so? Do they keep informed of what is going on in the rest of the system? 165

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Gatekeepers: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Do colleagues encourage or kill each other’s ideas and adaptations through their behaviour and interactions? Do managers and supervisors make it clear the extent to which ideas are welcomed and required? Is this matched in practice? Is challenge treated as productive and helpful or perceived as undesirable conﬂict? Are individuals supported in making alterations to the system? Are any decision making processes quick enough to allow maximum response and adaptability? Are communication processes smooth enough to allow individuals to know what is going on elsewhere? Domain:

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Do organizational processes (e.g. reward systems) encourage both individual and collective initiative and changes? Is the culture actively supportive of both challenge and agreement? Is it safe to speak up here? Do people know enough about their technical areas of responsibility in order to adapt approaches? Do people know enough about the external environment to be able to respond appropriately?

A marketing team was having difﬁculty building a reputation for being able to innovate. They found that others in the organization were getting the recognition instead and this was causing conﬂict. They used this model to diagnose what was going on for them as individuals and as a group within the organization. As a result, they identiﬁed speciﬁc actions they could take to deal with the situation, which included: having greater conﬁdence in their own ideas, talking more widely to colleagues outside the department to share those ideas and establishing better working relationships between team members and senior managers to ensure that ideas were encouraged, listened to and worked through more speedily.

Change through conversation There is sometimes a disappointing moment at the end of a workshop or away day when people have had some exciting and creative discussions. It is the 166

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moment when the action plan needs to be agreed. All of a sudden, there can be a dragging of feet, a quiet shufﬂing or looking to the ground when people are needed to take actions forward. What was energetic suddenly feels stuck. The complaint later can become, ‘it was just a talk shop’. Part of the dynamic here is that people need to work on the actions they have enthusiasm for, rather than what they ‘should’ work on. Part of it is probably the sheer exhaustion of having another set of tasks to take away and add to those already piling up. Without devaluing the role of plans, there is an alternative attitude that we can take that has a tremendous amount of impact in change and that is to perceive change as happening one conversation at a time. We often represent politics in organizations as being negative, about positioning and competition. That can be the case. The other way of understanding the word, however, is to consider the need to work informally, build networks and tap into the grapevine in order to ﬁnd out what is going on, what people think and feel and to input ideas, challenges and perspectives. In a workshop setting, this would mean having a conversation about ‘what next?’ and letting people’s energy and commitment carry them forward, trusting that the most important aspects will move forward in some way after the discussion. Outside of this context it means: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

using informal relationships and conversations to tap into what is of interest and excitement for people sowing the seeds of change and ideas through hallway conversations lighting ﬁres around the organization by sharing ideas, asking questions, throwing out challenges telling stories of success, pointing out possibilities noticing the conversations that are being had about change: what do people have energy and interest for, where are the ripples of change starting to take place, what else needs to be attended to?

Many of the most recent developments in change methodologies work from the principle that conversations create our experience of the world (as we shall see later). To change it, we need to keep talking and listening.

Managing on the ‘edge of chaos’ This is perhaps a particularly scary notion for many who work with change in organizations. That need not, however, put us off understanding the concept and what it can offer us in practice. The ‘edge of chaos’ is an idea from the world of complexity thinking. What it actually means is: ‘the point in a complex system when ordered behaviour gives 167

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way to turbulent behaviour’ (Battram, 1999). It is a place of transition, rather than anarchy and, in relation to organizations, sits between: ■ ■

Order: where behaviour is predictable to the point where the organization does not adapt and Chaos: where behaviour is totally unpredictable and random.

The ‘edge of chaos’ is where creativity happens and where space is provided for conﬂict and difference to be constructive. So, what does it take to be able to manage ‘on the edge of chaos’?

Courage

The starting point is having the nerve not to rely on ‘order’ and tight control to make sure that things happen. Managers and those working in change need to manage their own anxiety around these issues. Most of us in our work are tasked with achieving certain goals or outputs. The more we encourage others to participate and contribute, the more possible it is, we fear, that the focus or standard of the output will slip in some way. How we handle our emotions in response to this is a critical factor in creating changes and harnessing difference successfully. Ralph Stacey (1996) outlines how anxiety has an impact on our ability to work on the edge of chaos and that for him, there is a need for leaders to share that anxiety, so that others learn to deal with the confusion for themselves, rather than taking the approach of ‘pretending’ to know the answers and the way ahead. This then is the ‘white-water’ leadership we spoke of earlier where leaders exercise the choice to be conﬁdent that they can, with their team, navigate the uncertain, bumpy ride, rather than convincing others that they know what will happen next.

Handling paradox

It is important to be able to work with a mindset that embraces a range of ideas (both/and thinking), rather than looking at the world in an either/or way. This includes the ability to manage paradox. For example, the world we work in asks us to control what happens, what gets achieved in order to deliver on our targets. Yet, at the same time, we know we cannot control everything and we often feel that things are out of control. In effect, what we do is we ﬁnd a way to hold both of these realities at once, accepting that we both can and cannot control at the same time. This is a powerful place to think from. It enables us to engage in dialogue (as explored in Chapter 7), rather than either/or ways of thinking and talking that tend to lead us into over-simpliﬁed solutions and arguments. 168

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The facilitation skills described earlier in this chapter can be a useful tool for people in managing the balance between: ■ ■

giving direction and outlining limits to tasks on the one hand and creating space for innovation and adaptation, on the other.

Effectively, this frames work for people in the space between order and chaos and can be used by leaders, HR and individuals as a way of balancing enough room for manoeuvre with a sense of direction. A helpful way of looking at this is to consider the idea of ‘containers’ from the complexity thinking of Eoyang and Olson. They suggest that containers ‘set the bounds for the self-organizing system’ (Eoyang and Olson, 2001). Containers can be: ■ ■ ■ ■

physical/geographical (e.g. a building) organizational (e.g. a department) behavioural/cultural (e.g. professional practice) or conceptual (e.g. goals and targets).

The more rigid the container, the more ordered and controlled will be the system. If a container is ‘loose’, the system will be more chaotic, that is, more adaptable and creative. The amount of difference (e.g. diversity, different functions, ages, opinions, cultures etc) within the system will also impact on the degree to which it is ordered or more chaotic: less differences will mean more order. Finally, the speed or frequency of exchanges (of ideas or information for example) within the system will also dynamically impact on the extent to which there is order or chaos (again, less exchanges means more order). In this way, we can view an organization as moving on a continuum of chaos and order depending on these three variables: containers, differences and exchanges. In practical terms, a leader or HR practitioner can make some kind of assessment as to the extent to which a department, for example, is ordered or chaotic enough. If it is too ordered, where would a change be easiest to initiate? In the goals and targets that are set (i.e. container)? In introducing more diversity (i.e. difference)? In encouraging more conversations about opinions (i.e. exchanges)? In this approach, the suggestion is then to observe what happens and promote further changes as needed. Linked to the idea of ‘containers’ is the notion of ‘porous planning’ which we ﬁnd particularly helpful in understanding how to take a both/ and approach to the organizational necessity of planning. As Hirshberg (1998) 169

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tells us, plans can be energizing, they create focus and draw our attention to what needs to have priority. They also start to attract other ideas. When we start to think, for example, about how to develop competencies for leaders, we suddenly start to see the same topic in everything, because our awareness is raised. Yet, potentially, we have already agreed a plan and now we have to deliver on that. The idea of ‘porous planning’ is that we see the structure of the plan as a membrane that allows in ideas and possibilities. While we will aim to head in the same direction, we need to allow this new information in as we go, so that we can keep building ideas and ways to improve our approach. Again, we are managing the paradox of both needing new ideas and needing to keep on track at the same time. At some point we may even need to decide that not doing something, or doing something completely different, is also acceptable, in order to maintain effectiveness and improvement rather than simply delivering ‘something’. This takes a collaborative effort to achieve, as do most aspects of working on the ‘edge of chaos’.

Personal presence: being How we are as people directly impacts on the degree to which we will encourage or restrict the energy of those around us. We need, therefore, to develop our emotional and intellectual relationship with different levels and types of energy. For example: ■

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We may make a judgement on what we see as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ energy, but this is not necessarily useful. One person’s uncomfortable conﬂict is another’s robust discussion. When we think about energy, it is worth considering the direction it is moving in and whether that is helping us, considering what we are trying to achieve, rather than holding on to our judgements about it. A fear of conﬂict is unhelpful and restrictive. If we believe that emotions have no role in organizations, then we limit the scope for positive emotions (enjoyment, fun, enthusiasm, creativity) as much as we limit the seemingly more negative ones. This directly impacts on the energy that we can encourage as leaders or change agents. It is a great deal harder to work effectively with the feelings and energy of others if you do not have a positive and knowing relationship with your own.

Change methodologies that energize So far we have looked at how individual managers and change agents can relate to groups in order to release energy. We will now look at approaches to change that focus on the whole system, that is, they can be used across the organization 170

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simultaneously to create change and focus differences in a positive direction. There are many of these currently being used across the world, to powerful effect, both in organizations and in society as a whole. We will focus here on three that we ﬁnd particularly valuable: ■ ■ ■

Open Space Future Search Appreciative Inquiry.

Given the investment of time and people the approaches can take, it is best to have someone appropriately trained in the techniques to work with. The guiding principles can certainly be adopted and used without using the whole methodology. This is also the case with some of the speciﬁc techniques they contain. We add the warning here, however, that, in our experience, diluting these methodologies lessens their power and impact. All three offer radical approaches to how change can be coordinated and tampering with them too much to ﬁt with the existing culture begins to defeat the purpose. In this respect, they are methodologies which can only be ‘bought’ not ‘sold’, that is, if the HR function need to work too hard to convince managers and staff that the process is good for them, then the probability is that the audience is not ready and other approaches and conversations are needed ﬁrst.

Open Space Open Space is a methodology that arose out of the observation of Harrison Owen that the best part of conferences were usually the coffee breaks. His question as a result became: Was it possible to combine the level of synergy and excitement present in a good coffee break with the substantive activity and results characteristic of a good meeting? (Owen, 1997) Harrison tapped into the essential ingredients of good conversation that have been around for centuries in human history, in one form or another: ■ ■ ■

A circle, which he called ‘the fundamental geometry of open communication’ (Owen, 1997), with no hierarchy or pecking order A market place (or a place to meet) where people can exchange ideas A bulletin board, where people can advertise what they wish to discuss.

Added to this is the trust that a group of people, however large and however different, can come together and discuss, generate ideas and decide on actions. 171

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The methodology can work with numbers from 5 to 1000, potentially even more with technological support and it can run for between 1 and 3 days. We have also used smaller versions of the methodology as half-day sessions. In brief, the process, which is deceptively simple, runs something like this: ■

■

■ ■

■

Opening of the space for talk and introduction to the topic. Sometimes brief information is sent out in advance on this. The umbrella topic is usually chosen by senior management in liaison with those running the event (e.g. how can we deliver our vision to be ‘world class’?). Invitation for people to volunteer, one by one, subjects that they would like to discuss, within the context of the overall topic (e.g. what do we mean by ‘world class’?). Creation of a bulletin board with discussion times and locations. Attendance at the discussions by individual choice, with the proposer taking responsibility for making some kind of record of the discussion and any agreed actions. Closing circle, including provision of copies of notes (for large scale events).

Large group interventions in the civil service Open Space was used as part of the Make it Different campaign in the civil service, led by Sir Richard Wilson. The service wanted to know what it needed to change in order to be more customer focused and outward looking. Working with the expertise of Vista Consulting and Sue Belgrave (now of Roffey Park), they used a series of large group interventions to involve civil servants at every level, from every department across the country in the enquiry. The process, which lasted a year, included: ■

■

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12 large group interventions lasting a day, with around 1000 people attending each time: actors set out the scene about the current approaches to customer service, there was discussion of the context the service now needed to work within, people talked about what they were proud of and what they were sorry about, visions were created for the future and action plans developed. An Open Space for the senior levels to identify the implications for leaders of the changes that people wanted to make, and were making. Three hundred people attended for 3 days of highly engaging and active discussions. They sat in two concentric circles at the opening and close and everyone made a comment. A huge grid was used to identify subjects for discussion. Handwritten reports were collected from each discussion and put together

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to produce a publication of decisions and ideas. These were circulated around the civil service to ensure people knew what the leadership would do to contribute to the changes being made. Before his retirement, Sir Richard stated that this was one of his proudest moments. The principles for meeting in Open Space are powerful in themselves, in that they emphasize the need to let go of control of the agenda and for participation (Owen, 1997): ■ ■ ■ ■

‘Whoever comes are the right people’ (i.e. it will still be a good conversation regardless of who is there or how many people show up) ‘Whatever happens is the only thing that could have’ (i.e. we do not know what will happen, but we will learn from it) ‘Whenever it starts is the right time’ (i.e. creative energy and conversation does not always ﬁt best to the timing of a clock) ‘When it is over it is over’ (i.e. if we say all that we need to in the ﬁrst 20 minutes of a one hour session, then we do not need to ‘ﬁll the time’ for the sake of it).

The ‘one law’ establishes the principle of individual responsibility, with people contributing where they feel most useful and engaged. The law reads: If during the course of the gathering, any person ﬁnds him or herself in a situation where they are neither learning or contributing, they must use their two feet and go to some more productive place. (Owen, 1997) So, people decide for themselves what needs to be talked about and where they can add most value. They can attend sessions and stay for the whole period that the session runs. Alternatively, they can behave as bumblebees, buzzing from session to session, spreading ideas across the sessions like a bee with pollen. They can also become butterﬂies, not prepared to land anywhere in particular, but hovering about the coffee area, or lounge and chatting with whoever else turns up and about whatever is important to them. To some people, Open Space sounds like a nightmare of uncontrolled ‘chat’. To others, it sounds like nirvana, a chance to really talk about what matters without having a facilitator or leader direct or control them. The advantage of the methodology is exactly the latter: the process is creative, and energizing. It provides a way to talk about what people have in common and where they differ, without overly focusing on one or the other. It demonstrates trust and interest in what 173

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people really think about an issue. We have heard very few examples of where people have abused the process by, for example, simply hanging around talking about golf. Eventually, people talk about what matters to them within the organization they spend so much time and energy with. The disadvantage is that Open Space sometimes struggles to identify speciﬁc actions that get taken forward. If we hold with the perspective that conversations carry through to intentions and commitment back to work then this is ﬁne. Where more tangible and concrete plans of action are required, it is perhaps less favoured. This, however, is an example of where the process has become diluted and, therefore, less effective. In the 3-day version of Open Space, the ﬁnal day is focused on action planning and convergence. Open space and conﬂict

In one group we worked with, an individual had been raising a particular issue repeatedly during the more traditional agenda of a 2-day conference. He clearly felt strongly on the subject and the issue dominated a lot of conversation, as a result, partly because of his status in the organization. When we worked in an Open Space way, he nominated the issue to be discussed and went to the room allocated at the scheduled time. No one else came to talk about it. At the closing circle, when everyone commented on their experience, he spoke honestly about his anger at being literally left alone with the issue, but that he recognized he needed to rethink how he was approaching it and whether he understood why it was less important for others. To his absolute credit, he had taken the time while alone in the room to reﬂect.

In our experience, Open Space, whether used whole scale or in shorter bites, is powerful because it does give people the space to talk about what matters, in a manner that feels adult and trusting. It can also highlight which issues the organization ﬁnds most or least important, as in the example above. Conﬂict is a part of Open Space, in the same way that agreement is; it is left to responsible adults to have conversations about the subjects that matter and in the manner that works for them. The tone and importance of the conversation is set from the start, by the facilitator’s approach, by the powerful nature of a circle, so that all are there to contribute equally, and by the choices that people are trusted to make. Giving the process time also means that individuals and groups are able to work through disagreements at different points in the process and different ways. There are, of course, no guarantees that conﬂict will be ‘resolved’, indeed, that may not be 174

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what is always needed. The process offers space for discussion and innovation, using the differences of everyone present.

Future Search Future Search is a large group methodology, developed by Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff (2000), that brings stakeholders together to focus on achieving a task. The participants need to accept that they are inter-dependent, that the task cannot be achieved without them working together in some way and they need to be drawn from all the key areas within the system related to that task. For an organization deciding on how to deliver its mission, participants would, therefore, be from across the organization and from those external to the organization who have a vested interest in the outcome. The range of those who may need to be present for a hospital could include a wide variety of groups, for example: consultants, managers, nurses, orderlies, administration, reception, catering, cleaners, the Primary Care Trust, strategic health authority, patients, patients’ families, social services, general practitioners, Department of Health and so on. The exact make up of the group would be decided according to the task. The overall process for a Future Search works around ﬁve tasks: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Review the past Explore the present Create ideal future scenarios Identify common ground Make action plans. The conditions for success for Future Search (Weisbord and Janoff, 2000) are:

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‘Whole system in the room’: as outlined above, participants are from every part of the system. It is not intended that every individual from the system is there. The usual number is 64, with around eight people from each stakeholder group. ‘Global context, local action’: through the process, people need to get the opportunity to see the ‘whole’ picture, not just their perspective of the issue. The methodology is structured to enable this to happen. ‘Common ground and future focus, not problems and conﬂicts’: the method does not seek to resolve differences, although these are acknowledged; neither does it develop people’s interpersonal skills. Motivation and feelings are a part of the process as people bring themselves to the event, but are not actively facilitated. The primary purpose is to focus on achieving the task by discovering what is common and what is possible, now. 175

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■ ■ ■

■

‘Self-managed small groups’: as with Open Space, people are trusted to be able to manage their own conversations and do so in groups of eight. Sometimes these groups are mixed from across stakeholders, sometimes they work within their stakeholder groups, according to the stage in the process. Roles are agreed within the groups, such as timekeeper, facilitator, recorder and reporter to help the process work smoothly. There is here, again, the need for those in authority to work as equal participants in the process and ‘let go’, trusting that the group will ﬁnd the answers. Where there are suggestions and ideas which are not possible or do not have broad agreement, then this will be discovered through the process. ‘Full attendance’: all those attending need to be present and active for the whole event, otherwise they may miss crucial discussions. ‘Healthy meeting conditions’: the physical environment needs to be conducive to effective working 3-day event (i.e. ‘sleep twice’): the process is worth an investment of time in order to achieve the powerful outcomes and decisions it can offer. The methodology pays attention to when and how people can do their best work. Pushing the process into 2 long days tends to be detrimental in terms of people’s ability to think ‘Public responsibility for follow up’: intentions for follow-up actions are made publicly since this increases the likelihood that people will follow up with their actions. Future Search’s have been run in a variety of situations, including:

■ ■ ■

Creating a shared vision To share intentions and ambitions and ﬁnd common areas of action To agree how to deliver on a vision that already exists.

There is no doubt that a Future Search is a signiﬁcant investment: it takes time to run and plan and it is intensive in terms of getting people’s commitment to be there. The beauty of the process is that it is very immediate, in that the people who can inﬂuence and make a difference are there. They get to hear each other’s perspectives. They understand the whole picture and the current situation and they make immediate decisions that they intend to put into action. In a world where change needs to happen so instantly, this is a powerful beneﬁt. Future Search and conﬂict

Future Search takes ‘a radical stand toward conﬂict’ (Weisbord and Janoff, 2000). Getting the right stakeholders in the room means that there will inevitably be 176

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disagreements, some of them long-standing. Aspects of both the structure of the methodology and the way that it is facilitated enable conﬂict to be handled effectively. Structurally, participants begin by building up a whole picture of who is in the room and what the issues are that make up the topic. This is both through hearing from everyone at the outset and mapping the history of the situation. The latter creates a visual representation of what has been happening from everyone’s perspective. If we have a picture of the whole, it is harder to simplify the issue from merely our own view of the situation, to the exclusion of other perspectives. Later in the process, people are asked to ﬁnd the ideas that they agree on, rather than spending time on those where there is disagreement. The approach of the facilitators is neither to ignore nor emphasize conﬂict. There are times when the whole group of 60 or so people can have a discussion across the room. The facilitators at this time look out for situations where people may feel on their own with their issue. Research by Asch has shown that people ﬁnd it very difﬁcult to keep disagreeing in a group if they believe they are unsupported (Weisbord and Janoff, 2007). Yet it is critical that people feel able to bring their views wholly to the situation. The facilitative approach is to ﬁnd others who can identify in some way with the individual’s feelings. Janoff and Weisbord will also sometimes ask people to hold a discussion as a subgroup, when they identify with a particular issue and others disagree, with the rest of the group listening. Another group can then do the same. This way, again, all are encouraged to listen to the whole story. A key approach is also to do nothing, to let the group ﬁnd its way through differences: at some point, someone in a group ﬁnds a way to say something that integrates people back together. Underpinning all of this, however, is the focus on ﬁnding the ‘widest common ground that all can stand on’ (Weisbord and Janoff, 2000). This task takes precedence over processing conﬂict.

Appreciative Inquiry: a strength based approach to change Appreciative Inquiry (AI) offers another radical way of approaching change. It began in the research of David Cooperrider from Case Western University and has since breathed renewed life into organizations and communities around the world. AI turns the practice of change management inside out. It proposes, quite bluntly, that organizations are not, at their core, problems to be solved. Just the opposite. Every organization was created as a solution designed in its own time to meet a challenge or satisfy a need of society. Even more fundamentally, organizations are centers of vital connections and life-giving potentials: relationships, partnerships, alliance, and 177

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ever-expanding webs of knowledge and action that are capable of harnessing the power of combinations of strengths. Founded upon this lifecentric view of organizations, AI offers a positive, strengths-based approach to organization development and change management. (Cooperrider and Whitney, 2005) AI poses a particular challenge and opportunity for us here in the UK. When Jane Watkins, one of the leading lights of AI, was studying in the UK, she was asked whether any countries or cultures would ﬁnd the positive focus of AI more challenging than others. ‘Right here’, she replied. Culturally, we value highly the ability to critique and criticize; it is almost a sign of intelligence, that the smarter you are, the more you are able to ﬁnd fault. Analysis and problem solving is prized in many cultures, yet AI asks us to challenge what it really achieves for us when we keep looking at what is wrong. Understanding the principles at the heart of AI (Table 8.2) gives us other choices about how we effect change in organizations. Applying these principles in practice requires a discipline, to keep looking, as experienced AI practitioner, Barbara Sloan, puts it, for ‘that which gives light and life’. Take for example, a team wanting to improve their ways of working together. Traditionally, we might ask them to look at their strengths and weaknesses as a team and come up with solutions to solve the weaknesses. Most of the work, Table 8.2 Principles of AI (from conversations with Jane Watkins, Barbara Sloan and Mette Jacobsgaard)

Principle

Meaning

Constructionist

Conversations are creative; they create meaning and deﬁne how we perceive the world around us to be. In effect, we construct reality through the conversations we have. Valuing stories as holding meaning, both affective and cognitive and as being able to describe multiple perspectives without looking for merely either/or rational interpretations. That we can grow and learn and be inspired by what is lifegiving and positive and that we are drawn to create positive images of the future. A recognition that when we enquire into a system, we start to change it, right from the ﬁrst question that we ask. Anticipating and imagining the future shapes how we behave and act. Working with the whole system produces more enthusiasm than simply working with fragments.

