informal coalitions

Facilitating change #10 – Operating in the ‘real world’

We are now approaching the ‘home straight’ on this ‘back to the future’ review of my 30-year-old paper on organizational planning (“At last,” I hear you say!). Here, we will consider the proposition that planners – and, for our present purposes, change facilitators - should adopt a realistic rather than rational perspective of the dynamics of organization (see footnote).

Facilitating change #9 – Striving for consistency?

In the previous post, we looked at how business planners (and, by extension, those leading and facilitating change) set out to affect the future in organizationally beneficial ways. The definition of the specialist planning role in my 1980 paper, which triggered this series of posts (see footnote), included the intention to "… affect the future of the [power] station in a consistent and realistic manner and in line with the organisation’s objectives".

Here, I want to focus on the stated aim of achieving consistency. As in previous posts in the series, I’m looking to see if any parallels exist between the points I made back then and the informal coalitions view of organizational dynamics.

Facilitating change #8 - Affecting the future

Planners in organizations set out with the intention of affecting the future in ways that are organizationally beneficial.  The same can be said about those leading and facilitating change. And it is the comments on "affecting the future" in my 1980 paper on organizational planning that I want to focus on here -comparing and contrasting these with my current thinking on the dynamics and facilitation of organizational change (see footnote).

On many occasions in this blog I have referred to the writing of Peter Drucker, much of it stretching back to the 1950s and 1960s. Many of his remarks still resonate strongly today. And Drucker's insights feature prominently in what is a relatively short chapter in the 1980 dissertation.  Interestingly, I used Drucker to illustrate my current thinking on 'time' and change - and its relationship to Ralph Stacey's notion of the "living present", in a mid-2008 post on this blog (The time machine of organizational decision making).

Pleasingly, then, there were few surprises when I re-acquainted myself with this section of the earlier paper.

Facilitating change # 7 - Decisions and actions

After a long but unavoidable gap, this post returns to the review of my 1980 paper on the planning task in organizations. The aim of the series is to establish to what extent – if at all – the view of organizational dynamics embodied in the paper reflects that contained in Informal Coalitions. And, if so, what inferences might be drawn from it in relation to the facilitation of organizational change (see Footnote).

Here the focus moves to the nature of decision making and action taking in organizations.

Managing budgets – it’s all talk!

Peter Drucker once said that budgeting is not a financial process. 

“Only the notation is financial,” he argued, “The decisions are entrepreneurial.” 

This is an important insight that is often overlooked in the number-focused ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ that typically dominates formal budgeting rounds.  As the term was originally conceived, an entrepreneur is someone who creates value by moving resources from areas of low productivity to areas of higher productivity. So, rather than starting with the numbers, Drucker’s observation implies that managers should focus their attention on how best to acquire, deploy and manage the resources needed to deliver the organization’s business agenda.  The budget itself simply expresses the consequences of this managerial activity in financial terms.

Evaluating organizational interventions - The challenge of complexity

"The idea of a plane outside the world on which to stand has become a fundamental myth of our culture. The myth has most often taken the form of a spectator view of knowledge – the notion that we can stand aside from the action and comment upon it from a detached viewpoint."

Bruce Gregory - Inventing Reality

Yesterday afternoon, I attended an excellent meeting in London, at which Roffey Park’s Liz Finney and Carol Jefkins shared the output of their research into the evaluation of OD interventions (copies can be purchased here). Their work provides a thorough review of current thinking and practice in this aspect of organisation development. The research is presented in an easily digestible form. And the authors offer practitioners a "toolkit" of potential interventions to evaluate the conduct and impact of their work.

But is their prescription credible in the complex world of organizational dynamics?

Ralph Stacey and Etienne Wenger #5: On design

This is the final reflective piece, on what I see as parallels between Etienne Wenger’s work and Ralph Stacey’s perspective on organizational dynamics.

It centres on Wenger’s reference to “design”, in Communities of Practice, which Stacey criticizes on two counts.  First, those who advocate a design approach usually do so from a “systems” viewpoint, with its implication that the rationally designed structure, strategy, procedure or whatever will then unfold as intended. Secondly, it implies that someone (“the designer”) can ‘stand outside’ the ongoing process of interaction to design and build the required organization.

Ralph Stacey and Etienne Wenger #4: On organizational paradox

This is the fourth part of my exploration of the parallels that I see between Ralph Stacey’s complexity-based view of the dynamics of organizations and the ideas expressed by Etienne Wenger in his book, Communities of Practice.  This has been sparked by Stacey’s critique of Wenger’s perspective, in the 5th Edition of his textbook, Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics (reviewed here).

My view is that there is merit in emphasizing the similarities between these perspectives – if and where it's agreed that these exist, of course. In doing so, this strengthens the notional ‘coalition of support’ for a view of organizational dynamics which challenges the mainstream consensus.  That is, one that highlights the centrality of everyday, local interactions in determining organizational outcomes. 

This post focuses on what Stacey sees as Wenger’s failure to recognize and