Poetic

Positive

Simultaneity Anticipatory Wholeness

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therefore, focuses on what is wrong, where people have performed less effectively than they could. There will be differences of opinion about causes and different perspectives on who is at fault. In terms of energy, people can leave feeling like they have had a hard time and a team they actually enjoy being part of can seem to be less than what it was, after a thorough analysis. It is not unusual for misunderstandings to be left unexplored and for the seeds of conﬂict to be sown. An AI approach is to ask the team to tell stories about times when they worked effectively together or were part of a team that worked effectively. Themes are drawn from the stories about what makes the difference. The team creates a dream of how they would like to work and identiﬁes how to take forward their positive experience and build toward their positive future. There is no need to sap everyone’s energy by analysing why things go wrong, there is no need to point accusing ﬁngers. The energy and momentum is carried forward from the positive. The structure involved is a simple four-stage process (Figure 8.3), which is used in most AI interventions (Watkins and Mohr, 2001), sometimes with the addition of a Deﬁnition phase before discovery, where the aims of the work are outlined. Despite the beneﬁts of this, it is amazing how challenging it can be not to follow a route of critique, for facilitators, leaders and team members. Conﬂict and tension can actually arise because of people’s frustration at not being able to criticize or give someone that poignant piece of feedback they have been storing up. AI does give space for messages of this kind, where people are able to

Discovery (appreciating that which gives life)

Delivery (sustaining the change)

Dream (envisioning impact)

Design (co-constructing the future)

Figure 8.3 Four-stage process of AI (Watkins and Mohr, 2001)

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ask something of each other: instead of pointing out what is wrong, however, people request how they would like someone to behave instead; their wishes for the future, rather than their criticisms of the past. The impact of the difference this gives needs perhaps to be experienced to be understood. In our experience, certain differences between people simply become less important as energy is focused on the ultimate and common aspirations for the future. AI and conﬂict

There is sometimes a perception of AI that it is all a bit ‘nicey-nicey’ and is not robust enough to work with conﬂict. There are, however, many stories of how AI principles have been used in some of the most conﬂict ridden situations, such as Northern Ireland, Bosnia and South Africa. In the latter case, a Reconciliation Initiative used AI questions to enable groups from different cultures to understand more about each other and about how to create new relationships. Questions included for example: ‘I would like to understand what reconciliation means to you personally. Tell me of a time when you, or someone close to you, has had the opportunity to reconcile with another person. What happened? Who was involved? How did you feel? What did you learn about reconciliation’. Working through questions such as this in dialogue with others enabled people to start the work of building relationships out of conﬂict and distrust. (White and Nemeroff, 2005) The focus is not on going back through the pain, but on seeing what can be learnt from the difﬁculty, what positives can be taken from it and applied to the future that we want to create. Even if the most positive thing someone has to hold on to is that they survived, this has been seen to start a process of rebuilding. Within organizations, there are many stories of how individuals have begun to repair relationships as a result of interviewing each other, ﬁnding out what brings that person most to life, what they care about. When people connect in this way, the possibilities open up. AI has been used with teams to enable them not to ‘work through’ conﬂict and painfully recreate their same patterns of distrust, but to get on with the task of building anew, of valuing the best of what they bring and of what they could bring. And then again…

‘Worldworks’ is a process that uses the different perspectives we all hold and encourages people to take the space fully to express them, actively to disagree with each other. The example we have seen in action was at a conference, where the facilitator (Max Schupbach, www.maxfxx.net) agreed a topic of discussion on which 180

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there were different opinions. He then simply asked people to speak in disagreement with someone’s viewpoint. Very shortly, a room of 200 or so people were having a dialogue which was fascinating as all the different views were given permission to be surfaced. People gained a broader perspective of the issue. It was unsettling, continuing to be uncomfortable long after it ended, but enlightening to hear genuine differences on an issue. The process has been used in some very challenging settings, including for example with prison ofﬁcers and prisoners. It is a part of the ‘deep democracy’ movement, which works on the principle that people are entitled to have a voice, but often are not heard in our need to ﬁnd compromise and agreement.

Applying techniques from change methodologies Without adopting the processes whole scale, it is feasible to adopt certain techniques from these change methodologies. Here are some ‘quick-hits’ that might prove useful. ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Ask people what they would wish for, rather than what they don’t like Draw from stories of success and desire Ask people to talk about what they are most proud of and what they are sorriest about, in relation to a particular situation Map the history of the group, so that people can get the ‘whole picture’ Encourage people to talk about what they do agree on and action plan from there Use a collective mind map to assess all the issues involved (you can do this with up to about 60 people) Go with people’s energy and choices about where to spend time in discussion meetings, within an agreed overall objective

Summary In this chapter, we have approached conﬂict from a positive perspective, seeking ways to energize the organization, using conﬂict as an indicator of passion and interest. Facilitative leadership offers practical tools for energizing a group and working with disagreement. Informed by a greater understanding of creativity, HR and line managers can seek to encourage difference as a way of improving the organization’s ability to innovate and ﬁnd solutions through change. The notion of the ‘edge of chaos’ offers a mindset for working with energy in organizations, understanding how to avoid the restrictions of too much order, while avoiding complete chaos. Finally, methodologies such as Open Space, Future Search and Appreciative Inquiry provide radical approaches to change by enabling people to work in dialogue, incorporating conﬂict in differing ways as a feature of transformation and progress. 181

9 Holistically Healthy Organizations In this chapter, we move in and out of the metaphor of the organization as a living system, allowing it to inform our thinking about change and conﬂict and yet not presuppose that we can learn everything about these areas from living systems alone. Our own thoughts are that the areas covered in each chapter leading to this point will add differing perspectives to what we think and how we feel about change and conﬂict. The journey of the book now aims to take the reader to a more emergent and holistic place. As with all the possible strategies for supporting others with the challenges they face in the organization, we only attempt to support you in your own transitional journey, not dictate the right path for your own context. We will look at the notion of building the immune system and pay attention to health, well-being and meaning in the organization. In our view, paying attention to these aspects before conﬂicts become entrenched is more likely to engender a culture in which people feel able to express their feelings and needs. Health in this context encompasses mind, spirit, body and emotions. First let’s explain some terms: Closed systems – closed systems thinking would assume that organizations are self-contained with no connection to their outside world. Here the systems and processes, policies, procedures and controls are in the foreground and seen to be of primary importance in terms of ‘managing’ change. Closed systems emphasize stability, security, clear boundaries and tight controls. Conﬂict in a closed system is seen as a problem which has resulted from a failing in the controls or procedures. The problem is most likely to be rectiﬁed by tightening procedures or bringing in a new system. Open, living systems – open systems thinking takes account of the fact that organizations exist in relation to a whole host of external factors. As with other living systems (the human body is an obvious example), they have a symbiotic

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relationship of complex interactions with the external environment. The sense of the whole does not come from looking at the individual parts, rather their interaction with each other. Change and conﬂict in this context mean supporting individuals to make sense of their work and relationships to each other in the context of the external world. Understanding the internal and external relationships and what creates meaning for people is a more likely approach to ‘working with’ change and conﬂict. The nature of change and conﬂict is of primary importance, working with the natural forces that present themselves rather than trying to control or manage them. In this chapter we look at: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

What do we mean by organizational health? What does approaching an organization as a living system tell us about change and conﬂict? How do people create meaning for themselves within the work context? What are organizations doing to pay attention to health and well-being at an individual, group and organizational level? How can we take a holistic view on the health of an organization?

What do we mean by organizational health? When people think about personal health, usually the physical dimension is the one that comes most readily to mind. A more holistic concept of health would also encompass the mind, emotions and spirit: what we think, how we feel and what we feel strongly connected to in a meaningful way. This also links to some of the things we paid attention to in Chapter 5 in terms of having a healthy view of self and others. Good esteem would be a core in our view to personal and organizational health in that whether I am physically well or not, my self-concept is balanced and accepting, whether or not change is needed in some way. Being healthy and well includes authenticity and congruence and encompasses our being and our doing. Our being is about who we essentially are; our fundamental values and beliefs, our personality and perspective on the world. Our doing includes our skills and behaviours and how we interact with the world at large. Being healthy and well means a balance between our being and doing so that we are able to act congruently, with our values, beliefs and assumptions matching what we do on a daily basis. This looks straightforward in text but, in practice, it is much more complex. As we discussed on an individual level in Chapter 5, an important starting point is how self-aware we are, how we esteem ourselves and how resilient we are in dealing with the day to day. These same concepts apply at an organizational level. 183

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Health and well-being

Doing: behaviours processes, systems, structures, skills, strategies – what we do

Congruence

Being: purpose, personality, values, beliefs and drivers – who we are

External factors

Figure 9.1 Aspects of health and well-being

Figure 9.1 shows the differing aspects of health and well-being and can be applied to any system – either at an individual, group or organizational level.

External factors: What impacts on who we are and what we do? On an individual level, the more attuned we can become to the external environment and the potential for what might impact on our overall health, the more likely we are to be able to minimize the risk of disease and illness. For example, by being aware of the toxins in everyday products and limiting these, our needs for good quality air, water, food and exercise and nurturing relationships with others, we are more likely to stay healthy and well. We touched on the notion of toxicity in Chapter 5 and this would include recognizing relationships with others that are damaging our self-esteem in some way. At an organizational level, we can pay attention to the external factors that might adversely affect the health of the organization. For example, partnering or supplying services to organizations which do not match the values and beliefs of our business can also impact on the overall self-esteem of the organization, leaving us with an uncomfortable question about who we really are and what we stand for. Arie De Geus writes about the corporate immune system in terms of its role in ‘maintaining equilibrium with the intruders from the outside world’ (De Geus, 1997). The notion here is that there may be perceived attacks on the organization from other companies or stakeholders which are self-serving rather than symbiotic in nature. In symbiosis, two or more seemingly competing entities live side 184

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by side in a mutually supportive way. The cleaner ﬁsh, for example, swims into the shark’s mouth and cleans its teeth, getting a meal into the bargain. The shark allows this to happen because it helps with its own healthy functioning. In the best case scenario, a merger (for example) would be a truly symbiotic relationship, both or all getting something from the relationship with the other. If we think about the function of ‘skin’ in a human system, it performs a remarkable service in providing a ﬂexible and protective shield between us and the outside world. It has to keep us warm, prevent microorganisms from entering the body, regulate temperature, heal wounds and keep ﬂuids in. The boundaries of organizations with the external environment need to be equally ﬂexible and protective, so environmental scanning on a continual basis is one way to keep attuned to the potential opportunities and threats from the external environment. The greater the networks people in the organization have with those outside and the stronger the relationships with stakeholders, the more robust the health of the organization is likely to be. People who have a strong sense of the values and philosophy of the organization, the ways of working, the nature of the business and strategy for the future will also help to add sufﬁcient ﬂexible protection to the boundaries of the business.

Organizational being: Who are we? Rather than a checklist about what makes a healthy organization in terms of personality, this is about knowing what our personality is. Do we collectively have a strong identity and sense of self; not just to our customers but to every individual who works here? The links here are to the culture of the organization, what it stands for and what is important in terms of the values and beliefs. Many people we work with talk about ‘the organization’ as if it is a distinct entity apart from themselves. This disconnect is one indicator of the incongruence of the organization. If people in the organization talk about it as if they own it (‘we’ rather than ‘it’), then you could say that the organization has a healthy concept of itself. Does the organization accept itself ‘warts and all’. Are people in the organization prepared to say what the business is contributing to its employees, customers, other stakeholders and the community more widely? And are they prepared to own up to where more emphasis and energy need to be placed? We sometimes ask people to think of the organization as a metaphor, as this frees up creative thinking and allows people to reﬂect on aspects which might not readily come to light in a more linear description. Sometimes people will use a mode of transport. For example: ‘This organization is like a Morris Minor – a bit quaint, old fashioned, nice to look at from the outside but needs attention regularly, not the fastest car on the track, but much loved and with a loyal following.’ 185

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Following this through with values, beliefs and drivers these might include: valuing tradition and history, keeping things going and doing them well rather than recreating the wheel, believing in humility, being respectful to each other, benevolent, slow and steady wins the race, and so on. This metaphor may or may not work in terms of where the organization needs to be given the external environment, but that is another story. This is about what we know about ourselves as an organization and how universally that is understood across the different divisions. When there are very different metaphors or understandings of who the organization is, people can feel confused and isolated. ‘I thought I knew what we stood for, but now I’m not sure anymore’. This is quite common during change in a continually ﬂuctuating external environment but do we keep having the conversations? Roffey Park’s report, ‘In search of meaning in the workplace’ (Holbeche and Springett, 2004), makes the link between meaning and work and the notion of corporate spirituality. Through focus groups and a questionnaire, a number of aspects of meaning at work were explored with participants generally agreeing that there was a spiritual vacuum at work. What was important for people included congruence, respect, integrity, authenticity and honesty. In the Quest for Meaning in the Workplace (QMW) survey of 210 respondents across all sectors, the elements which make up meaning for people was explored and included: ■

■ ■ ■ ■

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Good work – work which people felt connected to, aligned with their own personal values and which they felt energized and stimulated by. Activity which allows full expression, enjoyment and the development of conﬁdence. Being interconnected with others – relationships to others was seen as an important factor and having relationships which went beyond the transactional. Autonomy and respect – being able to make decisions and choices, being treated fairly and acting with integrity were included here. Balance – being able to manage personal commitments and having a ﬂexible working environment to be more able to balance work and home life. Making a difference to others – many of the comments from the survey included being able to do something that felt worthwhile, making a positive difference to the lives of others. Trust – although most respondents felt that trust was limited in their organizations, particularly in terms of trusting senior managers, most mentioned it as an important factor, linked to integrity. Lack of trust included: unclear vision and resultant confusion, lack of communication and consultation, unprofessional behaviour, hidden agendas, poor leadership and poor performance management. Alignment of personal/work values – some of the responses here were linked to religious beliefs and the alignment of (for example) Christian values with the values of the organization.

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Making work a part of life’s mission – several examples of the importance of this for people. For example: ‘We spend a lot of hours at work. For me, those hours need to be connected to beneﬁting individuals in some way. This element is connected to my higher purpose of helping to heal the world’.

Organizational doing Organizations we work with still seem to be predominantly focused on doing rather than being; activity rather than reﬂection. This shows in a number of ways through a preoccupation with the task rather than relationships, an overly busy diary, constant ﬂow of information in the form of e-mails, texts, phone calls and messages and so on. It also shows (when out of balance with the being elements) in an emphasis on personal agendas and an inability to show appreciation of others readily. The concept of work–life balance is being redeﬁned all the time and will mean very different things to individuals in different organizations. Having said that, ‘balance’ still seems to be a desirable commodity in terms of being able to have a life outside of the tasks and relationships at work. Statistics show that reported stress within the organization is still a big issue, with people feeling they have to sacriﬁce a healthy work–life balance if they want to get on in the organization and, in some cases, keep their job. Trying to balance the demands of the workplace and still spend time with family can contribute to individual stress levels and lead to a culture of organizational burn out. For example, the ﬁgures from Roffey Park’s Management Agenda, (Garrow and Stirling, 2007) across 490 managers in differing sectors show that 68 percent experience stress as a result of work. The CIPD factsheet (2007) bears this out showing: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

20.1 percent of employees in the UK work long hours (over 45 hours a week) DTI report shows that men aged 30–49 tend to work the longest hours CIPD survey (2003) showed more than 1 in 4 respondents reported a negative impact on their health 2 out of 5 reported a negative impact on their relationships Most respondents reported negative effects on their job performance.

This doing side of the organization in relation to health is more concerned with the tangible aspects of what we do and how we do it: the behaviours, processes, systems, structures, skills and strategies. Do our systems, behaviours and ways of doing things generally in the organization match with our values and beliefs and how we see ourselves? If they do, then we are likely to have an overall sense of congruence as an organization. For example, our business may be highly competitive with an emphasis on beating the other suppliers in our market and the way 187

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we see ourselves might be fast paced, creative, unorthodox even and risk taking, but do the systems, processes and behaviours support these values and beliefs and the way we need to be? An overly bureaucratic process will potentially stiﬂe innovation and speed.

Congruence between being and doing There may be a sense that doing is in some way a negative aspect of organizational life, but it is, of course, essential in terms of getting work done and focusing on the priorities and tasks in order to achieve the objectives. Where this aspect impacts negatively on health is perhaps where it becomes detached from the values and heart of the organization; the emotional side and attention to relationships and meaning. Here, the design of the organization is an important factor and how congruent the design is to its aims and values. Does the design of the organization ﬁt the values and ethos of how we purport to be, what we espouse to be important and the strategic objectives of the organization? As this chapter is about health and well-being, we have included a model of design based around the human circulatory system and its fractal dimensions taken from the work of Elizabeth McMillan (2002). This is an interesting model of design because it is most closely aligned to a living open system. McMillan considers organizational structure and design from a complexity paradigm (Figure 9.2).

Ethos and values artery Competitors

Innovations Project space

Customers

Futures

Resources

Chill out Opportunities Safeties

a Risks

b c Heart e d Learning

Externals Global perspectives

Legals Experiences Shareholders

Local/ national perspectives

Project space Intelligence artery Purpose/s artery External landscapes

Figure 9.2 McMillan’s fractal web (reproduced by kind permission of the author)

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The model emphasizes a constant ﬂow of energy with permeable vessels allowing for greater spontaneity to respond to work, access information and build relationships. It is quite different from a typical organagram with hierarchical or even matrix structures and people reporting in to various levels. The arteries are all linked with access to the external environment and each other and its ﬂexibility means people can respond more quickly to events guided by an overall sense of direction and purpose (purpose artery). Project teams form as and when needed in response to ideas and information ﬂowing through the system. This self-organized structure needs aligned values and principles to support it (ethos and values artery). Every level takes on the ethos and values of the organization. It is fractal by nature in the sense that, however you slice the structure, it is replicated on a different scale with the same properties throughout. If the organization grows, more arteries, spaces or chambers may be needed to function effectively. Continuous ﬂow is part of the design and each space is dynamic in nature. The blood vessels, as in a human system, carry essential nutrients to constituent parts and the overall health of the system is kept by constant evolvement and communication. The inner chambers, a, b, c and d, represent core or essential principles of the organization. The idea is for everyone in the organization to move around to the different spaces, even if they are specialists, so that everyone shares a responsibility for the overall health of the organization. Leadership is distributed throughout and may also emerge for differing aspects of the work. At ﬁrst sight it may seem that this design would not work in your organization, particularly if it is large and essentially based on policies and procedures. However, it might be useful to think about the principles that underlie this more ﬂexible and adaptive way of working including: ■

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Team work and collaboration – by encouraging a climate which puts teamwork and collaboration high on the agenda and fosters difference as a valuable commodity, organizations are signalling that people are central to the success of the business. With more remote working, people can feel increasingly isolated and unmotivated to achieve the organizational goals. A sense of shared purpose and feelings of inclusion are more likely to engender high performance. Having compassion for others – how much compassion is there in the organization? Compassion is reﬂected in actions, so how much do people’s actions in the organization reﬂect an understanding or empathy for others feelings and situation? In times of change, do people really connect with others whose situation may be different from their own as a result of change? By ﬁnding ways to connect people on a human level and encouraging them to have open and honest conversations with each other, they are more likely to feel understood. Proactively look for opportunities to help team members in a meaningful way. 189

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Demonstrating trust – individuals need to trust that they have something to offer through change and that they have skills and knowledge that can still be used and built on even though the situation and context might change. They also need to know that they can be inﬂuential and trust that their inﬂuence can make a difference. Trust comes into the equation again in terms of trusting other people and how they might use the information that is given freely in a more adaptive system. Behaviours more likely to build up trust include: initiating contact, showing affection and caring; knowing your boundaries around contact with others but being prepared to make a move towards others. Moving towards rather than away from or against is a way of helping to make organizations more human. Trust in an organizational sense as well as on an individual level is built up over time. Communication and trust are inextricably linked and a regular concern through change is that senior managers are withholding information. We easily ﬁll in the gaps when not given a full picture. The reality might be just about highlighting where the gaps are. Building organizational conﬁdence – cultivate a climate of taking acceptable risks. This comes through moving away from fear and blame into a place of unconditional acceptance. ‘Love’ is not a word commonly associated with organizations and particularly with the cut and thrust of competitive market places. However, few would dispute that love is a fundamental need and considering we spend most of our time at work, what a soulless place it would be if there were no love in the climate. If we work in an environment where we know colleagues will support us and the senior managers are prepared to back us in difﬁcult circumstances, we could be said to work in an environment where love exists. In times of change, we can return to child-like states seeking reassurance and nurturing so that we retain sufﬁcient self-esteem to be able to take risks, grow and learn. The interactions of others around us are fundamental to helping us keep our sense of self worth. Acting mindfully – this includes doing what you say you will do; turning up for meetings; actively engaging and giving your views; following through on actions; considering how your decisions meet both individual and organizational needs; being prepared to speak out against actions which seem harmful to others (e.g. bullying behaviour); confronting difﬁcult issues; having a clear purpose and acting with integrity. If you really value the organization, being prepared to work with the issues you feel uncomfortable with and if there is no inﬂuence you can bring on the situation, being prepared to walk away.

The process of healing Throughout this book we have explored different approaches to looking at and supporting change and conﬂict. A traditional or rational perspective might 190

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include ‘managing’ change and ‘resolving’ conﬂict. If we align these notions now to the concept of health, these approaches are sometimes linear in nature and may deal with the symptoms rather than the root cause. Naturopathy as an approach to healing aligns itself with holistic or whole systems approaches with a key belief in the body’s ability to heal itself. A naturopath will provide personalized care to each person, seeing them as a holistic unity of body, mind and spirit. The remedies a naturopath might recommend, therefore, include a wide range of possible interventions. In the same way, a naturopathic approach to change and conﬂict would be to see the organization as a whole system working with what is manifesting during times of change, rather than suppressing any symptoms of conﬂict. If a system is in trouble, it can be restored to health by connecting it to more of itself. To make a system stronger, we need to create stronger relationships. This principle has taught me that I can have faith in the system. The system is capable of solving its own problems. The solutions the system needs are usually present in it. If a system is suffering, this indicates that it lacks sufﬁcient access to itself. It might be lacking information, it might have lost clarity about who it is, it might have troubled relationships, it might be ignoring those who have valuable insights. (Margaret Wheatley, 2006) In Chapter 7, we made the link to reﬂective practices where, effectively, people gain more access to themselves and the wider community in order to learn and grow. Here, we return to these themes in relation to the energetic ﬁeld of the organization. Paying attention to the ‘vital force’ or energetic ﬁeld will be an important aspect of organizational health. Vital force is the basis of health and disease in naturopathic practice and can be described as our energy or electromagnetic ﬁeld, known as ‘chi’ in Chinese medicine and ‘prana’ in Ayurvedic medicine. Some approaches to change can interrupt the ﬂow of energy through the system. Suppression is one form of interruption. Signs and symptoms are the vital force reacting in the best possible way to remind us that the body is not well. For example, fever is a natural response, like a defence mechanism reacting to something unbalanced in our system. Emotional release is also an important aspect to healing. We have worked with a number of organizations where there is little attention to the emotional aspects associated with change. During training events or coaching sessions, people sometimes surprise themselves to ﬁnd they are talking about emotions or more openly expressing them through anger, tears, sometimes laughter which has felt suppressed in the organization. To suppress a fever or cold in our human system or other sign that our vital force is reacting to illness is perhaps neither appropriate nor healthy. We can suppress the vital force, not only by medicines but also by our behaviour. For example, by not paying attention to the signs or symptoms early enough, resulting in compromised overall health. Alternatively, a ‘healing 191

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crisis’ (in naturopathic terms) can occur when detoxiﬁcation happens at too great a speed; this can be very unpleasant and confusing for the individual experiencing it. In an organizational context, interventions which force out symptoms too quickly or aggressively, (e.g. a badly managed team event) may leave people more distressed than is helpful. In the healing process from a naturopathic perspective, a cure can be seen to take place when the symptoms appear in reverse order. This is known as Hering’s Law (in Cazalet, 2001) so, for example, a skin rash or eczema might ﬂare up as an externalization of an asthmatic condition (skin and lungs being connected in Chinese diagnostics). A fungal infection on the skin might worsen once treatment is given for unfriendly bacteria being present in the intestine, before it eventually disappears. When working with change, rather than seeing resistance as a problem, we might choose to view this as the systems way of healing itself, externalizing the changes taking place at a more fundamental level. The release of emotions can be an indication of healing occurring, so it is important to create opportunities for people to talk about their emotions during change. A recent event on supporting change highlighted the need for people (in small groups) to talk about their feelings of disconnection from the transactional way in which managers were going through a ‘tick box’ approach to change. It became clear that what was mostly missing was a quality of attention to how people were feeling and allowing an opportunity for them to talk and be listened to. A question here from a naturopathic perspective is: how can we stimulate the healing power of the system? In Chapter 8, we covered Appreciative Inquiry as a method for taking the best of what is present in the organization and applying it for the future. Another aspect of a naturopathic approach is to look for whatever already exists in the system that we can work with, rather than introducing something new. This might include people, systems, skills, stakeholders, resources and processes. Rather than discarding what we already have (which has, perhaps, become a predisposition in a society caught up with the next new ideology), recycling what is already present.

Ways to support change from a naturopathic perspective There are a number of ways in which we can help people during times of change by working with the issues, people’s emotions and energies and supporting conﬂicts as and when they arise as part of the natural process of moving from one state to another. Here are a few ideas to pull together some of the previous sections. ■ ■

Allow opportunities for people to express their emotional reactions during change Work with existing groups, processes and systems rather than inventing new ones

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See the interconnected nature of the organization rather than apply a piecemeal approach Allow any ‘toxic’ aspects of the culture (see Chapter 3) to come to the surface rather than suppress them Apply an appreciative approach by highlighting what’s working well (see Chapter 8) Pay attention to needs as well as wants at an individual as well as organizational level Look at any underlying causes rather than treating symptoms of conﬂict arising from change

Positive psychology From a health perspective, much has been written about the psychological affects of attitude and a positive or optimistic outlook. Research has shown that, statistically, people recover from illness more quickly and live longer if they have an optimistic outlook. Other factors do, of course, count, but recent research suggests people with a positive outlook on older age can live up to 7.5 years longer than people with negative self-perceptions about getting older (Levy et al., 2002). The ﬁeld of positive psychology emerged from the work of Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Society (APS) and correlations are made between positive emotions such as joy, contentment, gratitude and love to improved performance (Isen in Frederickson, 2003). Gratitude, for example, is an interesting emotion and rarely found in organizational life. We often work in organizations where the primary aim of the business is making other people’s lives better. The charitable sector is, of course, a natural example. However, people in the organization often lose sight of its primary purpose and so lose a sense of gratitude for an opportunity to work in this way, even though it is often the thing that attracted them to the organization in the ﬁrst place. In Frederickson’s article, gratitude is most closely linked to resilience and resilience through change is a fundamental criterion for health. Anyone who has experienced bereavement will know that along with the grief, sadness and possibly guilt, there are often emotions of heightened gratitude, relief and joy, to still have life and be a part of the world. In an organizational context, paying attention to these emotions through and after difﬁcult times is important. At a recent workshop on supporting change, people were able to express their gratitude for still being in the organization when many colleagues had lost their jobs or were under threat of this happening in the near future. 193

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A Gestalt approach to organizational health ‘Gestalt’ is a German word for which there is no exact English equivalent but, in essence, it means a pattern or ﬁeld of data making a whole. In each gestalt at any one time an aspect of the situation, together with associated feelings and thoughts, will either be in the foreground or background. Gestalt as an approach is therefore based on the view that, in order for us to function healthily as human beings, we need to pay attention to identifying and satisfying needs at the emotional and physical levels. This cycle of experience is the ebbing and ﬂowing of energy sometimes also known as the contact–withdrawal cycle. The four stages of contact were originally described by Perls et al. (1951), as fore-contact, contacting, ﬁnal-contact and post-contact. This original theory and the stages have been extended in Figure 9.3 to eight stages from sensation through to creative void (Barber, 2006). The idea here is that human awareness begins with a sensation through our ﬁve primary senses: what we see, hear, feel, taste, touch and smell. Awareness is continuous and ongoing and arises out of our sensations. Mobilization gears us up to act; gets our energy going in readiness to do something and helps us to differentiate about the priorities in the moment for action. This is known as differentiating between what is in the foreground and background.

Awareness of needs Sensation

Mobilization

Action

Creative void

Contact

Withdrawal

Figure 9.3 Cycle of experience

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Satisfaction

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Action brings the ﬁrst three stages together in terms of doing something based on our increasing awareness. Contact is our active engagement with whatever is in the foreground of our experience and, if followed through, will achieve satisfaction. The last two phases are the completion of the cycle in terms of achieving closure on the current experience and lying ready for the next sensation. At an individual level, for example, we might become aware of feeling stiff and cold having sat for a long period of time. We recognize in that moment a need physically to move our body and stimulate muscles that have been dormant for a while. We prepare to ready ourselves for some activity, including making some choices about what exercise might suit our mood and then carry this out, achieving in the action contact and satisfaction and so the cycle goes on. Because of the complexity of levels of need, we may or may not achieve full satisfaction. If (for example) a simultaneous need is for empathy from someone else and access to this is not available, the exercise may or may not result in a satisfactory gestalt. The links to health here are based on an assumption that by achieving greater contact and satisfaction we limit the amount of emotional baggage that we carry around. In other words, the more we can clear up unﬁnished business (thoughts and emotions that have not been worked through, understood or acted upon) the more likely we are to have a sense of well-being. This is not the same as being physically healthy, although physical health in our view can be impacted by our emotional well-being. Symptoms of stress are a classic example of this and are often the aspect of employee health causing most concern in organizations because of the time needed off for recovery. For an individual experiencing change in the organization (or at any other time), the cycle might be interrupted at any stage. For example, an announcement about a change in work practice is made which impacts on this individual and their future in the organization. They may remain disconnected from any emotional reaction to the announcement; they may be aware of feeling anxious and confused but be unable to do anything with these emotions; or they may absorb themselves in the detail of their day-to-day tasks. In each of these examples any underlying needs of the individual may be blocked from working through the cycle in a more satisfying way. In relation to working with gestalt as an approach at an organizational level: Gestalt practitioners attune to everything; they attempt to look at the current state of ‘the total situation’; the ‘gestalt’ or pattern, with a view to illuminating the complex ever-changing characteristics of organizational life, where everything that occurs, interactions, feelings as well as the fantasies of individual members are seen to say something about the wider context or the organizational ﬁeld. 195

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A gestalt consultant doesn’t ‘plan for change’ or ‘employ strategic interventions’ but rather liberates change through the impact of awareness. They ‘illuminate the current organizational situation’ by highlighting interests and needs and drawing attention to how individuals, groups and organizations perceive themselves right now. If what they uncover is meaningful and attention is grabbed, group awareness shifts and hey presto ‘change’ occurs. (Barber, 2006) Table 9.1 is Paul Barber’s work which suggests that a facilitator working in an organizational context should work to undo interruptions to contact with an aim of facilitating renewed energy for movement and involvement at various stages of the cycle. When reading through these descriptions of various states within the organizational context you may well have a sense of what is happening within your own setting. The use of an experienced external facilitator can help to reveal some of the less helpful aspects of behaviour and empower people to move forward with greater contact and satisfaction. There is a case study at the end of the book which reﬂects Barber’s work, using gestalt within an organizational setting.

Health and well-being strategies Our ability to deal with change and stress is often compromised when our physical and mental health is paid little attention. If we put our organizational naturopath hat on once more we might have health and well-being in the foreground for our approach to working with change in the organization, so that if individuals, groups and the organization overall have a sense of well-being and vitality they are more likely to be resilient and resourceful when dealing with challenging times at any of these levels. Many organizations are now paying greater attention to the issues of health and, more broadly, well-being, often as a response to increasing sickness and stress levels. More commonly, the approach pays attention to the physical aspects of health by bringing in health monitoring procedures (e.g. blood pressure checks and cholesterol testing). However, there are a wide range of health and wellbeing interventions that might be considered including: health promotion events, lunch and learn sessions, subsidized gym membership, healthy eating campaigns, working in the community schemes, awareness on disability events, stress awareness seminars, competitions, support for carers, ﬂexible working options, access to counselling services, tai-chi classes, yoga or other ﬁtness classes and regular social events. 196

Holistically Healthy Organizations Table 9.1 Interruptions to the cycle of experience

1. Interruptions between withdrawal and sensation – the suppressed state Teams or companies unable to move from withdrawal into sensation are in a profoundly disconnected state; having little sensory input they rarely show feelings or excitement, are withdrawn and tend to rely on mechanistic rules/controls. Remedy – Draw attention to the sensory world and waken the client–system to the sights and sounds around them; coach them to move and engage. 2. Interruptions between sensation and awareness – the hysterical state Teams or companies blocked between sensation and awareness experience sensations but do not know what they mean or what to do with them; habitually respond with emotional excitability; are dramatic, chaotic or excited by turn. Remedy – Develop sensitivity to the interrelationship between environmental causes, social action and psychological effects and encourage strategic thinking and action. 3. Interruptions between awareness and mobilization of energy – the aware and angry state Teams or companies here are unable to move from awareness to the mobilization of energy, there is much intellectual rumination but little movement; energy is blocked for fear of unleashing emotions which threaten control; blaming others and holding on to hurts is the norm. Remedy – Encourage the client–system to feel its emotional energy and to consider experimental action. 4. Interruptions between mobilization of energy and action – the fearful state When teams or companies are blocked here, the wheels spin at a great rate but they are unable to act to get what they want; they play safe and because change includes ‘risk’, experimentation and action are avoided. Remedy – Encourage expression and engagement with emotional energy and support the client–system as it experiments with behaviour strategies. 5. Interruptions between action and contact – the task state Teams and companies stuck here feel diffused and needy, boundaries are felt to be weak and emotional diffusion renders engagement superﬁcial; there is an obsession with detail and performing tasks to perfection, people are serious and output is high. Remedy – Help the client–system locate and release its energy; build up a sense of empowerment and self-identity; self-control and mindful self-expression. 6. Interruptions between contact and withdrawal – the burnout state Teams and organizations that cannot turn off or rest may strive to achieve a continuous high, but can’t let go and tend to hang on to an experience long after it has served its purpose. Remedy – Focus upon the stress that is resulting from lack of rest and on what needs to happen to complete an activity; build an appreciation of how to recognize when something is ﬁnished.

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Some organizations are further ahead than others in taking a more holistic approach as in the example below taken from “High Impact Healthy Workplace Interventions” (PA Consulting Group, 2007).

Case study 9.1 British Gas Business (adapted from PA Consulting Group) Background The BGB Leadership Team was keen to bring in a culture of empowering employees. A part of this culture is the belief that a healthy workforce is good for business. Fundamental to this is that health and well-being initiatives should not be forced on employees. The organization provides information and interventions and employees choose to get involved or not. The Health and Safety team have rebranded their work to encompass health and well-being and have been successful in increasing employee interest in well-being at work.

Key actions taken ■

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Benchmarking exercise with organizations quoted as being in the top 50 companies as the best places to work (The Great Place to Work Institute) Quarterly employee surveys and focus groups to ask people what they felt would improve their well-being Interventions designed around employee feedback to signal involvement and full participation Rebranding health and safety to ‘health and well-being’ Voluntary approach to taking part in health and well-being initiatives Stress interventions aimed at giving people opportunities to have more fun Voluntary community schemes where employees have an opportunity to undertake voluntary work for charities Workplace competitions including rafﬂes Workplace football teams and competitions Employee assistance programmes Support for carers Flexible working options Twice yearly health events Leaﬂets and information on employee facilities Staff involvement in designing new ofﬁces

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Key pointers for other organizations ■ ■ ■

Make sure the company has a holistic approach to health and well-being and that it ﬁts with other HR and organizational objectives Consult employees on their views and don’t dictate Keep the momentum going by coming up with new ideas and interventions

Results British Gas has seen a 12 percent reduction in staff absence and a 25 percent reduction in staff turnover in the past two years. This is attributed to a range of initiatives including the health and well-being strategy. There has also been an increase in employee engagement and commitment scores from its annual employee survey. Several awards have also been won including in the Financial Times ‘Great Places to Work’ and the Sunday Times ‘Best Companies to Work for’.

PA Consulting Group has pulled together some common themes in relation to the health and well-being strategies adopted by employers including: ■

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Getting the basics right ﬁrst – accurate information on absences from work; effective management of short- and long-term absences; timely occupational health support; developing an engaging organizational culture and investing in line management people skills Being clear about what you want to achieve – health and well-being interventions as part of the people plan. Focus on reducing absence or making employees feel valued at work. Or both. Take a systematic approach – having a clear business case to gain senior management support, clear objectives and an estimate of likely pay back. Good ways of accessing evaluation data on progress Make it ﬁt – make it holistic – stand alone health interventions are less likely to be successful than those that are integrated into other aspects of the HR/ People strategy – e.g. improving absence data, training managers, performance management etc. Engage your staff – asking people what they think would help improve health and well-being Make any interventions suit all your staff – linking the interventions around the jobs that people do and how they do it, for example shift patterns. 199

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Consider diversity issues and what might suit individual needs. For example, not relying solely on intranet questionnaires Measure impact and progress – as part of a wider health strategy to feed back data to senior managers and demonstrate the value of the interventions. For example, by measuring staff uptake of different activities Sustainability is key – mainstreaming activities as part of normal business for long-lasting effects for staff and customers.

Summary Viewing the organization as an open living system, which is impacted by the relationships and connections it has with the outside and its own inner world, can help us work with change and conﬂict in a more meaningful way. Viewing both change and conﬂict as part of the natural evolutionary cycle of the organization, paying attention to how we are being as well as how we are doing brings an emphasis on health in the most holistic sense. Seeing that people come to the organization in the whole, with their feelings and needs as well as their thinking and capabilities means a more compassionate approach to working alongside each other. A more compassionate and empathic organization means people feel cared about as well as ‘for’ and are more likely to feel a sense of connection with themselves, each other and the primary purpose of the organization. Being cared for generally takes the form of systems and processes to help support people’s health and well-being. Being cared about is sometimes as simple as saying ‘how are you?’ and really listening to the answer.

Questions to consider for developing a healthy organization ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

What would a healthy organization look like? And have we ever discussed or identiﬁed this? What is the shared purpose of the organization? And how clear are people who work in the organization on this shared purpose? What are the values that are lived out in the day-to-day behaviours of people in the organization? What aspects of the current culture of the organization do we need to keep? How are differences recognized and celebrated? What purpose do rituals, stories and present behaviours serve? How can the needs of individuals, groups and the organization overall best be met? What systems, processes, structures and other elements of the culture keep us in a state of dis-ease?

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What behaviours do we want to promote, highlight and see more of in the organization in the future? How are the ways in which people communicate with each other in the organization either supporting a healthy self-concept or not? What healing processes are in place to help people sustain quick recovery – particularly during change?

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10 The Bigger Picture: Community In the 21st century, many organizations are re-examining their place and purpose in society. New organizations are being established that operate from principles, as well as ﬁnancial sustainability, in a similar way perhaps to the Quaker organizations of the 19th century. Employees and customers are looking to organizations to be more responsible, to be more meaningful. The challenge of change and conﬂict, therefore, has a very different edge to it. The challenge is no longer simply internal, but very much external as well, with the organization needing to pay attention to its place in our social context, in terms of what it means to its various stakeholders. Within our society, organizations of all kinds have a fundamental role. They are the places where most people spend most of their time. They provide the goods, services, needs of all of us, in one way or another. They are a powerful force in our world. As we have seen, however, working within them is also problematic: as we seek to adapt them to ﬁt our changing requirements and work within the increasingly complex technical and economic world around us, our lives are also disrupted through constant change programmes and the conﬂict that this inevitably seems to create. In this ﬁnal chapter, we ask what alternatives there are for the role of organizations in society and for the way that we perceive and experience them. From a practical viewpoint, we ask what difference this would make to our daily experience of organizations and to how we can get the most from them. The questions we will consider are: ■ ■ ■

What difference would it make if we considered organizations as communities, where people had a sense of meaning and belonging? What is the role of organizations in relation to the rest of society? What responsibility do they have and how can they action that responsibility? How does understanding the way organizations work with meaning and responsibility help us in relation to change and conﬂict?

The Bigger Picture: Community

Organizations as communities What do we mean by community? Communities are an ancient form of existence, part of nature and human experience long before our structured organizations and corporations came into being. They are part of the process of life and creation, as organisms of all kinds come together in some kind of collective grouping, in order to survive and thrive. Some suggested deﬁnitions of community are: A group of people who willingly come together and put time and energy toward achieving a common goal or goals. (Axelrod, 2002) Imagine an organization that actually feels like home. Not some idealized home where arguments never happen and everything is sunshine 24 hours a day, but a real-live home where you can just be yourself and grow. Founded in respect, nurtured by acceptance and stretched by challenge – that is a good home. And it also seems a reasonable description of genuine community. (Owen, 2000) … the essence of community, its very heart and soul, is the nonmonetary exchange of value. The things we do and the things we share because we care for others and the good of the place. Community is composed of things we cannot measure, for which we keep no record and ask no recompense. (Hock, 2005) Communities have a collective purpose, and pay attention to ‘what is going on at the heart’ of a group of people. They are based on ‘desire not directives’ and embrace the contribution of ‘diverse and unique gifts’ rather than viewing difference as an issue of ‘deﬁance or compliance’ (Wheatley, 2005). Additionally, in a community, ‘people take care of each other’, they care about involvement and connection and they make trade-offs in order to realize fully the sense of community and live out their values; that is, the organization has a purpose beyond ﬁnancial or performance targets, taking care of the community matters as well (Pfeffer, 2007). The meaning and belonging at the heart of community is characterized by collective effort, using everyone’s abilities. The approach is generally informal, stories are shared, successes and events celebrated and tragedies mourned and healed (McKnight in Axelrod, 2002). There are lots of examples of communities, but generally we see them as being a place where we go voluntarily, such as clubs, societies, charity networks, pressure groups, church. Not all of these feel like communities. For example, the gyms that have sprung up all round the country can be soulless, with people pounding on a treadmill without communicating. Others use them as a much more sociable 203

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and community based locale, with families meeting up and having Sunday lunch. Bands of friends, neighbours who socialize and look out for each other; these are communities. They are not, therefore, places where we merely turn up; they are something that we commit ourselves to, that we feel part of, that has meaning for us in the way we construct our lives and our view of ourselves. What then would it look like for an organization to be a community? In any organization there will potentially be pockets of communities. Some teams have a ﬂavour to them that feels like a community: people know each other, personally and professionally, conversation is about both work and life, people look out for each other and are honest with each other, often in some robust ways. It is unlikely, however, that these groups actively call themselves a ‘community’. It is not an expression that we tend to use within organizations, except for situations where we have, for example, created a ‘community of practice’ (as we explored in Chapter 7). Taking a community approach to a unit or department can be a powerful way of working, if it is something that all or most participants are instinctively drawn to and it feels like a ‘natural’ way of being. It is a different matter, however, to take on board the idea of seeing the whole organization as a community and for that experience to be real. There is a ﬁlm clip of Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, making his ﬁrst presentation to managers and sales staff at a huge meeting. He runs on to the stage, shouting at the audience to ‘get up’ and ‘give it up for me’, getting them to shout and scream louder and louder. Eventually, breathless, he says into the microphone ‘I – Love – This – Company!’ to rapturous applause. Watching the clip we may cynically think of an audience worked up into a frenzy, but actually what we are seeing, in that moment, is a community of people enjoying being part of something together, sharing a passion for their organization. We may, therefore, experience moments of real community in organizations. There are examples of whole organizations that are perceived (either internally or externally) to be communities. A recent publication for the Harvard Business Review (Pfeffer, 2007) suggests a number, including IESE. This is a successful business school in Spain where they have a clear policy of being a ‘community’. They stress the importance of caring for people, whether they be staff, students or visitors. A further illustration of community is that of DaVita, a large US kidney dialysis company: the DaVita Village Network collects money from teammates, matched by the corporation, to help out employees facing ﬁnancial stringency because of their own or a family member’s illness. If you listen to people who have been helped by the network, it quickly becomes apparent that it is not just the ﬁnancial support, but the emotional support, visits, help with household tasks such as cooking, and friendship that make such an enormous difference during difﬁcult times. (Pfeffer, 2007) 204

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St Lukes, a creative communications company, is a fascinating and still highly successful organization (Law, 2001). It is co-owned by all of its employees, with the focus being on collaboration to achieve the best creative service possible for customers. As each individual is an owner of the business, they carry the rights and responsibilities of that position. Together, they decide how the organization needs to work, agreeing rules where required, suggesting changes where needed. The word ‘community’ may not be actively used, but to all intents and purpose, that is what they appear to be. What communities are not, as Peter Senge and his colleagues remind us, is exclusive (Senge et al., 1994): we do not need to sell our soul to the company, it does not need to take over a whole town and dominate it, and we can still belong very healthily to communities outside of work. In many ways, community is a state of mind and an intention. It is a set of values about the importance of collective purpose and belonging. Behaviours, structures and practices are then shaped in response to these values and intentions. In the UK, there is potentially a reaction to the word ‘community’ within an organizational setting that represents it as a soft option or a New Age piece of management jargon. Yet, to create an organization that works like a community, that gives us a sense of belonging and meaning, is a challenging task and demands the best of who we are as human beings. Such an approach is not, we think, entered into lightly, but it may offer a way forward for all of us in creating and thriving in organizations that enrich all the stakeholders they serve. So, what does this feeling and sense of community give to us as people within a collective effort? Why would we want to create a community approach? What are the challenges inherent in ‘community’ and, if what it gives us is desirable, how do we create and sustain it? We will cover these questions in the following sections.

Why ‘community’? The notion of community is suggested by a number of recent writers, including for example, Peter Senge, as a way forward for organizations, in particular as a response to the complex and ever-changing environment that most organizations work within. The drivers and beneﬁts to taking the approach are outlined below.

Organizational performance

Pfeffer states some key beneﬁts of a community approach for an organization: ■

People are by nature social and afﬁliative, consequently the approach results in increased employee satisfaction and motivation. 205

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The approach overcomes the alienation and distrust which exist in so many organizations, particularly those where change programmes and reorganizations are constantly on the agenda. The approach helps people with the stresses of trying to balance work and life by recognizing individuals as ‘whole’ people (Pfeffer, 2007).

Evidence for the success of the approach also comes, however, from research carried out 60 years ago in the UK. As far back as 1947, Eric Trist discovered a group of miners in Haighmoor, who, due to technological difﬁculties at the particular coal face they worked in, were basically left to their own devices in terms of managing their work. In place of management direction and tightly controlled division of labour, they created a community (Kleiner, 1996). The miners coordinated their work, sold the coal, supported each other (individuals and families) and even fought each other in the process of self-direction. It proved to be the most productive mine, with a better safety record than those run to more ‘machine’ oriented management styles. Managers, however, saw them as an aberration and tended to keep quiet about their existence. Trist and his partner Fred Emery were inspired by this and developed an approach to organizational management called industrial democracy (also known as open systems or sociotechnical systems). What they were basically recommending was ‘community’. Trist and Emery predicted that as change became more endemic, top-down management approaches would no longer work (Kleiner, 1996). They considered organizations as a ‘living system’ that could create its own order (see Chapter 9 for more on open living systems). It is this self-organizing aspect of communities which offers so much potential: swift adaptability is business critical in today’s context. Clearly, there are examples of organizations that succeed by taking the opposite approach to community and there are successful organizations that work somewhere between community and traditional hierarchy. Community is not a panacea, but it is an option and one that arguably gets insufﬁcient consideration because of the questions and demands it asks of leaders and employees. A need for meaning

There is much discussion in the HR and OD ﬁeld about the importance for individuals of ﬁnding ‘meaning’ in their work, as we touched on in Chapter 9. Recent research presents interesting data on this subject: Garrow and Stirling (2007) found a decline since 2002 in individuals giving importance to meaning at work. At the same time, however, the desire for organizations to be corporately responsible has gone up. In addition, where an organization is not seen as taking corporate social responsibility (CSR) seriously, or having a worthwhile purpose, the need for personal meaning at work is still high. 206

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Meaning, therefore, still seems to be valued in one form or another and community has the potential to offer that greater sense of purpose and contribution. It will be interesting to see whether this need for meaning sustains if we experience less economic stability than we have had in the past years. A need for belonging

We need community as human beings, as Funky Business Forever reminds us: Look at YouTube and MySpace...These networks are there thanks to technology but they also exist because we have a deep and largely unfulﬁlled need for a sense of community…We all want to belong and to overcome the lack of community…This human need offers one of the great challenges and opportunities of our times. (Nordstrom and Ridderstrale, 2008) Perhaps we should be asking ourselves, why not community? Not only is community a natural human instinct, but we forget that we are already part of a community, our own species on earth: the natural occurrence of community may be hard to believe given our current difﬁculties in this area, but it starts from a very simple fact: we (that is all human beings) are a community…we start as a community and then the divisions take over…. (Owen, 2000) Part of the conﬂict that we experience, in organizations and elsewhere, is that we sometimes, as Wheatley puts it, ‘retreat behind community for protection’ (Wheatley, 2005). When organizations merge, for example, emotions are rife: fear, anxiety, hope and so on. We join with those we know already and ‘defend’ ourselves against the newcomers. We retreat to our known ‘community’. Strangely, in our experience, this community seems to become even more important, even more favoured than before the new ‘tribe’ came along. We forget that we are all in this together and it takes an act of personal strength to let go of the ‘old’ boundaries and accept the new. This happens in many different ways, through change and through life. Considering organizations as communities appeals to our need for belonging; in order to really make it work we need to stretch ourselves to see those communities across borders, whether they be functional, geographic or cultural.

What are the challenges of a ‘community’ approach to organizations? Controlling delivery

An essential question in relation to a community approach is, ‘will it still deliver bottom line results?’ 207

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John McKnight (in Axelrod, 2002) characterizes an institution (or more traditional organization), as a place ‘that can provide goods and services but has difﬁculty caring for people’. A community, conversely, he suggests ‘cares for people but has difﬁculty producing goods and services’. There are, however, many examples of communities who have achieved tremendous successes. They do so on a regular basis throughout society. The calendar produced by a branch of the Women’s Institute is a famous example, raising money for charity and becoming the subject of a successful ﬁlm Calendar Girls. It is also the case that some communities get frustrated by their own inaction, where people exercise free will to discuss, rather than necessarily to get things done. We do not need, however, to think in terms of an organization either being a community or an institution; it can be both. It is interesting to observe how these two worlds can come together in some organizations. Many pressure groups and charities, for example, are professionally managed, working at the hub of a community of volunteers and relying on a network of members’ donations to achieve their purpose. There is a particular sensitivity in these organizations to the need to balance control and direction on the one hand, with engagement and choice on the part of the wider organizational network on the other. There is also a focus on delivery and performance which is managed in dynamic tension with the need for broad stakeholder participation. The team at Amnesty International UK is part of an international network, managing a community of shared interest professionally and with a clear sense of purpose. ‘Amnesty International is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for human rights. It is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion’ (www.amnesty.org.uk). Their structure, explained on their website comprises: ■ ■ ■

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over 1.8 million members, supporters and subscribers worldwide, in over 150 countries an International Executive Committee (IEC) which consists of eight volunteer members elected by the International Council over 50 Amnesty International sections worldwide (including the UK) who participate in decision making by sending representatives to the International Council Meeting every two years a Secretary General, appointed by the IEC, who is responsible for the dayto-day conduct of the international affairs of the movement and heads the International Secretariat (in London). This provides ‘professional expertise and support to the movement, including research in line with principles

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agreed within the movement. It guides the organization’s day-to-day work but is not authorized to make fundamental policy decisions.’ The Amnesty International UK (AIUK) Section has nearly 260 000 ﬁnancial supporters, 130 staff and 65 volunteers to coordinate the work of its members. It is governed by a national board of members elected by a ballot of the whole membership. A ballot is held whenever there are more candidates than places; this should take place every year. The board employs a director, who has overall responsibility for the management of the staff and ofﬁces and the management team, which comprises all the departmental directors. They are also the senior spokespeople for the UK Section.

See: www.amnesty.org.uk Amnesty International certainly ‘delivers’: ‘As an organization, we do not claim credit when a prisoner is released, when death sentences are commuted, or when a government changes its laws and practices. However, former prisoners, torture victims and others who have suffered human rights abuses often say that international pressure secured their freedom and saved their lives. Every year, we receive messages of thanks and solidarity that inspire our members to keep working for human rights. Such messages show the positive effects of our work and that, together, we can make a difference.’

The concerns about delivery, if a more community oriented approach is taken, are perhaps not simply about whether people will get things done: the critics of the notion of community in organizations, question what things will be done and whose agenda will be followed. There is a fear that an organization based on community, where people contribute willingly and participate in decision making, will fall into chaos, particularly, that people will not work in the direction senior management are looking to go in or deliver the results that they need. This is where a community approach truly differs to simply involvement and effective teamwork. In a community, there is a need to trust that people collectively will have the capability to lead the organization to success, in relation to the environment in which it works and the purpose it was created for. At some point there is a choice, for all of us, either to let go of the reins and trust to people and the processes they create, or to keep tight control and risk losing all sense of community and collective endeavour. As Harrison Owen says, ‘The arrogance of control destroys human community’ (Owen, 2000). Self-determination and collaboration need not mean chaos or inefﬁciency. The notion of ‘managing on the edge of chaos’, explored in Chapter 7, suggests that there is a way of taking a both/and approach to community and organization. 209

Change, Conﬂict and Community Too difﬁcult?

A community approach makes demands on individuals within the organization: ■

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Leaders need to be able to handle the paradox of needing to ‘control’ and direct, while also letting go of the reins. They need to be able to deal with anxiety, uncertainty and ambiguity, whilst working with others to ﬁnd ways forward. Organizational members need to have the maturity to be self-determined and responsible. They need to be able to have the supportive and the tough conversations that enable a community to do its work (Senge et al., 1994). They too need to handle ambiguity.

Both groups need to be able to do the hard work it takes to create and maintain trust. As Senge et al. (1994) remind us, there is a need for ongoing honesty, even in the face of conﬂict and difﬁculty and this takes courage and emotional maturity. Communities do not lessen conﬂict; people often argue passionately about what is important to them. Fundamentally, community asks us to re-think our assumptions about how performance and change can be achieved, what our responsibilities are to one another and what an organization actually is. We need to ask ourselves whether we are really up for the challenge: sometimes it is easier and more comfortable to be able to deny responsibility, blame others and not try to understand another point of view. As a leader, it is tempting to work as a community, that makes decisions and choices together, to enjoy the beneﬁts of the approach, but to withdraw into our authority position when tough decisions are to be made, or too many people see things too differently. Time seems always to be the pressure point, that if we have too much discussion, we will not make decisions and get on with it. So, often we would rather be getting on with ‘something’ than take the time to discuss and understand different ideas and opinions. We often have the need to tidy things up, to make things efﬁcient, and community approaches seem to delay us in what we want to get on with. In traditional structures, where the ‘buck stops’ with the senior manager, how prepared are we as leaders to work with a group rather than direct it? What risks are we prepared to take in order to lead organizations which work collectively to respond to and create change? Human nature is paradoxical

At the same time as we need community, we also need our independence and this paradox gives us difﬁculty, as Margaret Wheatley (2005) points out: We form our communities from …two needs – the need for self-determination and the need for one another. But in modern society we have difﬁculty embracing the inherent paradox of these needs. We reach to satisfy one at 210

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the expense of the other. Very often the price of belonging to a community is to forfeit one’s individual autonomy…Life requires the honouring of its two great needs, not one. In seeking to be a community member, we cannot abandon our need for self-expression. In many situations, not just in our organizational lives, we are both attracted to the idea of ‘togetherness’, and pull away from it. As a leader and change agent, there is a need to be respectful of both aspects of this dynamic. We have come across many examples where the need for self-expression has not just been overlooked, it has been positively discouraged. People are, for example, quickly labelled; how many times have we heard the words ‘he’s not a team-player’ of someone with a unique perspective to bring? We need to be sympathetic to others’ needs in relation to the dynamic tension between self-expression and community. We also need to take responsibility for our own needs in this regard. Will Schutz (1994) describes three basic human needs: the need for openness (or intimacy), for control (or inﬂuence) and for inclusion. Individually, we have different levels of need in relation to these, at different times. People with a high need for inclusion will thrive on belonging to a group; those with lower needs for inclusion, will enjoy the ‘collective’ spirit less. Some have a high need for privacy, which can cause tension in a community that may want to get to know each other personally, not just professionally. This is all a fundamental part of what it takes to be a social animal, and becomes part of what a community negotiates among its members: what does it really mean to belong here? Organizations and teams negotiate like this all the time: the codes of behaviour differ from group to group (e.g. what is ok and what is not ok to do here), as do the ways that they are agreed (e.g. who says what the codes are). In a community, these matters are discussed as part of working together. We need to remember, that there is not one perfect picture of how a community ‘should’ be. A few years ago, a Channel 4 documentary called Slave Nation ﬁlmed the working life of people at Egg. For those working there, the tight culture, close work relationships and community atmosphere was important and meaningful, providing a spirit of connection and a sense of place. For the documentary maker, it was a picture of horror, with people selling themselves and their lives to an organization. The key challenge here is for the community to be ‘natural’, something that individuals within it relate to, that works in a way that makes sense for them and that they feel drawn to and co-create.

It’s not really very different…?

Given the challenges above, it is perhaps not surprising that taking a community approach to the whole organization is less common, in the purest sense of the idea of ‘community’. It is very easy, given the personal challenges involved, to talk 211

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ourselves out of the attempt and take a more diluted approach. Ultimately, we may start to say that a ‘community’ approach is not that different after all to effective change management and good team working. In some versions of community this may be so, but the question is, have we avoided the challenge of building genuine trust, collaboration and co-creation? Have we avoided the difﬁcult conversations and creative collaborations that could push us collectively and individually to achieve what we never thought possible?

How do we create a community? Arguably, organizations are already communities, where people in one way or another attempt to achieve something together. It seems though that we are not always very good at making the community elements within them work. In 2003/4, the UK seemed a long way from the approach in most work settings: Far from experiencing a community with a shared purpose, people remark on tensions at board level and a management focus on personal agendas. Managers at all levels are tending to ‘act a level down’, over-controlling people’s work. Particular criticisms include a lack of ability to listen, discriminatory and prejudiced thinking patterns of senior management. (Roffey Park, 2004) Yet, we have regularly seen complete groups of strangers meet for only a week on a leadership programme and leave with a sense of community with people whom they initially believed were nothing like them. They also leave with a sense of what can be achieved when a group of people comes together in that way. The potential is there: how could we build more of a community approach into our organizations? Dare to dream

We ﬁrst need to dare to dream that it could be possible. That dream also needs to be shared: community, by deﬁnition, cannot be ‘mandated’. Dialogue about purpose and values helps to build community, by discussing what is at the ‘heart of the community’ (Wheatley, 2005), what connects people, what brings the organization together? It would be easy for all of us to stay with what seems realistic, what seems practical in our current situations. Without imagination and a bit of courage, we limit the possibilities for our organizations. Community approach to change

A key indicator of whether we are a ‘community’ is the approach taken to working with change. 212

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The equation is simple: the more people are involved in co-creating the organization and their collective future, the greater the likelihood of becoming a community. In this way, the means becomes the end. Some examples of how this might work in practice include: ■ ■ ■

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Agreeing the principles and values of the organization and using them as a compass for direction and approach Conducting large group interactions to enable conversations and collective decision making Openly sharing information about the context for change, including difﬁculties, concerns, ambitions, what has gone well, what has not; communicating transparently rather than selling Deciding not to proceed with a strategy if the majority is against it Making decisions on behalf of the community where there is a mandate to do so Involving people in change initiatives based on interest, enthusiasm and contribution rather than hierarchy or status Making politics, networking, conﬂict, collaboration and competition part of the process Recognizing that the impact on people is a critical business issue Involving a broad range of stakeholders Sharing responsibility for success or failure and the consequences.

Working with emotions

A positive and healthy relationship with emotions enables us to collaborate more effectively and build community. Some approaches to change use the power of positive emotion to build community. Under the leadership of Greg Dyke, for example, the BBC used Appreciative Inquiry, globally, to share stories of success in the organization and identify how they could use the best of the BBC to build for the future. For most of those involved, a collective spirit was developed, through a process of participation and an inspiring leader. Footage of the departure of Greg Dyke looked very much like a community in mourning. Appreciative Inquiry has been used also to build and work with communities across the world, in organizations, towns and villages and has even been built into processes to develop the national constitution of Nepal. Honouring emotion is a vital part of community building. Conﬂict can be used positively to draw people together, as in the approach of Arthur Mindell (1995). He offers a different perspective where conﬂict is seen as the heart of community building. A key piece of advice in this approach is to be ‘humble’ and self-aware in order to be open to experiencing what is really happening in the group around you. Mindell’s approach is through skilful facilitation, to enable groups to go through 213

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difﬁculty together, not to shy away from anger and conﬂict, to ‘go through the ﬁre’ together. This is not created where it does not exist but, rather, the approach works with the feeling that is already there. It takes strength to be a leader in such a setting. Taking the idea into organizations more generally, would clearly take skill and self-awareness as a leader. The lesson we can take from this, however, is that avoiding conﬂict, ignoring it, not honouring the strength of people’s hurt, detracts from a sense of community and potentially kills it. A classic example is when redundancies have happened and the loss of friends and colleagues is effectively glossed over by people in the organization.

Mindset

Community is arguably as much about attitude and mindset as it is about structures and approaches. We suggest an experiment: a subtle way of approaching community building, is to work ‘as if ’ you are already part of a community, one that you truly want to belong to. Ask yourself ‘how would I approach this situation/person if I believed we were working in community together?’ Try taking this approach next time you have e-mail contact or a telephone conference with colleagues from very different functions, or different countries or locations. What might you say or do differently with this perspective in mind? Organizations as ‘community’ may, in this sense, be more of an ambition, a way of approaching the journey of change in organizations, rather than the end destination.

Leadership

There are, of course, many skills and behaviours which would be important for a leader in a community setting, but what would be the essential requirements? We suggest: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Belief in the value of a community oriented approach Inner strength and conﬁdence, to be in charge and accountable, without seeking directly to control or manipulate Self-awareness, humility and integrity Great interpersonal and facilitative leadership skills Emotional intelligence and maturity Strong political skills, particularly to manage relationships with wider stakeholders (peers, customers, executive leaders, shareholders and so on) Mindset open to self-organization and participation, rather than just command and control approaches to leadership.

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The Bigger Picture: Community Trust

Trust is a key element for community building. Realistically, there is no perfect situation where all colleagues trust each other all the time. There is perhaps a tipping point at which trust breaks down so much that a group or organization fractures and collaboration becomes hard to impossible. Similarly, there is a point at which the building blocks for trust are there, so that people trust enough to deal with problems of interaction and relationship when they do occur. What then are these building blocks? To begin with, there is not one clear deﬁnition that researchers can ﬁnd that summarizes exactly what trust is, as individuals have different perceptions of what it means for them (Bunker, Alban and Lewicki, 2005). One study suggested that there were over 75 factors which contributed to trust (Ferrin, 2003). Some helpful ideas about what trust may mean include: An individual’s belief in, and willingness to act on the basis of, the words, actions and decisions of another. (McAllister, 1995) Belief in the other’s ‘ability, benevolence and integrity’. (Mayer et al., 1995)

Clearly, the issue is not a straightforward one, either in terms of research to understand it or in our own experiences of how to build it. Certain leadership behaviours have been found to contribute to building trust: fairness, future vision and keeping promises (Ferrin, 2003). Charles H Green (2006) suggests that there are four components of trust in relationships: ■ ■ ■ ■

Credibility: this is about knowledge, or about what we say Reliability: in relation to our actions Intimacy: whether or not we can have safe discussions with someone Self-orientation: whether the person seems focused on themselves or us.

He stresses that developing trust is a personal issue, rather than being about whole organizations and that it is the principles behind how we operate that make the difference, rather than merely doing the ‘right’ things (such as listening) that may seem to indicate trustworthiness. He suggests that the four ‘trust principles’ are: ■ ■ ■ ■

‘A focus on the other for the other’s sake, not just as a means to one’s own ends’ ‘A collaborative approach to relationships…a willingness to work together, creating both joint goals and joint approaches to getting there’ ‘A relationship perspective focused on the medium to long term’ ‘A habit of being transparent in all one’s dealings’. 215

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The context of his work is primarily in the arena of the ‘trusted (business) advisor’, however, these principles certainly seem useful for all arenas of working relationships. Finally, there are two statements about trust that, for us, make practical sense: ■ ■

Trust is two way, you need to give it (trust others) in order to receive it (be trusted) Trust is an act of faith, which has to start somewhere.

We do not underestimate how challenging trust can be in some organizational settings, where promises may not be delivered, commitments may not be honoured and politics are rife. Being trusting and being naive are not the same thing: acting with integrity and being prepared to trust others can be done at the same time as recognizing the complexities of relationships at work.

Organizations: a community within a community? We can, therefore, consider a more community oriented approach within organizations. There is also increasing interest in the role of organizations within the wider community. Organizations are basically networked entities that rely on their wider relationships for survival and success. According to Charles Handy, the purpose of business is community, both internally and externally. He is highly critical of the way that businesses particularly, focus on one purpose: shareholder value. Legally, corporations have a responsibility to their shareholders, but in his words: We need to eat to live; food is a necessary condition of life. But if we lived mainly to eat, making food a sufﬁcient or sole purpose of life, we would become gross. The purpose of a business, in other words is not to make a proﬁt, full stop. It is to make a proﬁt so that the business can do something more or better. That ‘something’ becomes the real justiﬁcation for the business. (Handy, 2002) A good business, therefore, to Handy ‘is a community with a purpose’. In the public sector, the equivalent to shareholder value is arguably government targets, where the measures of success are in danger of dominating the wider purpose of the organization, such as patient care or education of children. The approach that organizations take to their customers and wider stakeholders also has the potential to be more involving and collaborative. The issue of ‘how much can we control what happens?’ applies as much externally for organizations as it does internally. Taking a community approach externally, therefore, starts 216

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to open up possibilities for inﬂuence and co-creation. Sky worked with consultants to build a different kind of relationship with its customers (see box below). Changes in technology have enabled organizations to start to have a different online relationship with customers. One organization, for example, changed its website from being an information only site, to using open source technology (i.e. the same technology used to create wikipedia) so that it could enter into dialogue with its customers. As a result it connected with 1.3 million customers in 6 weeks. This has not only widened the organization’s customer base, it is also likely to change the nature of the organization, as it creates an approach for maintaining communication with so many people, in what is effectively an online community.

Sky, the bigger conversation Opinion Leader Research is one organization that focuses on running large scale events which require a highly structured approach in both their set up and facilitation, typically involving a wide range of stakeholders. An example case study of work completed recently for Sky illustrates one approach that they use. The Bigger Conversation was an opportunity for Sky to listen to and engage with almost 200 consumers about The Bigger Picture, Sky’s responsible business campaign and initiatives. The day long event in March 2007 brought together 144 Sky customers and 77 prospects to have their say about Sky, The Bigger Picture work it is doing, and to develop practical ideas and suggestions for Sky to take forward. Through informed debate and deliberation, the event enabled Sky to take its relationship with customers and prospects to a new level. A mix of techniques was used through the day, including group discussions, an interactive quiz, case studies, polling and a presentation highlighting Sky’s plans and activities. Participants worked in teams to develop their own ideas on ways Sky could contribute responsibly as a business, with a speciﬁc focus on climate change and sport, arts and learning initiatives. They then pitched their best ideas to a panel with James Murdoch, Chief Executive of BSkyB, Ben Stimson, Director of Responsibility and Reputation, BSkyB, Sue Campbell Chair of UK Sport and Steve Howard, Chief Executive of the Climate Group. The ideas were inventive and inspiring and the winning idea is now being developed by Sky with plans to implement it in 2008. The Bigger Conversation created an opportunity for Sky to get closer to the public’s views and opinions, and to understand better how to build their relationships with the wider community. 217

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A corporate conscience If organizations have a greater role to play in society, then does that mean that they have a duty to act with a conscience? Not all would agree with this. Some writers would argue that individuals have a conscience, but the organization is neutral (Goodpaster and Mathews, 1982). In the UK, however, we have for some time expected that organizations have a corporate duty, as demonstrated, for example, by organizations being prosecuted for ‘corporate manslaughter’ as a result of rail tragedies. So, how far should an organization act with a conscience in society? There are legal requirements that position an organization’s responsibility in society, such as: annual reporting; health and safety legislation; employment legislation and codes of practice. Does a corporate conscience need to extend beyond legislation? Public trust in all organizations has hit some severe problems over the past years. When even Blue Peter starts to create trust issues for the BBC through ‘Socksgate’ (when the programme’s cat was named Socks, ignoring the choice viewers had voted for), we have to really think about what is going on (De Vita, 2007). The NHS, of course, is constantly hauled through the media with stories of uncleanliness, ﬁnancial difﬁculties and so on. Tesco is the subject of many campaigns across the country, where people are unhappy at the supermarket moving in and dominating a town and at some of the alleged approaches it takes to doing that (Simms, 2007). Who knows yet what the true impact of the Northern Rock debacle will be on people’s trust in ﬁnancial institutions. Conscience and ethics are increasingly not a matter of choice for organizations. Legally, there are instances where failing to meet social and legal stipulations can result in companies having to cease trading; negative customer reactions can decrease proﬁtability or the ability to raise funds in the charity sector; and a poor reputation can mean seriously losing out in the competition to attract and retain talent. The challenge of developing and maintaining a corporate conscience, however, is not an easy one. Individuals at different points in the system can ﬁnd it difﬁcult, or unappealing to work in this way: ■

■

CEOs are under constant pressure to deliver short-term results, which can mean that developing a corporate conscience at best becomes a ‘nice to have’. For some in the past, it has led to the opposite, a lack of conscience and unethical behaviour. Not all managers see ethics as being part of their responsibility, in fact, according to research in the USA, most do not see it as part of their job (Samuelson and Gentile, 2005). Those in professional roles ﬁnd ethical decisions easier, because it is more intrinsic to their work (e.g. an accountant has a professional responsibility for accuracy in ﬁnancial data). If the situation is the same in the

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UK, then there is some way to go before we see organizations as really being able to have a conscience. The added dynamic in this is the difﬁculties involved in being the one to speak up against something. For example, bullying occurs in organizations, prejudice, harassment, all these things exist. We have policies and procedures that can be followed to protect people, but how easy is it really to be the one to say ‘there is a problem here’. The same applies to ‘whistleblowing’ and the challenges of being prepared to stand against the crowd. In previous chapters, we have seen how organizations ﬁnd conﬂict problematic, so raising an issue, and potentially causing a conﬂict, can be a very hard choice to make, particularly if an individual feels they are ‘on their own’. Developing a conscience, therefore, needs to be worked on as a collective endeavour, to be co-constructed and supported rather than left as an individual responsibility if organizations are to raise their game in this ﬁeld. Managing conﬂict positively also now becomes a prerequisite for enabling people to speak out safely about ethical issues. Arguably, people need to become better at creating appropriate conﬂict. Clearly, the ﬁeld of corporate social responsibility provides a platform for enabling the organization to take the issue of conscience forward.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) The increased attention paid to CSR asks many questions of organizations and functions within them. Its importance is still debated, the degree to which organizations truly embrace CSR is questioned and the practicalities of how to improve CSR in organizations are still to be worked out. Nevertheless, CSR is increasingly becoming a critical business question, as a result of organizational relationships with the wider community. It has direct relevance for line managers and HR/change agents, although that link is not always clear. What do we mean by CSR? The CIPD offer a very useful deﬁnition (CIPD factsheet, 2007): CSR covers all aspects of corporate governance. It is about how companies conduct their business in an ethical way, taking account of their impact economically, socially, environmentally and in terms of human rights. This moves beyond traditional business stakeholders such as shareholders or local suppliers. CSR includes social partners such as local communities, and global responsibilities such as protecting the environment and ensuring good labour standards in overseas suppliers. CSR also includes relationships with employees and customers. It inevitably involves working in partnership with other organizations or groups. It can be seen as a form of strategic management, encouraging the organization to scan the horizon and think laterally about how its relationships will contribute long term to its bottom line in a constantly changing world. 219

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This deﬁnition highlights that CSR is both an internal and external feature of organizational life. For some critics, CSR is merely window dressing, and does not yet go far enough to live up to the CIPD deﬁnition of what it should be. Corporations now have a legal responsibility to present information on intangibles, such as their approach to employees, the environment and society. Does this mean, however, that they are living out CSR principles in practice? Recent research into the views and organizational experience of managers and professionals in the UK (Garrow and Stirling 2007) has shown that: ■ ■ ■ ■

CSR is of personal importance to a large majority (87 percent) 61 percent believe that their organization is to some extent responsible environmentally and socially Only 3 percent say that their organization is not at all responsible Less than 25 percent of respondents said their organization was greatly responsible environmentally and socially.

The ways that CSR is demonstrated in practice is through: recycling (77 percent); help in the community (66 percent); fundraising for charity (63 percent); rigorously implementing diversity and equal opportunities (52 percent); rigorous auditing procedures (43 percent). There is less evidence, however, of CSR permeating business practice, since the following ways of demonstrating CSR in practice are comparatively less common: ethical considerations drive business decisions (29 percent); having a CSR statement (28 percent); producing safe products (23 percent); ethical and fair treatment of developing countries (14 percent); ethical pension fund options (11 percent). In the research there are clearly some examples of where CSR is taken seriously, with some people reporting that they have a ‘CSR department reporting to the board’ and another where there is an ethics partner whom people can approach in conﬁdence. In other organizations, it is through staff activities (rather than business or organizational initiatives) that CSR is being implemented. In effect, the community element within organizations is taking action on CSR in these places. So, does it really matter whether CSR is done simply from a point of view of window dressing or is implemented on a voluntary basis from staff within the organization? Ethically, of course, we might prefer for it to be genuine and for CSR considerations to permeate through all organizations. From an organizational effectiveness point of view, the question is, what impact does the current approach to CSR have on critical aspects of the organization? For example: ■

Trust from the wider community in the organization: if CSR is simply spin and no substance, at some point we might think an organization will lose in

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■

■

■

■

■

terms of reputation. Conversely, effective CSR approaches can enhance public proﬁle and reputation. Employee retention and motivation: if CSR is important to the majority of people in organizations, what impact will a lack of genuine response to CSR have in the long-term provision of a satisfying work environment? A positive approach to CSR may produce a greater sense of pride in working for an organization. Attraction of new staff, especially young graduates and professionals: many organizations are at pains to ensure that high calibre recruits recognize their CSR credentials, given the importance of environmental and social values for this generation. PWC, for example, invite candidates to: ‘Be a part of an organization that is committed to our communities where we all live and work and to the diversity of its people and the career advancement of women’ (www.pwc.com). Development opportunities for staff: for example, a young manager in an insurance company was invited to work with a youth development scheme, providing mentoring and leadership. He found it had a signiﬁcant impact on his personal development, in terms of learning about himself, understanding a broader perspective in society and becoming a better leader. Improved business success: research since the 1980s (summarized in Kakabadse and Kakabadse, 2007) has shown that companies who treat employees, shareholders and customers as equally important are ﬁnancially more successful than those who focus only on shareholders; companies with positive CSR approaches are more successful in the long term and investors are willing to pay more money for shares in well-managed organizations. Organizational sustainability: is it possible that working to a purpose beyond numerical targets (whether that be government measures, proﬁt or revenue generation) enables an organization to take a long-term perspective and be more sustainable as an entity? Porter and Kramer (2006) suggest that organizations need healthy communities for their own long-term survival; they suggest the idea of ‘social integration’ rather than ‘CSR’ in recognition of the interdependence between organizations and communities.

There are, therefore, arguments in favour of CSR and its beneﬁts. It is not, however, universally seen as part of the picture for all organizations. The Boards of companies based on the Anglo-American model, as Kakabadse and Kakabadse (2007) express it, are less likely to perceive CSR as a ‘given’. Delivery of CSR is, in the view of some in this situation, a matter for politicians to mandate organizations to achieve, since the efforts of companies will only have a limited impact socially and environmentally, as they pursue the priority of shareholder value. Companies with a European model, where participation and wider community responsibility is more of an accepted model for the legal basis of companies, are 221

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more likely to see CSR as an important part of organizational purpose. So too, are the Boards of public agencies and the not-for-proﬁt sector. How do we deliver on CSR?

Marks & Spencer have developed their CSR policies under the banner of ‘Plan A’, named ‘because there is no Plan B’. Theirs is a 5-year, 100 point plan built around ﬁve commitments: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Climate change: becoming carbon neutral and helping customers and suppliers cut emissions too Raw materials: all to be from sustainable sources Healthy eating: contributing to setting good food standards and helping customers and employees have healthy lifestyles Waste: bringing an end to sending their waste to landﬁll and making sure that customers don’t need to throw any of their products away Fair partner: trading fairly, thereby improving lives of people in communities down the supply chain.

In December 2007, M&S received the World Environment Centre’s TwentyFourth Annual Gold Medal for International Corporate Achievement in Sustainable Development. This was speciﬁcally in relation to ‘linking sustainability extensively with its supply chain, operations, and customers’. Stuart Rose, Chief Executive of Marks & Spencer said: ‘We are delighted to receive this prestigious award. Our customers, shareholders and employees have also embraced our Plan A ambitions, and it’s now how we do business. While we still have a long way to go and face many more challenges ahead, we are making good progress and this recognition will provide even more motivation for our teams as we continue to deliver our plan’. See: www.marksandspencer.com CSR is still a new area, but there are some interesting developments and challenges for HR, OD and change. We suggest below some areas for consideration. 1. Business strategy ■ Fundamental questions need to be asked about organizational purpose: what kind of organization are we? How do we see our role within the broader community? What attention do we need to give CSR? How do we deﬁne CSR? What does it mean for our relationships with external and internal stakeholders? 222

The Bigger Picture: Community ■

CSR is also a strategic business opportunity: organizations can identify where their own needs and society’s intersect, and seek opportunities to create shared value (Porter and Kramer, 2006). 2. Role of HR ■ As the purpose of an organization and its strategic objectives adapt, so too does the role of the HR Department. For many years now, HR has avoided perhaps being the ‘conscience’ of the organization, keen to demonstrate a contribution to bottom line results. If an organization now also takes on board a further purpose, then HR may legitimately play a role which represents the organization’s place as an ethical employer and institution in its strategic environment. Further, the role of HR may actually return to being about people, something that some practitioners seem strangely keen to deny. ■ The CIPD have recognized CSR as an opportunity for HR to further its strategic contribution to the organization, by helping the organization decide on its strategy and approach to its internal and external stakeholders. In doing so, HR will need to collaborate with a wide range of colleagues internally to develop policies and approaches that will work across all aspects of organizational performance. 3. Integration of CSR into organizational culture ■ A key challenge for making CSR a practical reality is integrating policies into the daily actions of individuals in the organization, so that it is taken seriously at all levels. Attention can be paid to: the CSR values the organization wants to put into practice; the cultural habits of the organization; the attitudes and processes needed to make CSR happen in practice ■ A ‘ground up’ approach to values is powerful. IBM, for example, have held ‘Values Jams’ where employees are able to discuss live online their views on values with the CEO. The Co-operative Bank has, for many years, held a regular vote among its customers to decide on the principles of its ethical approach to banking ■ Existing HR practices relating to cultural development and attitudes can be used to promote and integrate CSR. 4. Developing competence ■ Individuals throughout the organization need to know how to apply CSR policies in practice. One organization, for example, with a rich history of ethical business from its Quaker origins, discovered that at some point in the supply chain child labour was being used. The Board reacted with horror and a requirement for instant action. An ethical sourcing policy was rolled out very successfully through HR as a training programme, with an interactive game used to train all managers on how to make ethical decisions in different scenarios. 223

Change, Conﬂict and Community ■

The CIPD has drawn up a CSR Competency Framework in collaboration with the DTI’s CSR academy (CIPD factsheet, 2007). They list six characteristics of effective CSR working: ■ ‘Understanding society’, i.e. understanding the roles of different organizations in relation to CSR ■ ‘Building capacity’ with partnerships and networks ■ ‘Questioning business as usual’, i.e. being open to new ways of thinking and challenging others to do the same ■ ‘Stakeholder relations’: identifying who the stakeholders are and building effective working relationships with them (internal as well as external) ■ ‘Strategic view’ of the business environment ■ ‘Harnessing diversity’: adapting the approach to different situations.

These can usefully be integrated with existing competency approaches, or used for speciﬁc development of CSR capability. Fundamentally, HR has an opportunity to enable organizations to see ethical and performance beneﬁts for identifying themselves as communities, within communities.

Summary In this chapter, we have explored the possibility of viewing organizations as communities, where people co-create the organization and work together with a shared passion for the work of the organization and a commitment for each other. There is a danger in this being viewed as an idealistic approach, impractical in a business setting. There are, however, examples of where aspects of a community approach have been highly beneﬁcial for organizations and their stakeholders. The beneﬁts can be improved organizational performance and the ability to work collaboratively with the dynamics and conﬂicts of change. Far from being a soft option, the approach can make signiﬁcant demands on leaders and organizational members alike. Working in genuine collaboration asks for emotional maturity, trust and relational skills, the ability to handle ambiguity and achieve delivery through co-creation rather than tightening control. The current focus on CSR in organizations is indicative of the increasing expectation that organizations act responsibly as part of the wider national and international community. Achieving CSR in practice relies on appropriate values being an active part of the organizational culture, rather than simply statements of intent. This includes creating a culture where individuals are able to challenge current practice in order to identify where CSR, and a community approach, can be improved. As the CIPD has stressed, HR practitioners, as well as line managers, have a key role to play in helping the organization bring these values to life, strategically and operationally. 224

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This ﬁnal chapter brings our exploration of change, conﬂict and community full circle, by asking, as we did in Chapter 2, what an organization in essence means to us, how we think about change within it and, further, what we want it to mean. Every organization has a speciﬁc purpose to achieve, the very reason for its existence and survival: making a proﬁt, delivering public services, or working for a cause. In pursuit of that purpose, we have many choices about how we enable the organization to work at its best, that is, how we work together as people. The constant challenge of change puts pressure on the dynamics between people, creating tension and conﬂict, exaggerating differences and magnifying the cracks in relationships, both those with other people and the relationship we have with ourselves. A critical question for leaders, HR practitioners and line managers is how to deal with the reality of these pressures. We have explored a range of choices, both in terms of practical steps and challenging mindsets, including: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

considering the different perspectives we can hold on organizations and change understanding the underlying organizational culture and its impact identifying sources of conﬂict and its relationship to change resolving conﬂict in one-to-one and group situations using third party mediators to resolve conﬂict and encourage collaboration viewing change and conﬂict as opportunities for learning and growth using the energy of conﬂict and difference to create and thrive through change building healthy organizations, understanding them as complex, living systems ﬁnally, adopting an orientation of co-creation and community.

Organizations dominate our lives and change within them is important work. We encourage you to continue to be both open minded and practical in unleashing the potential of the dynamics between change, conﬂict and community.

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Case Studies

Introduction There follows a number of case studies which reﬂect aspects of change and conﬂict outlined in this book. We have tried to represent a wide range of approaches and issues so that the reader can heighten their understanding of the possible ways in which to support change and conﬂict in the organization. A summary of the case studies is shown below.

1. Afﬁnity Sutton Mark Hewson, Group Special Projects Director tells of recent developments for the Afﬁnity Sutton Housing Group. This case study shows how the process of strategy development using an inclusive approach supported the transition to a merged housing company.

2. Portsmouth NHS Trust Alison Savage, Staff Support Ofﬁcer at the Trust on the setting up of a mediation service and how the use of mediation is helping to resolve disputes within the Trust. Alison also outlines some useful advice for others considering mediation to support people in dispute.

3. Red Bee John Allen, an independent consultant, on a change management programme for part of the BBC which included: supporting the relocation of staff within the newly formed ‘Red Bee Media’ and conducting stress in the workplace interventions.

4. Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service Bob Ratcliffe, Area Manager and member of the Service management team tells his story of change within the Fire Service, the challenges faced and a number of initiatives which have taken place to support a more empowered responsive service.

Case Studies

5. O2: ‘A better place’ Jo Macbeth and Peter Shepherd tell the story of how Appreciative Inquiry was used to build on the successes of O2, renewing energy and customer focus.

6. Organizational Health issues from a Gestalt perspective Paul Barber, an independent consultant who runs workshops on gestalt informed consulting, coaching and group facilitation, illustrates how Gestalt practice can support organizations in the process of change.

7. A change agent’s story A successful internal consultant and manager, working within the healthcare sector, outlines how they approach change and conﬂict in their organization.

Case studies 1. Afﬁnity Sutton – Merging housing associations Mark Hewson, Group Special Projects Director tells of recent developments for the Afﬁnity Sutton Housing Group Background

Afﬁnity Sutton Group is the parent company of one of the largest housing association groups operating in England. The company was formed in October 2006 through the merger of the Afﬁnity Homes Group and the William Sutton Group. Afﬁnity Sutton manages over 50 000 homes across the country and recently contracted Roffey Park Institute in Horsham to support their senior managers and leaders in making the transition to a merged housing company. The intervention included a launch event for 24 of the senior managers introducing them to a programme which would take place over the period of approximately 6–9 months and included the broad themes of leadership, change and strategy, with modules on each of the topics supported by action learning sets. The formation of learning sets with participants from across the different operating groups was an important aspect of the programme with the aim of helping the senior managers share knowledge, experience and skills and ﬁnd out more about their colleagues’ ways of working. The ﬁnal module became a ‘real time’ strategy exercise with the executive team joining the senior managers to work through speciﬁc strategic goals to take the company forward. 227

Change, Conﬂict and Community Challenges

The challenges at the outset for this newly formed housing association included: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

■

Disparate companies with differing cultures, ways of working and goals A lack of proactive leadership among the senior managers in the organization A lack of urgency in making any changes to existing practice and moving away from separate organizations An ‘us and them’ culture between the senior managers and the executive team A concern that a merged company might result in less autonomy for individual companies and freedom to provide the services they felt best met their individual customers Hesitancy to be open about the concerns in their own operating companies and lay bare differing vulnerabilities.

Programme content

All the ‘modules’, although having a taught aspect, relied heavily on real exercises which engaged participants in working through the issues. For example, a time line on the foundation programme helped participants to map the history of the various operating companies, so that they could see the value each of them would bring to the new organization. Many were surprised to see aspects of the companies that they had previously been unaware of. It gave them a sense of the real beneﬁt of working collectively and honoured the past of each of these organizations: an important aspect of change management. Another exercise gave participants an opportunity to think about the implications of moving toward a uniﬁed future: ‘Mads, Sads and Glads’ gave people a chance to reﬂect on the past, what they will be sorry to lose and what needs to change for the future. The change module again presented frameworks and theories which participants could reﬂect on in the light of their own experience, particularly around managing differing stakeholders and the transitional aspects of change. Collaborating on organizational strategy

At the Group Board Away Day in January 2007, the members of the Executive Team (GET) and the Group Board reviewed the ways in which the Group as a whole should conduct its business and establish priorities. It was agreed that there should be a set of ‘group wide’ objectives and that all operating companies and the Group Centre Departments, either collectively or through individual endeavours, should be able to demonstrate a commitment and progress towards delivery of a shared vision and shared goals. 228

Case Studies

The essence of the new group was to exploit and develop, to the full, synergies which had been beneﬁcial in the past, delivering improvements in the quality, quantity, scope and efﬁciency of the services offered to customers. Four strategic themes were devised with three or four strategic objectives or targets under each to be ﬂeshed out in discussion with senior managers. The intention being that these strategic objectives would come to represent the basis for a group wide balanced scorecard: a measure of the collective endeavours towards delivery of the shared goals and objectives. The ‘what’ of the strategy was seen to be secondary in some senses to the ‘how’ of its development. Key to the process was establishing consistency of openness and conﬁdence in managers to make suggestions and input into the strategy of the emerging organization. Senior Managers needed to be seen collectively to drive the business and give it a sense of direction. There was also a sense of needing to establish an ongoing role for the senior managers in the development of future strategy and corporate planning. The two-day programme on strategy, as a ﬁnal module in the Roffey Park offering, provided senior managers with a greater understanding of strategy and strategic thinking and led into a real time strategy activity on day two, when participants were joined by their senior executive team to develop the strategy for the merged organization. Participants had been given ‘themes’ in their learning sets prior to the event to discuss and came to the module with some ideas on how to progress them. The exercise, structured using a variation on the ‘World Café’ methodology (Brown and Isaacs, 2005) used the following themes for table discussions: What does ‘helping people put down roots’ actually mean? ■

An articulated understanding of purpose and intent

What is our vision of the future for Afﬁnity Sutton and what are the biggest challenges facing the group now and in the future? ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Size Aspirations Direction Economies of scale Service standards

What does operational autonomy within a group structure mean in reality? ■ ■

How it works Understanding the Group dynamic 229

Change, Conﬂict and Community ■ ■

Understanding the Operating Company dynamic Not about uniformity; more an afﬁnity

What is the future role of this (the collective Senior Management Team’s) group? ■ ■

Cross-company working Synergies

Based on the information about strategy from the previous day and a half, learning sets were invited to prepare for their time with the executive team in terms of their ‘BHAG!’ (or ‘Big Hairy Audacious Goal!’, from Collins and Porras, 1997) for their strategy in working with the executive team. It was important at this stage to push the senior managers into being more proactive, stepping up to the plate in terms of demonstrating their ability to be leaders in the organization. An important aspect of the overall programme was to develop a common purpose and move away from silo working in the separate operating companies. Preparation for work with the executive team included individual learning sets presenting their proposals to their colleagues in other learning sets. In groups of four to ﬁve they then took a stakeholder each from: tenant, member of their teams; and/or a member of another housing corporation, to deliver the appropriate message about the strategy to that stakeholder. This gave participants an opportunity to critique the strategy from differing stakeholder perspectives.

Outcomes of the programme

By the end of the programme, the executive team and senior managers were working effectively on their strategy with low key facilitation from the Roffey Park team. Key to the success of this process in terms of managing change within the organization and heading off conﬂict were the following: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Senior managers’ motivation to be involved in the future strategic direction of the Group The Executive team sharing a human face, making themselves available and walking the talk Being clear about the desired culture to develop in the organization and paying attention to new members in the senior management structure Integrating the business planning process into the responsibilities of all senior managers Regular meetings to review progress Using the development opportunities available to senior managers to work on real issues within the organization.

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Since the Roffey Park programme, the ‘GET together’ group has been formed comprising GET members and senior managers from around the organization. This group of 37 will meet four times a year around the planning cycle, to look back and review performance, launch the business planning phase, review corporate themes and start the budgeting process and set the direction for the following year. At the end of the programme, Afﬁnity Sutton had a cohort of senior managers that knew they had a responsibility for inﬂuencing and shaping the future of their business and shared with the executive team a vision and a sense of its future direction.

2. Portsmouth NHS Trust – Setting up a mediation service Alison Savage, Staff Support Facilitator Background

Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust had run a successful staff counselling service within the Occupational Health and Safety Department for many years. It was well used and held in high esteem by staff. However, relationship issues were frequently presented, leading to disrupted team relationships, sick absence and inappropriate behaviours. Work ‘as usual’ had become less possible for many of the people involved with strained relationships, exaggerated behaviours and negative feelings. The development of a Trust-wide mediation service, if used as an early intervention, would help to support staff, reduce stress and facilitate healthier relationships in the workplace, as well as save money on expensive tribunals, minimize sick absence and aid retention of staff. Setting up the service

In her role as Staff Support Facilitator at the NHS Trust in 2004, Alison Savage had the responsibility of taking the mediation service forward. At an early stage, it was important to consider a number of issues as part of the process: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Getting senior management commitment Deciding on the team of mediators Training and ongoing supervision Conﬁdentiality issues and record keeping Keeping track of results.

It was important that any intervention was seen to be non-threatening, conﬁdential and easily accessible. Staff needed to know that if they were experiencing relationship difﬁculties at work, then a different kind of support would be available. The ﬁrst step in the process was in securing senior management commitment to the process. However, 231

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as issues of conﬂict were well known at the senior levels of the organization, there was little, if any resistance. The same level of support was apparent from the trade union side, seeing this as a positive move towards improved working relationships. Stakeholder engagement

Another early action was in identifying key stakeholders in this initiative and inviting views on the issues which prompted conﬂict in the organization. These interviews and group discussions provided useful case studies which (when suitably anonymous) became the case studies in a training programme for the mediators. Part of this initial research also helped to establish criteria for the selection of mediators. Some suggested criteria were as follows: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

A genuine interest in helping and supporting others to resolve conﬂict Good listening skills (although these would be heightened throughout the programme) A willingness to learn through practical experience Open to feedback and personal change A commitment to using the skills within Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust.

The most suitable candidates for the mediation service were the Trust’s counselling team who already had some key skills needed for mediation. They were seen to be sufﬁciently impartial and neutral (working on a contract basis already) and eager to add further skills to their portfolio. One person from HR attended the training for information and to develop generic skills, but it was decided that HR would not be best placed to offer the mediation service, with a potential conﬂict of interests and debatable neutrality. Barbara’s role as an external consultant was to offer advice and support on setting up the mediation service and training the mediators. The resulting 6-day mediation skills programme was approved by Mediation UK, the lead professional body for community mediation and participants received a certiﬁcate endorsed by Mediation UK. The programme comprised two 2-day events covering the key skills of mediation and case studies to support skills practice, built from the initial research, followed by two separate one-day events to embed skills further and determine how to take the service forward. Referrals

The service set up three referral pathways to give full and easy access for staff, which now operate as follows: Self-referrals are positively welcomed as this gives an early intervention opportunity. Staff can access all the referral information via the Trust’s intranet 232

Case Studies

site, from the staff support suite, or simply by leaving a request message on the staff support voice or e-mail system. The service is still in the early stages and trust still needs to be built through experience and successful results so that staff will continue to use the self-referral route. A second referral route is via the Trust’s HR department, who support the mediation process fully and often promote the service to managers when relationship conﬂicts occur in teams. Experience has shown that a good way of encouraging individuals in conﬂict to use the service is to meet them face to face. Once they can sense the neutrality of the mediator and understand how mediation works, the idea becomes more tangible and less frightening. Alison, as the person heading up the service at the time of its creation, became an ambassador and champion for mediation and her faith in the process helped others to see the possibilities of resolution. The third referral pathway occurs when HR use the service as part of their own process. When a complaint about one member of staff from another is received through the Trust’s grievance policy, HR has the option to make a mediation referral. The policy states that a facilitated meeting should be offered initially to help individuals get to resolution. If mediation is the preferred option for the facilitated meeting, Alison makes the initial contact. She assesses the case for mediation readiness, suitability and willingness. Even though HR makes the initial referral, everyone has to partake willingly. Mediation is a voluntary activity and will not work if people feel forced to take part. It is perfectly acceptable if either person does not want to use mediation as a way of resolving their issues. However, of those who do, almost all decide not to continue with their grievance, preferring to try the working agreement which is negotiated in mediation itself. People in dispute

A typical illustration of the issues presented to the mediation service is outlined below. Two senior consultants, Person A and Person B, were at loggerheads, questioning each other’s professional judgements, blaming each other for the change in the department’s achievements with a general deterioration in overall atmosphere. The presenting issues included a change in work patterns from full to part time, increased workloads and lack of staff resources to support the increase, lack of communication, increased tension and stress on both sides. Impact on others

The fallout of this soured relationship was massive. One consultant was about to retire 2 years early, the other was heading for burnout. Three nurses and two administrators had resigned due to the deteriorating atmosphere in the department. 233

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Increased staff turnover, higher sickness absence, reduced development opportunities, a lack of creativity and innovation for over a year, and a growing poor reputation within the Trust eventually brought things to a head. Mediation intervention

After 14 months of stress and as things reached a crescendo, one consultant decided to contact the newly formed mediation service, seeing this as preferable to taking more formal action. The mediation service assigned two mediators as they do for every case. Both consultants were seen separately before meeting face to face. For the ﬁrst time, both consultants were encouraged to share their thoughts and feelings. They heard each other say what had led to their actions and decisions and they spent time trying to understand each other’s perspective. The mediators remained neutral at all times and were called upon to translate language that could exacerbate negative feelings. In all, it took about 5 hours to go through the process and ﬁnd a way forward. After 5 months, the repaired, workable relationship was holding. Consultant A had decided not to retire for another 2 years; Consultant B was less stressed and had found more appropriate ways of managing the workload. Both consultants were talking to one another and communicating well, the atmosphere in the department was good and staff had fewer days off sick. Challenges of mediation

Mediation in the Trust presented several challenges; some of which might be anticipated but others came to light as the service rolled out. Mediation agreements

One challenge arose from the process of agreed ‘resolution plans’ resulting from the mediation discussions. Participants in the mediation process often experienced a sense of personal relief and new found euphoria and were keen to implement their respective resolution plans without either negotiating or informing line managers when the plans involved a change in work practice. This, of course, led to some bad feeling as the mediation process somehow took on a role of having ‘power-over’ the normal procedure for change. As soon as this came to light, the initial working contract with prospective new clients was changed. Before embarking on mediation, it was stipulated that any suggested change in working practices must ﬁrst of all be agreed in principle with the respective line manager. Change in working practice as highlighted in a resolution plan is not simply a ‘rite of passage’, it requires the involvement of others which often means disclosure. 234

Case Studies Time out for mediation

The next hitch arose when mediation clients were found to be absent for their mediation session without informing managers. Disclosure of the process could, of course, be difﬁcult for some. However, not informing anyone could have catastrophic effects, such as inappropriate medical cover on the wards, as well as colleagues having to cover for the missing person. It has now been made part of the Trust policy that staff are entitled to time out for mediation which must be negotiated and agreed with line managers prior to a session. A 24-hour service means anyone can arrange mediation in or out of work time whether they work day or night shifts. Conﬁdentiality Other issues around conﬁdentiality centre on an expectation by some managers for the service to disclose the content of a mediation session. It is made very clear from the outset what, if anything can be passed on and a contract around conﬁdentiality is agreed upon. There is a ﬁne balance between client conﬁdentiality and the importance of tracking issues raised by the whole mediation process at an organizational level. One option is to offer a mediation model that simply offers a service to staff with no further function or purpose. Alternatively, a more sensitive model can be allowed to evolve which adds value, facilitates learning and develops working practices at both micro and macro levels within the Trust. The mediation process has the potential to inform the business about the clear trends and patterns which both create and reduce conﬂict. Keeping track of results

In the ﬁrst 5 months of operating the mediation service at Portsmouth, there had been 28 enquires of which 19 progressed to full mediation. In line with best practice, mediation has to be a voluntary activity, requiring all parties to sign up willingly on the understanding they are free to withdraw at any time during the process. The data already available at Portsmouth told Alison that 93 percent of mediation clients had experienced positive beneﬁt; 64 percent remained at work; 23 percent returned to work as a result of mediation; 2 percent requested redeployment; and 1 percent left the Trust. Questions to consider for developing an internal mediation service ■ ■

Can we ﬁnd potential mediators who are seen as conﬁdential, neutral and who can hold the appropriate boundaries? What conﬁdentiality boundaries do we want to develop for the service? 235

Change, Conﬂict and Community ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

How will they differ from existing conﬁdentiality agreements, such as those under current staff support schemes? How will we manage the conﬁdential nature of mediation within the organization? In which department will the mediation service sit? What relationship will the mediation service have with HR? What will the referral pathways be? Can we offer appropriate accommodation for the service? How will case notes be dealt with? What will be the code of practice for the mediators? Mediator training: what/how? What supervision of the service needs to be in place? How do we need to publicize the service? What is the potential saving mediation can offer? What are the costs of setting up and running an appropriate mediation service? How will we measure the success of the service?

3. Red Bee – Change and Stress in the Workplace John Allen, Independent consultant Background

Red Bee Media is a company which has gone through major change over the past few years. It has made the transition from being a department within the BBC (responsible for the operational playout of the BBC’s television channels, its promotion and its signing and subtitling) to an organization not only outside the BBC in a business sense, but also located in a completely new building. Within the BBC, the department of approximately 1000 people was known as Presentation and later changed its name to BBC Broadcast. In 2005, it was sold by the BBC to an investment bank, moving from Television Centre in West London into a brand new, purpose built Broadcast Centre a stone’s throw away. At this point, it became a commercial company renamed Red Bee Media which now counts the BBC as one of its many clients. John Allen, a BBC Presentation Editor who managed the teams running the BBC’s television channels, was asked to run the change management programme as Red Bee made the transition both physically and psychologically into its new building. Over a period of about 2 years, he designed and facilitated workshops for large groups of staff, creating a forum where managers could share business development plans and staff could freely question, debate and contribute to the 236

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process of change. Tours were arranged of new working areas as they were built and staff were involved closely in the design and layout of areas, whether technical, operational or ofﬁce areas, including choosing furniture and colours, as well as devising new working practices and rotas. Understandably, this was a period of uncertainty for staff, however, the beneﬁts of regular consultation, communication and involvement of staff in the ongoing process helped enormously with some of the fears and concerns such a major change would inevitably create. In fact, staff survey research showed a high score of understanding of change among staff, especially when compared to other areas of the BBC. One of the areas of growth for Red Bee through this period of change was in the area of programme listings and billings. A team of staff compiles programme information which is then passed on to listings magazines and published on the digital Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) which appears on screen. The EPG team was part of the original BBC structure, part of Presentation. As Presentation became Red Bee, the EPG team joined together with an outside company called Broadcast Data Services (BDS) to form a larger listings department. The formation of this new structure did not come without its own conﬂict as part of the change process and Red Bee asked John Allen, now himself an independent consultant, facilitator and coach, to run some Stress in the Workplace focus groups. Focus Groups were run across a week looking at work-related stress with staff and managers from the Broadcasting Data Services (BDS) area of Red Bee Media. Each group used brainstorming techniques to look at what causes the most stress in the workplace. They analysed the Health and Safety Executive Management Standards (Demands, Control, Support, Relationships, Role and Change) and discussed at a deeper level the two key areas about which they had most concern. Some common issues centred on workload, communication and IT, as well as facilities such as the fabric of the building in which staff worked. ‘Demands of the workplace’ was one of the most common reasons given for stress. There was a general feeling that workloads had increased and resources did not match the demand. There was concern in some areas and at some levels that there was a need to work a lot of extra time in the evenings and at weekends. There was also some feeling that it would help if operational staff or team leaders were more involved in contract discussions and client management. Although there was praise for small teams, it was recognized that sickness and holidays increased pressure on staff having to cover for those away as well as working towards tight deadlines. There was a general feeling that there should be greater communication across the business and that there was a need for regular team feedback sessions. There was also a suggestion that people want to know more about other parts of the business and that there was a need for more positive feedback when there had been success. 237

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IT issues were commonly considered to be a cause of stress in the workplace. The fact that part of the business was in a building several miles away from the main Broadcast Centre meant that the different parts of the business had grown up using different systems. At times, this made communication difﬁcult, especially when positive messages were sent out from senior management and not everyone was able to read them. There were a number of comments about the fabric of the building, windows and air conditioning for example. For the team who worked in an old building, without the fantastic facilities provided by the new building, which housed the rest of the business, this was an aspect of conﬂict and concern. While a building cannot be easily changed, there were a certain number of quick wins that could be achieved to improve morale and help staff through the change. As well as some relatively minor improvements like a new kettle and seating, greater attention from the staff themselves to general cleanliness in the kitchen and toilet areas were issues that, with a little more consideration from people, could improve life for everyone enormously. The results from the focus groups were fed back to the management team who then looked at ways to tackle the issues over the longer term, as well as looking for quick wins. This is an area of ongoing work for a team adapting to a new working environment. It forms part of a bigger picture of a company that has gone through major change over the past few years but has continued to deliver to the highest standards of broadcasting in the UK and around the world. All of this at a time when technological changes in the industry are moving at a breathtaking pace.

4. Changes within Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service Bob Ratcliffe, Area Manager and member of the Service management team for 5 years tells his story of change within the Fire Service. Background

The Fire Service had changed little since the Fire Service Act in 1947. The national Fire Service dispute in 2002, although essentially about pay and conditions, also raised issues about the Service and, in particular, its effectiveness in leadership, managing change and communications with the staff and public. The Government’s Modernization Agenda has driven the changes that have taken place both nationally and locally, resulting in greater accountability and reformed systems in place to improve services, foster partnerships within the community and other agencies. Audit, Performance Management and Key Performance Indicators were the tip of the iceberg in terms of some of the changes that needed to be implemented. 238

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A number of national networks and committees were dismantled so that decision making could be streamlined. The Fire Service had to adapt locally rather than rely on national guidance. This change also saw the introduction of Regional Management Boards with a requirement from Government for increased collaboration between Fire and Rescue Services. Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service

Culture change in Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service needed to reﬂect the changes at a national level and signiﬁcant project work was needed with joint inter-department project groups set up to achieve agreed targets and deadlines. Examples of some of the projects which were necessary to support the transition included: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

New national pay scheme Job evaluation Rank to role: structure review Integrated personal development system Changes to shift patterns and work routines Conditions of service Equality and diversity Integrated risk management planning.

Assessment and development centres were introduced to provide a fairer and more accessible selection process; a move away from the more traditional panel process. Role maps for each job role based on national occupational standards were also introduced and a rank to role review streamlined 14 roles into 7. Challenges

Some of the challenges faced along the way included: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

The rate of change: responding to central Government expectations while still trying to carry out the day-to-day work Financial constraints and increased budget requirements Marketing and communications, internal and external Staff engagement Planning and prioritizing at a strategic level Resource planning Engaging the unions. 239

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Following the national dispute, there was a need to build bridges with the trade unions, in particular the Fire Brigade Union (FBU). The FBU lost some credibility with its members after the dispute and needed to accept that some aspects of change would now be a matter for consultation rather than negotiation. The implementation of Integrated Risk Management Plans at a local level was of concern to all the unions; the involvement of the unions in all of the change projects has been an important factor. The unions are themselves challenged by the rate and complexity of the changes that have been necessary. Working in partnership with the unions was seen as important so that members get the right information at the right time and that they had the opportunity to contribute to key projects. Management meets with the union representatives once a quarter and involve them in every major project from an early stage.

Culture change

Integral to all of this work has been embedding a culture which reﬂects open communication, an organization that demonstrates it values its staff and their contribution, where people have an opportunity to ask questions and contribute ideas. Managers at all levels needed to demonstrate an increased capacity to think for themselves, to be more proactive and involved with their teams, to reduce risks by involving station staff and to focus more on community involvement by developing partnerships. Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service has never been bottom of the league tables and is performing strongly: it aims to be in the top 10 Services in the country and to develop from ‘good to great’. The engagement and development of staff in the Service has been tackled through a number of initiatives including development programmes for supervisory managers (including dispute resolution and mediation skills run by Conﬂict Management Plus) and management programmes for middle and senior managers. Other key areas included are: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Visits to stations/departments by the management team Marketing and communications strategy Cross department meetings and project groups Developing a ‘no blame culture’ Clear expectations that managers have a right to manage, with a commitment to lead openness and transparency with the staff: the introduction of core values Increased recognition of the importance and beneﬁts of working with the unions Project management training for managers Training and development opportunities for all staff.

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Change is an ongoing process and, although no redundancies have been necessary in Hampshire, there has been some reluctance in terms of accepting the changes. On a local level, it meant changes to duty systems, working teams and the relocation of appliances or staff. At this stage, there was a choice either to accept it or to do something about it. A collective decision was made by the management team at the time to do something to improve the situation. An important decision was to use the Investors in People standard as a framework for assessing the organization and to provide a structure for improvement. The organization has been working towards Investors in People for the last couple of years and a commitment has been made to achieving this as part of the improvement process. As the work involved with this has taken place alongside other initiatives, people have become more engaged and less cynical. This, according to Bob is about ‘looking at the dirty linen on the line’ and identifying what people can do to improve the areas that need to be improved and work better. Honesty, trust and good communications throughout the organization have been vital in this culture change. As a way of signalling an appreciation for staff ’s involvement in these change initiatives, they were recently given two free cinema tickets to use where and when they want. Bob said, ‘I thought this would go one of two ways: it will be viewed as a waste of money, or they will see it as it was intended, a gesture of appreciation’. Feedback since has been that it was a good idea, so perhaps cynicism about change is changing itself! Lessons learnt ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

■ ■ ■

Having a more effective project planning system with people trained in how to manage projects effectively The importance of effective marketing and communications (internal and external) Early involvement of staff and unions in major projects Clear leadership and direction from the management team Making the engagement of staff a priority and a measured target. As part of this, the corporate risks register includes ‘failure to engage staff ’ as one of the risks and this is measured through the organization both formally and informally and through the consultation process with the trade unions Investment in staff and their personal development Staff understanding where their work contributes to the Service’s plan Recognition and appreciation for staff and their contribution to improving Service.

5. O2: ‘A Better Place’ Jo Macbeth of O2 and Peter Shepherd of Ashridge Consulting, tell the story of how O2 worked on its culture to improve the working experience of employees in order to delight customers. 241

Change, Conﬂict and Community Background

O2 was launched in 2002 and, over the next 3 years, the people of the organization worked hard to establish the business successfully in a highly competitive market. Contributing to this was a culture which focused on task and action, with a ‘can do’ mentality. In 2005, there was a recognition that after all the efforts that had been made, with O2 thriving commercially and reaching a market position that many outside the business considered would be impossible for them, there was now a need to provide an additional focus of energy into the organization. Strategically, O2 were very clear that they wanted to differentiate themselves in their market. Competitors’ approaches included taking risks with 3G technology, off-shoring call centres or being very agile with tariffs. O2’s desired source of competitive advantage was the customer experience. O2 saw a direct relationship between the quality of the employment experience people had and the likelihood of achieving competitive advantage through customers. They felt that if people were having a positive experience as employees, they would communicate that to the customer. They also recognized that they and their competitors were putting a lot of effort and resources into customer acquisition, when there was a greater cost involved in losing customers. The priority, therefore, became customer retention. So, the proposition was to keep customers through excellent customer experiences, which started with the employment experience of O2’s people. After 3 years of necessarily focusing on task, there was a need to shift the balance a little to build further internal relationships. What was required was a change programme that would work with culture. There was a recognition that external expertise would be needed for a project of this size and ambition. Paula Cave, Head of Experience at O2, put together a group of people from across the organization to recommend to the Board which consultants O2 should work with. In this way, the change programme was, from the very beginning, a collaborative effort, where senior managers challenged themselves to ‘let go of the reins’. In the end, the choice was between two very different approaches. One consultancy approach was a more traditional, though sophisticated, problem-solving methodology for change. The other, from Ashridge Consulting, was based on Appreciative Inquiry (AI), which provides a different perspective on working with culture. One approach is to see this work as ‘remedial’, identifying the culture you want, comparing it to what you have and effectively ‘backﬁlling’ in order to get to where you ‘should’ be. This carries the assumption that the culture you have now is less desirable than the one you would wish to have for the future. The AI approach is to say that you almost certainly have the seeds of the culture you most desire already within the organizational system. Inquiry into that system ampliﬁes the best of what is already there and starts to develop and strengthen those seeds (see Chapter 8 in this book for more information on the principles behind this approach). 242

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The selection group recommended Ashridge Consulting and, while the Board had favoured the more traditional approach, the CEO at that time, Matthew Key, led the way in encouraging the Board to work collaboratively, trusting their staff as agreed and step into the unknown. A key part of the successes and challenges for O2 through the change programme was the ability of the Board to keep supporting the process, which was understandably not always easy for them, given the demands and concerns of the business. The change programme featured two concurrent streams of activity: the planned aspects and the emergent ones. Planned activity

A formal inquiry process was conducted which lasted for several months in the lead up to a ﬁnal 3½ day summit. It involved three key stages: 1. Training in AI principles and techniques: this was carried out for 200 members of staff and took place in groups of 20 over a period of 2–3 months. 2. Interviews across the organization: these people in turn interviewed 1000 people across the organization to create a huge volume of stories of the organization functioning at its best. Groups of interviewers would meet to share the stories that they had gathered from these interviews and the levels of excitement that this created in people from all different functions, and of all different personalities, was remarkable. The process was experienced as hugely energizing, that so many people felt that they were having a voice on how they wanted the organization to be, rather than people telling them what it should be. 3. The Summit Meeting: again, this process created an enormous amount of enthusiasm and energy, providing a hugely positive experience for the 250 people attending. They consisted of: ■ approx 120 of those who had conducted the interviews ■ the Board and senior managers ■ a group called ‘process owners’ who were responsible for processes that might need renewal or reinvestigation at the summit (e.g. induction, training and development) ■ a group called the ‘unusual suspects’, people who were powerful informally and in the social networks, such as trade union reps and receptionists, who would need to be onside if change was to happen. The event was held in Edinburgh. The AI phases were followed, as Peter describes them: ■ Discovery – what have you discovered from the interviews? ■ Dream – what dream of the future for O2 is implicit in the data? ■ Design – what are the key elements that need to be designed? 243

Change, Conﬂict and Community ■

Delivery – who’s prepared to take action to allow O2 to fulﬁl its best possible destiny? The methods used included left and right brain activities (i.e. both logical/analytical and creative methods) and social activities were also included. The summit was run in a way to mirror the strengths of the O2 culture, for example: ■ O2 has a work hard, play hard culture and the summit was set in a mountaineering centre. People had time to get involved in activities and the metaphor of ‘reaching our peak’, ‘climb to the highest limit’ was used to good effect. ■ O2 has strong brand and production values so it was important that the event was managed in a way that supported that. Participants were given t-shirts, they had welcome packs in their hotel rooms and a ﬁlm was shot of the event which was used at the close to play back to them highlights of what they had achieved together over the 3½ days. Towards the end of the last day, the consultants used a version of Open Space (see Chapter 8 for more information on this approach) to enable people to gather around actions and ideas that they would be happy to continue involvement in. They also held a leadership goldﬁsh bowl where people could come up to the Board and present ideas that they wanted to be able to put into effect immediately. This included for example, changes in phone lines, and more autonomy for spending on ﬂights, where people were asking to be trusted to make sensible ﬁnancial decisions. The Board was asked in advance to have their ‘hearts and cheque books open’, so that people could see how real their commitments to change were. The result of the summit was 30–40 projects or lines of further inquiry. In reality, some ideas faded, where the amount of energy for them was not as great as ﬁrst anticipated. Some ideas were taken into the normal part of business: induction, for example was already being reviewed, but the contributions from the summit were built into the review. Finally, a third were new and really took off, particularly when people were involved who were most inﬂuential in promoting the changes. One powerful example was the establishment of an alternative Board, called ‘Real Directors’: people had stood up at the summit and said that the Board did not take the customer fully into account when decision making, so the alternative board idea was set up to hold the board to account on the issue. Of all the aspects of the change programme, the summit and its follow up were probably the most challenging. A great deal of excitement and energy had been raised through the process, culminating in the summit, and ﬁnding a way to balance this, with the anxieties and concerns of the Board during and after the summit, was a process of realistic negotiation and learning for the organization and all those involved. 244

Case Studies Emergent activity

One of O2’s strengths is its awareness of creativity and brand. The senior team was able to make a strong connection between the need to give ‘creative licence’ to their consultants in order for them to be the catalyst within the system that they desired. The consultants and internal O2 change agents themselves kept open to possibilities of how to work most effectively with the system. As a result, three further streams of activity emerged. Consulting by ‘hanging out’ Informal conversations in the lobby of ofﬁces and over coffee led to questions being asked and discussed, framing suggestions, bringing diverse people together and getting involved in change activities in different locations and venues. Change through appreciative principles started to have a bubbling, ripple effect through random pockets of the organization in ways that were led by the enthusiasm, interest and needs of different people in different places. Working with the Board

The consultants and Paula Cave worked closely with the Board to keep a debate going about the leadership implications of the work. This was a way of maintaining trust and conﬁdence, helping the Board to understand how they could give up the necessary degree of control to the consultants, change agents and employees. Business as usual

In order to effect change, it became necessary for the consultants and internal O2 change agents to establish themselves as a reliable presence among the broader leadership population. The level below the Board would also need to believe in the process and the consultants if tangible changes were to happen. The consultants and change agents, therefore, became involved in facilitating meetings and supporting the leaders on an ad hoc basis. Did the process work?

The programme generated excitement and enthusiasm for change. There was a sense of shared ownership and a credible belief that people all over the organization could make a difference. Appreciative Inquiry galvanized and gave a structure to a desire in the organization that was already underway, that is, for the front line to make more of a difference to the organization, for untapped energy to be released and maximized. The traditional management approach of exercising control from the top of the hierarchy was not nimble and agile enough 245

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to make a difference in a complex and rapidly changing market. Through the change programme, people at the bottom of the hierarchy were being given the authority to innovate without permission. This was essential from a business viewpoint: when the organization’s commercial position can change daily there is no time for each individual carefully to check whether they have the discretion to credit a client £10. Managing this effectively also required a background learning and feedback process, so that the use of discretion could be understood. There was through the process a very real challenge for managers to learn how to move from the old style leadership to the new. One speciﬁc example was the agreement at the summit for managers no longer to need a Director’s sign-off to book a ﬂight. A real test of the process came when, a few weeks later, 250 people bought ﬂights to go to an industry trade conference in Barcelona, whereas previously a maximum of 20 people had attended. There were discussions among the Directors, including blame of the consultants for the increased costs for the organization. The Finance Director, however, pointed out that they had never really known as an organization how many people it was useful for them to send to the conference. Through this approach, they would now be able to learn this, provided the feedback mechanism to do so was in place. There were other activities happening at the same time as the Appreciative Inquiry process. For example, there was a reinvigorated customer promise which had its corollary in an employee promise (the People Promise) which came out of the summit. The hard work and courage of all those in the organization certainly paid off, as illustrated, for example, through some strong statistical indicators of success. O2 was placed 5th in the Top 10 of the Sunday Times ‘Best place to work’ on its ﬁrst entry. Customer retention and satisfaction ﬁgures were higher, mystery shopper results improved and employee satisfaction ﬁgures were higher. The place of conﬂict

The strength of the AI approach is that it encourages groups to collaborate around shared positive feelings, before they collaborate around cognitive tasks. It focuses on the positive, and little time or space is given to listening to what is not working, or to the grumbles and complaints often associated with change programmes. In the process, some dissent and conﬂict against the approach went ‘underground’. The down-side of AI is that if it is used without honouring pain, regret and doubt, these feelings can provoke unnecessary conﬂict. In addition, the sheer level of energy and enthusiasm that can be raised needs to be balanced with a system wide perspective of what is happening in the organization. Not all ideas can be delivered on; not all enthusiasms can be followed up and some 246

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unproductive conﬂict can be created when other priorities start to evolve and take precedence. There is a need to manage the tensions between traditional hierarchy and decision making on the one hand, with participation and enthusiasm on the other: and this is not always easy. Within O2, the methodology was positioned heavily right up front as a process used by organizations and consultants internationally with great success. While this built conﬁdence, it meant that people started to look at the window rather than the view, that is, they focused sometimes too much on the methodology rather than what the organization was looking to achieve. A practical example of this was the focus placed on the summit as ‘the change intervention’ whereas, in reality, the real work started after that and budget and resources needed to be as available after it as before. In O2, there was an inner circle who knew about AI and an outer circle who were yet to be enlightened, which caused tensions. This was a mirror of the whole organization; there had traditionally been an inner group of managers and leaders who felt a strong sense of ownership of the business but who were massively overburdened, and an outer ring of supervisors and front line staff who might have thought ‘why does this business use so little of my talents?’ The programme had the capability to release the over busy managers, but this process was particularly challenging for them. They were needed to give up a large degree of control and work strategically. The approach of some was understandably, subtlely to try to remodel the approach into something far less radical and act as if it was really nothing that much different to the old way of doing things. In an approach where the focus is on ﬁxing what is wrong, this dissent can become highlighted and given more time and attention than what is working, potentially rising out of proportion. In AI, the need is to keep focusing on the strengths of everyone’s effort and learn from the differences and tensions. Follow up

A year after the summit, the change programme went into a second phase. There was new energy for a customer based Appreciative Inquiry process, asking about the customer’s experience. The real power of AI is that for years afterwards, people are often still using the approach, but not consciously; it becomes part of how business is done. Jo and other consultants within O2 use an appreciative approach to most of their work, whatever the scale of the change, involving others and working with the strengths of the current situation. In effect, AI creates ‘second order’ change, where organizations change the way they change, rather than keep pushing harder at old ways of improvement that potentially make the problem worse. 247

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6. Organizational Health from a Gestalt perspective Paul Barber illustrates how Gestalt practice can support organizations in the process of change. Notice from his use of language and the aspects of change that he pays attention to, how Paul uses Gestalt principles (see Chapter 9 on The Healthy Organization). Clearly, Paul is an experienced and qualiﬁed Gestalt consultant and not everyone could work in the way he describes, however, the awareness and attention he pays to the ‘here and now’ and giving space to talk and be heard, is something we can all learn from as we deal with the complex world of change and conﬂict. Background

The Chairman of a leading edge tele-marketing consultancy in England, which had around 2000 staff and had been in existence for around 15 years, approached me with the following goals in mind for his company and people: ■ ■

A heightened awareness of the nature of learning Increased understanding of models of culture change for wider use with their external customers and clients.

He wanted both goals to be developed through a peer learning community and an experiential approach to cultural change. Some 24 people from the organization, across a wide base, from Director to shop ﬂoor level, formed the Gestalt-based learning community to study together towards a commercially based masters degree in change. This process aimed to increase their knowledge, understanding and awareness of change by paying attention to their own journey and process in the experience. Into the Dragon’s Lair: Organizational resistance to change

The negotiations between the company and the university (who would own and sponsor the programme academically) to establish the learning programme were not plain sailing. Initially, the company’s eagerness to get things under way was seen as pushy and naive and the company saw the university’s slow over-careful response time as faint-hearted. Due to the university’s caution, the company became nit-picking and legalistic with regard to contractual arrangements and guarantees. This resistance to the process, I suggest, was symptomatic of the dynamic within the organization which I was later to learn about. After a prolonged period of ﬂoating in limbo and mounting frustration, realizing it was impossible to supply the securities being demanded by both sides, I forced the pace by reframing the proposed off-site masters as an experiment that 248

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would tackle problems as they arose. This was accepted by both the university and the company. Awakening Dragons: A Dialogical Approach to Renewal

In the introductory 3-day block, within a palatial commercial building, participants and tutors began to evolve a way of being together. Our cognitive agenda was to raise awareness to the nature of learning and our affective task was to bond as a peer-learning community. At the start of each day, we spent from 30 to 90 minutes, depending upon the nature of the emerging issues, seated in a community circle raising attention to current individual and community learning needs, while reﬂecting upon the group dynamics we were co-creating together. This process surfaced emerging conﬂicts and frustrations, while providing opportunity for tutors to resolve the same through timely facilitation. Following this checking-in process, we planned how we would address the academic content of the day, inclusive of mini-lectures, experiential experiments, self-directed activity and assignment preparation. At the close of the day, participants reformed the community group to debrief, share evaluations, celebrate their gains and to say their goodbyes. Also within this ﬁrst meeting, a good deal of old scores and resentments surfaced among colleagues. Table 1 provides a sample of my ﬁeld notes recorded at the time. This record, in the interests of openness was circulated and discussed with the community. Its external impressions were subsequently veriﬁed as recognizable to others. Hopefully, from my notes you can begin to appreciate the emotionally expressive nature of this company, with its ‘tell it like it is’ character and competitive ‘I want to be a star’ culture. Another feature essential for an understanding of the company, was the emotional dependence individuals felt upon the Chairman who, having originally drawn the working community together, retained an immense personal following. Most people in the company, including the major power holders, had been recruited personally by the Chairman in the 1980s through seminaries which incorporated a potent mixture of group encounter and charismatic spirituality. Consequently, he exercised enormous political power and personal control within company life. Indeed, in the 1980s the company had been publicly compared (Heelas, 1987) to a cult and, even now, the Chairman took very seriously indeed his obligation to provide individuals with unsolicited developmental experiences. Sometimes he became so trapped within his facilitative/parental role that he enacted with gusto a ‘beneﬁcent parent’ one minute and a ‘punitive parent’ the next. So personally felt were the dynamics that neutrality was rarely in the equation. He was either loved or rejected (or loving and rejecting) by turns. No doubt this was as exhausting for him as it was for others, yet, on the plus side, this intense emotional climate was felt to be generative of a good deal of heightened interaction and emotional learning. 249

250 Table 1 Facilitator’s ﬁeld notes

External impressions

My internal reactions

a) How are people and events organized here? Some of the longer serving members of the community appear to take it on themselves – and be looked to by others – to police the community rules Community members, being familiar with ‘other people’s stuff ’, tend to ridicule or laugh at those who act characteristically and/or true to the company stereotype

Shock at how punitive some Facilitate an all male and women of this community are all female group, in a permitted to be, almost as if they ﬁsh-bowl setting? have divine protection or a permit Investigate further the male to abuse and female stereotypes Surprise at the carefulness of the men this culture produces?

b) What inﬂuences of the present ﬁeld explain current behaviour? A highly competitive group with strong players for power With so much being said it is not easy to be heard or to enter gently and dominance into the group Powerful members make long speeches rather than enter into dialogue with others Tendency to ‘tell people how it is’ rather than enquire Competition for attention and air-time c) What is unique about the present ﬁeld? A gifted group of individuals who are potential stars in their own right The organization seems genuinely to value people and appears to offer opportunities for individuals to maximize their potential

I ﬁnd this group very easy to like

Possible future action

Encourage attention and more sensitive listening and role model same? Facilitate exercise in deeper levels of listening with the heart as well as the ear?

Monitor and draw attention to the community’s development?

People appear to want a ‘quick ﬁx’ and actionable skills, rather than mindfully and carefully to acquire the same Some individuals very committed to the organization and some appear trapped within it d) What is in the process of becoming? If the quieter members are permitted to stay quiet and the noisier ones noisy, the community will split into activators and those who hold hidden resentments and hurts

e) What am I blind to or excluding at this time? Conﬂict seemed to be held onto until near the end, when all manner of grievances arose as time was conveniently running out A tendency for senior community members to swing a little between depending and rebelling against authoritative facilitation Questions from Partlett, 1991

I was aware of letting this run this time round to get at the emerging pattern, so as to see the organic form this group co-creates

Gently encourage the quieter ones to speak and noisier ones to hold back? Let the pattern run until the community sorts itself out?

I believe the under tone of my communication was ‘life is too short for us to waste playing out the usual rescuer-victimpersecutory dramas you play out to get attention here’

Be less patient with repetitive deﬂective behaviour that appears to be getting nowhere? Challenge the resistances?

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Change, Conﬂict and Community Feeling the Heat of the Dragon’s Breath: Threats to Community Learning

Two months into the programme, when academia and commerce had grown more accustomed to each other, a period of stability ensued. But everything has its seasons. Some 8 months into the programme a number of interesting challenges arose. Event 1: The Chairman sold the company, upped and left

The retirement of the Chairman evoked within the company a response not unlike that of a trusted parent deserting his family; emotional distress on all sides was deep and long-lived, with individuals swinging between adoring and rejecting, gratitude for the past and fear of the future. Event 2: The author was invited to heal the organization following the Chairman’s departure

This took the form of communally working through the waves of shock and grief that occasioned the Chairman’s leaving. The outside world now began actively to threaten the learning community. Following the Chairman’s departure, the author was heatedly quizzed about the nature of his relationship with him: ‘Are you still in contact with X?’; ‘Do you report back to him?’ etc. Though uncomfortable at the time, this regular surfacing, airing and resolution of hidden and imagined agendas helped to maintain the health of the community. The retiring Chairman had evolved a divisive culture where each group warred with another, while holding him special. By contrast, within the learning community, teacher and student alike were seen as accountable to the learning community, and each was openly held to account. In the learning community, a period of destabilization, echoing the company’s position, likewise ensued. Intense effort and energy was now invested in a lifeor-death drama as the company sought to prove itself under new management. Indeed, organizational pressures now began to fragment communication and threaten the timely return of course assignments, to the degree that I circulated a letter to participants, stating, ‘I am holding you to your contract with yourself, your company and myself, to meet the requirements of the MSc programme. You may choose to feel alerted; supported; told-off; patronized or cared for. Whatever reaction and whatever you feel is ﬁne, just as long as we open further dialogue.’ The above missive was received positively, bar one, as a supportive tutorial act. Lessons from Drawing the Dragon’s Teeth: So What Really Changed?

At the end of the workshop component of the course, prior to the research dissertation, an evaluative day was organized. I was commissioned to record events and to circulate my account to the community. I was granted permission to publish what transpired. 252

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In the check-in to the day, participants began sharing how they had changed: provided therapeutic insight and an intense working through of personal issues in a relatively short space of time; awakened me to ‘being’ as well as ‘doing’ In relation to the cult-like culture of the company, it was also noted that the programme had: encouraged life changes and a de-construction of previous notions of the self;exerted a collective effect upon the organization – by way of setting people free from their history In terms of learning, there was evidence for an emotional working through and a re-evaluation of self and relationships: a healing process; I have become more softer, and questioning of what I’ll do with the rest of my life; Clearer as to what is mine and what are other’s processes that effect me; Feel much more compassionate; I don’t need to be angry and bullying; which I did to others as they did to me to avoid being controlled. I’m more angry and upset than before, as if it’s peeled the layers off. My quality of energy is different now. More aware of organic rather than imposed change now It was suggested we adopt a ‘ﬁshbowl’ format. (This necessitates a circle of six chairs being placed in the centre of the larger community group, of which participants ﬁll ﬁve chairs, but leave one empty, so that should someone walk in another must leave, keeping an empty and inviting chair. Through this process speakers regularly alternate, only ﬁve people are active at any one time, others may enter and the whole community is party to discussion.) Attention was then turned towards the healing effects of the learning community within the company: Emotions are more accessible now and our personal quality of life (within the organization) has improved; for example, we can now say no; This course has helped me integrate difﬁcult experiences of the past (within the company), and helped me develop conﬁdence; Before the MSc I didn’t feel qualiﬁed as a human being. So many years of negative feedback. I now value my humbleness and skill in working with people here; I’ve reinvented myself and my career on this course, and learnt the importance of beingness and being ourselves. Learning processes were identiﬁed as having been practically transferred back into the workplace: The self and peer assessment felt very rich, and is starting to be integrated into the organization more now; Peer groups are still meeting and have generated peer sets within the company. 253

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The immense difference in boundaries between business and education was raised: There is also the difference between business being action driven and academia being reﬂective. Developing an attitude to work and life that is inquiry based was not easy with commercial pressures in your face. Front, was part of our survival, and the articulation of needs was not strong here. The greater cause of work always came before people and the group. We did not share needs for fear of looking stupid. Later in the day, we returned again to how the educational community had effected organizational practice: My doing and acting is now balanced by encouragement to reﬂect. Greater sensitivity in the organization towards people and their needs. Changes to the company have been in our completing and working through the old culture, which enabled us to put a full stop to our previous conﬂicts; Facilitated cultural change with the new company take-over and helped us re-create our culture; We have re-committed to values we once held dear; such as person-centredness and growth. We have moved from a panicky culture to one more accepting of new people; the course kept us sane through a very organizationally traumatizing time. The course helped to build-up our new culture. We now have a new lease of life, structure and capability for sustaining people-centred values that provide support and in turn inﬂuence our client relations. Increased skills means increased charge-out rates to clients. In the ﬁnal minutes, participants shared their appreciation of the ‘inquiry’ based approach of the programme. What began as a rather mechanistic and intellectual task was observed to have transformed into a richly experiential and ﬂowing process, as is usually the case when people are encouraged to be reﬂective ‘human-beings’ rather than over-busy ‘human-doings’. Taking this case study’s earlier description of the community in its initial meeting as a base-line, there appeared to be less dependence, less distress reaching out from the past, less competition, the ‘stars’ seemed less in ascendance and the community appeared to have become self-facilitating. Change: A Phoenix or a Death-Knell?

From the foregoing study, it would appear substantial gains were made in developing individuals in areas of self- and interpersonal awareness, in fostering motivation and an appreciation of team and organizational dynamics. The person-valuing culture of the community appears to have also supported individuals 254

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through the hiatus of a change of company ownership and done much to heal trauma of the past, while building individual resilience. My experience of learners in a Gestalt informed peer learning community causes me to suggest that because they feel seen, heard and included, they have less need politically and emotionally to act out their distress or to engage in internecine emotional politics. Regarding the feasibility of a learning community, within the framework of a masters programme, serving to promote personal and professional development, team building, quality supervision and organizational renewal, participant feedback attests some success in this regard. As I write this paper some 4 years after the above events, all who participated in the programme have left the company. All bar one, who left in the ﬁrst block, completed the taught component of the course to achieve a post-graduate diploma. Over four-ﬁfths gained the MSc, three opted for the diploma and two have gone on to doctorate study; and this from a cohort who were primarily without a ﬁrst degree and entered via a non-traditional and non-academic path. Post the chairman’s departure, the company doubled, then trebled in size. Over-expansion and a drive to replace ‘the old’ with ‘the new’ led to redundancies and most of the course participants at this time chose to work free-lance. So, in company terms, was this experiment representative of a new phoenix rising from the ashes or a death-knell? Evidence from ongoing conversations and an informal inquiry in a conference setting suggests it challenged those personal and institutional patterns, remnants of the earlier cult culture, that kept people and the organization stuck, and in so doing increased the options all round. The experience reiterated for me the paradoxical nature of change, that it is better to raise awareness and to build in community support than to aim to change something or somebody directly.

7. A change agent’s story This case study is an interview with a senior manager who has a change agent role within the Healthcare sector. It illustrates how they think about creating change through others and their approach to conﬂict. What are your beliefs about how to create change in organizations?

Change is people-centric: people choose whether or not to change and so I get nervous when someone likes to follow a logical, cook book methodology. You have to get into the head of the person you are seeking to inﬂuence, what makes them tick and why they might adopt a change. That’s the hardest thing, recognizing that people choose to change or not: you can approach them in different ways 255

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(suggesting, cajoling and so on), but people are driven by emotions, data and peer challenge; change needs to make sense to them. I remind myself that I’m such a stick in the mud when change happens to me: unless I’ve thought of it, it can’t be any good! So working with change is very much something to make an art of rather than a science. There are a whole range of strategies which might provide a plausible way to work: you have to be pragmatic. So, my ﬁrst place to focus is on people and getting an insight into them. Behind that, in my mind I hold different models that help me understand and work with change. There are a lot of models out there, some good, some indifferent, some bad. I heard the story of how a commander of police in a conﬂict zone worked. He was concerned to prevent riots in one particular year. His strategy was to take a helicopter view of what was going on, to spot the patterns of behaviour, to understand the values underlying that behaviour, the environment in which they operated and notice where the stresses were and, therefore, where to pay attention and intervene. Basically, he was looking at it as a system. It led to the creation of a scenario where a group of members of one of the opposing camps was caught on camera breaching the peace, including high proﬁle moral leaders. A number of key arrests led to the community itself getting more of a grip on behaviour, because having a high moral stance was of upmost importance to this group in the conﬂict. I’m using this approach now with a complex part of our organization. How people plan for and use services involves so many stakeholders and there is a need to create an environment that moves opposing people towards consensus. So, we need to get people together, understand how they see the problem and solve it to mutual satisfaction: if people aren’t signed up to the solution, it simply won’t happen. What aspects of working with change do you ﬁnd most challenging?

The hardest aspect around change for me, and one that I get wrong, is when people do and say things that they don’t mean. It can be difﬁcult to detect whether change will happen, when for example you get the nodding dog syndrome: they look like they are in agreement, but then go away and do nothing. It seems to be a delaying tactic: they are the silent blockers of change. My approach is generally to use persistence, to keep trying to ﬁnd the bargaining point to negotiate some action. Some people are very vocal about what they want and need in order to change something, others give nothing away. At the heart of our organization are the values of always wanting to do the best for the patient. There is a pride in it for most people and, if we are focused on that, we can enable and facilitate change because ultimately that’s where it all leads and, if that is clearly the case, then I can help people ﬁnd a way to get on board with the changes. 256

Case Studies How do you decide what approach to take towards creating change?

It’s a very intuitive process (one that I think about when driving home, or in the shower) as to whether a change needs to happen in the way I think it can, or whether people need to resolve it for themselves. I judge it on a case-by-case example, thinking about what’s important, and what ducks need to get in a row where. Sometimes, I will tell people what the outcome is that is needed, but I’m ﬂexible on how they get there. I might give them the non-negotiable, the goal. Other times, it is more of a case of ‘what shall we do with such and such?’, a more open question that I throw out there and then see what I get back. They are the experts, so I start a conversation before we focus on the outcome. So, basically I get people in a room and say ‘let’s talk about how we do it’. You can make too much of it and over-complicate things, with a hypothesis, say, of an optimal process where ‘x’ happens in week 2 and ‘y’ in week 3. You need to go with the spirit of it and ask ‘what do we need to pay attention to?’ People need to understand what the issue is in a way that they can relate to and adopt for themselves. What is important to me might be the bottom of their agenda, so I need to talk about what’s important for them around the issue, rather than, for example, my targets. I have a sense of conscious competence around this stuff, because it is important to be aware and pay attention to everything you say to different people, and how you say it. It would be too easy to become unconscious of it. For example, I had been asking one specialist’s advice on something for 4 months, but then one day, we solved it in 7 minutes, because I had caught him in the right mood, where nothing was a problem.

How do you handle the needs of different stakeholders through change?

The iceberg diagram is very useful (see Figure 8.1 in Chapter 8) as a way of thinking about how you present and talk about change to different stakeholders. The question for me is: ‘who needs to see what?’ I need to see structure and order, I like charts that show when things are due to happen, but people out there don’t need to see that, because it reduces their willingness to sign up to things and be creative. So I think about who needs to see what structure: my chief executive would never accept ‘just trust me’ as an approach if I was talking to the Board about change; clinicians love structure because they can see that something is deﬁnitely happening. So there is a structure to the changes, a goal that is agreed, but how that is delivered is clinically led and achieved through conversation, with each area having their own way of doing things. There is clarity about when a view or a decision is needed, so there is conﬁdence that there is a process, but they also have space to come up with ideas and approaches. It reduces the feeling that management are trying to enforce something, even when it’s something, like 257

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an EU Directive, that we have to adhere to. I will take risks and give people control of projects that others might not, but I calculate it based on an understanding of the person and their values. If they come back and can’t do something, well it’s often for legitimate reasons and so we need to regroup and have a new tactic. Critics of my approach say that things can take longer than they need to, but my view is that it is better to spend 4 weeks longer on something, than rush to implement it and then it all falls apart in 6 weeks. It is all about ingredients: you can force people to hammer something out, but if they don’t leave personally convinced and committed to the decision, then the success rate reduces. People take time to make sense and co-create. In my gut I just don’t think it is generally successful just to tell people to do something when it comes to change. How do you handle shifting priorities?

In our environment, this often happens. Something that becomes less important can be dropped down the priority list. It is not so much about stopping things altogether, but maintaining progress on it. If we drop things altogether, people can feel like their efforts are just picked up and dropped again and that it wasn’t that important in the ﬁrst place. Sometimes, we have to move things back in terms of the timing of them. What about power and politics?

Often an external stakeholder involved in something will make a big difference: people have a perception of the authority of an external person, for example, from the Department of Health. It makes sense to work with this perception and involve external people where appropriate. There is a strong hierarchy in the medical profession, so you need to work with that, since people will do what a senior clinician says. When I took on this role, I also had to create a strategy for how to gain inﬂuence. In my previous job I was very close to the Chief Executive, so I ‘borrowed’ power, as it were. Coming here, I knew no one and had to ﬁgure out where the power and inﬂuence to get things done lay. I also think about the idea of an emotional bank account: never be in deﬁcit. People see me as a good egg, trying to do the right thing, so there is a feeling that I have contributed, rather than that I have simply drawn on other people’s time and favours. What about handling conﬂict?

This one is my weakest area and I’m trying to work on it. I recognize that some conﬂict can create stretch and create innovation, but I don’t like it really. Having 258

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said that, there are times when I facilitate a degree of conﬂict between stakeholders because I want to have a full and frank discussion, as I call it, rather than ‘conﬂict’. Sometimes, I need to stoke the ﬁre and let the great differences of opinion that there can be come out, even though it is personally painful. I prefer to give them the chance to ﬁnd a solution ﬁrst, because they are the experts who need to make it work, but I will impose one if I have to. Top tips?

If you are trying to do something new, hunt out the people who can persuade the rest by trialling it ﬁrst; go with the people who are willing to do something and create momentum. Work with the personal elements of change rather than a logical process of change. I’ve found the work of Patricia Shaw (see Chapter 2) fascinating, working with emergence and conversation. How you can create opportunities for people to create a new reality, create opportunities for discussion. An issue for us at the moment is how to manage the demand that comes our way; we are a well-run organization, but we beat ourselves up all the time and always want to do better. We keep talking and, bit by bit, we tap into the right people with the right evidence that yes we are doing a good job, and we can start to realize it. My approach to change is contextual, using a few important questions: ■ ■ ■

What are we trying to achieve? What will the organization let you do? What do I think is right?

We need to have our eyes open to what is going on and make a judgement call about it. Change happens in unpredictable ways, so you need to use different approaches, for example, telling people something is not debatable, or putting something in their performance management targets, working with the politics, or handing it over to them to decide. In the health sector it is tremendously difﬁcult to make people do things, so you have to work in many different ways. The easiest time for change is during a crisis, when you have a burning platform and it is not a negotiable thing. The top team in an organization is crucial: what they focus on is what gets changed, so you need to try to focus them on the right things.

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Further Resources Appreciative Inquiry Appreciative Inquiry Commons (at Case Weatherhead School of Management): http:// appreciativeinquiry.case.edu European AI Network: www.networkplace.eu Mette Jacobsgaard: www.appreciative-inquiry.co.uk (for AI training workshops in the UK) Jane Watkins and Ralph Kelly: www.appreciativeinquiryunlimited.com Barbara Sloan: www.sloandialogs.com

Conﬂict and Mediation ACAS: Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service: www.acas.org.uk Burgess, G. and Burgess, H.: Transformative Approaches to Conﬂict – www.colorado.edu/ conﬂict/transform (source ncdd, 2004) Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR) www.cedr.co.uk Conﬂict Management Plus, for training and consultancy on conﬂict resolution and mediation: www.conﬂictmanagementplus.com Restorative Justice, victim offender mediation: www.restorativejustice.org.uk Law Society: www.lawsociety.org.uk, includes information on civil, commercial and family mediation

Coaching, Mentoring and Counselling Kenton, B. and Moody, D. (2001). What makes coaching a success? Roffey Park Institute.

266

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Complexity Stacey, R.D., Grifﬁn, D. and Shaw, P. (2000). Complexity and management: fad or radical challenge to systems thinking? Routledge, London/New York.

Corporate Social Responsibility CSR Academy: http://www.bitc.org.uk/resources/training/csr_academy/ (resource for businesses and organizations) UK Government website on CSR: www.csr.gov.uk CIPD: www.cipd.co.uk

Deep Democracy Movement Max Shupbach: www.maxfxxx.net Deep Democracy website and training: http://deep-democracy.net

Future Search Future Search network: www.futuresearch.net

Neuro-Linguistic Programming Founded by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in 1975. See, for example, Frogs into Princes (1981) Real People Press.

Training Organizations and Consultancies Barbara Kenton, independent consultant: www.whoosh.uk.com Suzanne Penn, independent consultant: www.penn-inc.co.uk John Allen, independent consultant: www.johnallen.biz Paul Barber, gestalt coach, consultant and facilitator: www.gestaltinaction.com Ashridge Consulting, part of Ashridge Business School: www.ashridge.org.uk National School for Government, provides management training and research for the UK civil service: www.nationalschool.gov.uk Roffey Park Institute, offers management training, research and consultancy: www.roffeypark.com

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Index Abbassi, S.M., 66 Accommodating behaviour, 91 Action, 136 planning, 122 Afﬁnity Sutton case study, 226, 227–31 Allen, John, 226, 236–8 Ambiguity: in roles, 58–60 management of, 85–6 Amnesty International, 208–9 Appreciative inquiry (AI), 177–81 conﬂict and, 180–1 Argyris, C., 131–2 Avoiding behaviour, 90–1 Axelrod, R., 203 Bacal, R., 44 Ballmer, Steve, 204 Barber, Paul, 194, 196, 227, 248–55 Barrett, Frank, 130 Behavioural ﬂexibility, 89–93 accommodating, 91 avoiding, 90–1 collaborating, 92 competing, 91 compromising, 91–2 Belbin, M.R., 164 Beliefs, 138 Belonging, need for, 207 Bohm, David, 142 Brainstorming, 120–1 Bridges, William, 49–51 British Gas Business (BGB), 198–9 Brome, G., 158 Burke, Warner, 9, 10 Business strategy, 222–3 Change, 1–2 capacity to change, 107

community approach, 212–13 conﬂict and, 2–3 change triggering conﬂict, 56–66 conﬂict triggering change, 66–73 content, 11 elements of, 46–51 energizing methodologies, 170–81 appreciative inquiry, 177–81 future search, 175–7 open space, 171–5 engagement with, 12 feelings about, 11–13 learning and, 133 integration, 135–6 management of, 17–20 meaning of, 9–11 principles behind, 14 process, 11, 42–3 resistance to, 12, 42–3 culture and, 38–41 support, 192–3 thinking about, 13–28 complexity, 22–5 social construction, 25–8 systems thinking, 20–2 through conversation, 166–7 types of, 9–10 working with, 28–9 Change agent’s case study, 227, 255–9 Change curve, 47–8 Change equation, 68–9 Chaos, See Edge of chaos management Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD), 60, 73, 105, 187, 219–20, 223, 224 Choices, 107 Circulatory system model, 188–9 Closed systems, 182 Closure, 122

Index Co-operative Bank, 33, 223 Coaching, 144–7 coaching skills, 96–8 executive/external coaching, 146 line manager coaching, 145 peer coaching, 145–6 team coaching, 146–7 Collaboration, 14, 92, 189 Communication: conﬂict resolution and, 88–9 trust and, 190 See also Language Communities of practice, 130, 147–9 Community, 203–5 challenges of community approach, 207–12 controlling delivery, 207–9 paradoxical human nature, 210–11 too difﬁcult, 210 creation of, 212–16 approach to change, 212–13 daring to dream, 212 leadership, 214 mindset, 214 trust, 215–16 working with emotions, 213–14 organizations within the community, 216–24 corporate conscience, 218–19 corporate social responsibility (CSR), 219–24 reasons for community approach, 205–7 need for belonging, 207 need for meaning, 206–7 organizational performance, 205–6 See also Communities of practice Community mediation, 111–12 Compassion, 189 Competing behaviour, 91 Competition, over scarce resources, 56–7, 134 Complex adaptive systems (CAS), 23–4 Complexity, 22–5, 139–40 See also Edge of chaos management Compromise, 91–2 Conﬁdentiality, in mediation, 107, 110 Conﬂict, 2–3, 54–6

appreciative inquiry and, 180–1 breaking the psychological contract, 60–1 change and, 2–3 change triggering conﬂict, 56–66 conﬂict triggering change, 66–73 cost of, 73–4 creativity and, 163–4 deﬁnitions, 54 dynamic nature of, 69–70 embedded, 102–3 future search and, 176–7 individuals in, 76–8 learning and, 133–5 integration, 135–6 management of: key steps, 93–4 language and, 88–9 relationship management, 82–93 self-management, 78–82 supporting others, 94–100 See also Facilitation skills; Mediation metaphorical take on, 71–3 open space and, 174–5 over identity, 134–5 over interests, 134 over resources, 56–7, 134 role ambiguity, 58–60 See also Differences Constant self-focus, 85 Consultants, 153 Contact–withdrawal cycle, 194 Containers, 169–70 Context, 27 Contracting, 117–18 Control, 28 in mediation, 110 Conversation: change through, 166–7 learning through, 141–4 dialogue, 142–4 thinking environment, 141–2 Cooperrider, David, 177 Corporate conscience, 218–19 Corporate social responsibility (CSR), 206, 219–24 competence development, 223–4

269

Index deﬁnition, 219–20 delivery of, 222–4 integration into organizational culture, 223 Creativity, 163–6 collective nature, 164–6 conﬂict and, 163–4 Critical reﬂection, 135 Cultural differences, 64–6 Culture, 30–1, 32–42 embedded, 38–42 resistance to change and, 38–41 learning culture development, 135–40 Lily Pond model, 33–5 supportive aspects, 37–8 Cycle of experience, 194–6 interruptions to, 197 Dannemiller, K., 69 DaVita, 204 De Geus, Arie, 184 Deletions, 87 Dell, 21 Deutero-learning, 132 Dialogue, 142–4 Differences, 136 cultural, 64–6 in values, 57 of opinion, 57–8 personality, 61–2 perspectives on change, 63–4 See also Conﬂict Discussion, 142 Distortions, 87–8 Dogmatism, 85 Double-loop learning, 131–2 Dyke, Greg, 213 Edge of chaos management, 167–70, 209 containers, 169–70 courage, 168 handling paradox, 168 Egg, 211 Embedded cultures, 38–42 group culture, 39–40 organizational culture, 40–1 personal culture, 38–9 resistance to change and, 38–41

270

Emergence, 136 Emery, Fred, 206 Emotion, 12–13, 28 community creation and, 213–14 Emotional resilience, 81–2 Empathy, 82–5 Employee motivation, 221 Energized organizations, 157–8 change through conversation, 166–7 edge of chaos management, 167–70 energizing change methodologies, 170–81 appreciative inquiry, 177–81 future search, 175–7 open space, 171–5 facilitative leadership and, 158–63 personal presence and, 170 understanding creativity, 163–6 Energy, 156–8 Engagement: of stakeholders, 152 with change, 12 Enron, 31–2 Eoyang, Glenda, 23–4, 169 Evaluative mediation, 106 Evolutionary change, 9, 11 Executive/external coaching, 146 Facilitation skills, 117–22 action planning, 122 closure, 122 contracting, 117–18 evaluating options, 121–2 exploring underlying interests, 118–20 generating ideas for moving forward, 120–1 internal versus external facilitators, 122–4 Facilitative leadership, 158–63 autonomous facilitation, 160 cooperative facilitation, 160 hierarchical facilitation, 160 Facilitative mediation, 106 Fault-ﬁnding, 63 Feedback skills, 98–9 Fight–ﬂight syndrome, 77 Four Rooms of Change model, 48–9 Fractal web model, 188–9

Index Freedom of choice, 107 Friedman, V.J., 134 Frost, Peter, 45 Future search, 175–7 conﬂict and, 176–7 Garrow, V., 206, 220 Generalizations, 86–7 Gestalt approach, 194–6 case study, 227, 248–55 Gratitude, 193 Green, Charles H., 215 Group culture, 39–40 GROW framework, 97–8 Guttman, H.M., 54–5 Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service case study, 226, 238–41 Handy, Charles, 216 Harris, Mark, 21 Hay, R., 44–5 Health, 183–4 external factors, 184–5 healing process, 190–2 positive psychology, 193 strategies, 196–8 See also Organizational health Hering’s Law, 192 Heron, John, 160 Hewson, Mark, 226, 227–31 Hirshberg, Jerry, 163, 169–70 History, 31–2 Hock, D., 203 Holbeche, Linda, 9 Hollman, K.W., 66 Hosking, D.M., 28 HR role, 223 IBM, 223 Iceberg model, 159 Identity, conﬂict over, 134–5 Intention, focus on, 136 Interest-based mediation, 106 Interests, 110 conﬂict over, 134 Involvement, 28 Isaacs, William, 142–3

Jacobs, R.W., 69 Janoff, Sandra, 21, 175–7 Janssen, Claes, 48 Jung, Carl, 62 Kakabadse, A., 221 Kakabadse, N., 221 Kesborn, D.S., 59 Kline, Nancy, 141–2 Kolb, David, 129 Kotter, John, 18 Kramer, M.R., 221 Kubler-Ross, Elizabeth, 47 Language, 26, 27, 85–9 conﬂict resolution and, 88–9 deletions, 87 distortions, 87–8 generalizations, 86–7 Lave, J., 130, 147 Leadership, 44–5, 152–3 community setting, 214 facilitative, 158–63 Learning, 127–33 behaviourist approaches, 127 change and, 133 integration, 135–6 coaching, 144–7 cognitive approaches, 127–8 communities of practice, 147–9 culture and, 133–5 integration, 135–6 humanist approaches, 128 learning culture development, 135–40 learning sets, 150–1 master classes, 149 through conversation, 141–4 dialogue, 142–4 thinking environment, 141–2 training and development programmes, 151–4 types of, 131–2 Lewin, Kurt, 18 Lily Pond model, 33–5 Line manager coaching, 145 Litwin, G.H., 10 Living systems, 182–3 LUSH, 34–5

271

Index McAllister, D.J., 215 Macbeth, Jo, 227, 241–7 Machine metaphor, 15–22 McKnight, John, 208 McMillan, Elizabeth, 188 McNamee, S., 28 Management, 44–5 of ambiguity, 85–6 of change, 17–20 of edge of chaos, 167–70, 209 See also Conﬂict; Relationship management Marks and Spencer, 37–8, 222 Master classes, 149 Maurer, R., 12 Mayer, R.C., 214 Meaning, 27 need for, 206–7 Mediation, 104–17 beneﬁts of, 113–17 to individuals, 115 to teams and groups, 116–17 decision to mediate, 112–13 internal versus external mediators, 122–4 Portsmouth NHS Trust case study, 231–6 principles, 106–7 process of, 105–12 number of mediators, 111–12 stages, 108–11 styles of, 106 Metaphors, 15–22, 71–3 Mindell, Arthur, 213–14 Mindset, 214 Mitchell, S., 51 Mole, John, 65 Morgan, Gareth, 15–17, 33, 71 MTG (Moving Towards Goals) energy, 63 Multipathways, 63 Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), 61–3 Needs, 110 Nemeroff, T., 180 Networks, 148–9 Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), 83 Logical Levels, 136–7

272

Neutrality, in mediation, 106–7 Nissan, 163 Non-Violent Communication, 88 Nordstrom, K., 207 O2 case study, 227, 241–7 Old boy networks, 149 Olson, Edwin E., 23–4, 169 Open space, 171–5 conﬂict and, 174–5 Open systems, 182–3 Opportunity Orientation Proﬁle, 63–4 Optimism, 64 Organization: energized, 157–8 perceptions of, 14–17 toxic, 44–5 within the community, 216–24 corporate conscience, 218–19 corporate social responsibility (CSR), 219–24 Organizational conﬁdence, 190 Organizational culture, 40–1 corporate social responsibility integration, 223 See also Culture Organizational health, 183–90, 200–1 case study, 227, 248–55 congruence between being and doing, 188–90 external factors, 184–5 Gestalt approach, 194–6 healing process, 190–2 organizational being, 185–7 organizational doing, 187–8 strategies, 196–8 Organizational performance, 205–6 Organizational sustainability, 221 Owen, Harrison, 171–2, 173, 203, 207, 209 PA Consulting Group, 198–200 Paradox, handling, 168 Peer coaching, 145–6 Perceptual positioning, 83–5 Perls, F., 194 Personal culture, 38–9 Personal responsibility, 107

Index Personality differences, 61–2 Pfeffer, J., 204, 205–6 Planning, 28 Political networks, 148 Politics, 73 Porter, M.E., 221 Portsmouth NHS Trust case study, 226, 231–6 Positions, 110 Positive psychology, 193 Post it exercises, 121 Power, 71–3 Proactive change, 10 Problem checklists, 121 Project teams, 59 Provocative therapy, 99 Psychological contract, 60–1 QO2® score, 63–4 Quest for Meaning in the Workplace (QMW) survey, 186–7 Ratcliffe, Bob, 226, 238–41 Reactive change, 10 Real Time Strategic Change, 69 Red Bee Media case study, 226, 236–8 Reﬂection, 27 Relationship management, 82–93 behavioural ﬂexibility, 89–93 empathy, 82–5 language, 85–9 Resilience, 81–2 Resistance to change, 12, 42–3 culture and, 38–41 Resources, conﬂict over, 56–7, 134 Revolutionary change, 9, 11 Ridderstrale, J., 207 Rights-based mediation, 106 Roan, A., 148–9 Roffey Park, 32, 73, 159, 186–7, 212 Role ambiguity, 58–60 Rooney, D., 148–9 Rosenberg, Marshall, 88 Rothman, J., 134 Sainsbury’s, 32 St Lukes, 205 Savage, Alison, 226, 231–6

Schein, Edgar, 32, 33 Schon, D., 131–2 Schutz, Will, 211 Scorzoni, J., 33 Self-awareness, 80–1 Self-esteem, 78–80 Seligman, Martin, 193 Senge, P., 21–2, 205, 210 Senior management teams (SMTs), 69–70 Shadow system, 44–5 Shaw, Patricia, 24–5 Shepherd, Peter, 227, 241–7 Shuttle mediation, 109–10 Single-loop learning, 131 Sky, 217 Snyder, W.M., 148 Social construction, 25–8, 136 context, 27 language and, 26 meaning, 27 multiple perspectives, 26–7 reﬂection, 27 Spoth, J., 156–7 Stacey, Ralph, 24, 44, 168 Stakeholders: engagement of, 152 stakeholder analysis, 108 Stirling, E., 206, 220 Stress, 187 Support networks, 148 Sustainability, 221 Symbiosis, 184–5 Systems thinking, 20–2 Team coaching, 146–7 Thinking: about change, 13–28 environment, 141–2 Thought, value of, 13–14 Time focus, 64 Toxic organization, 44–5 Toyota, 131 Trade unions, 45–6 Training and development programmes, 151–4 Transformative mediation, 106 Transitions, 49–51 Trist, Eric, 206

273

Index Trust, 190 community creation and, 215–16 corporate social responsibility and, 220–1 Underlying interests, 118–20 Unions, 45–6 Values, 138 differences in, 57 Varney, Sharon, 139–40 Voluntariness of mediation, 107, 111 Watkins, Jane, 178 Weisbord, Marvin, 21, 175–7

274

Well-being strategies, 196–8 See also Health Wenger, E., 130, 147, 148 Wheatley, Margaret, 22–3, 191, 207, 210–11 White, A., 180 Wilson, H., 159 Wilson, Sir Richard, 172–3 Work–life balance, 187 Worldworks, 180 Wright, Vicky, 1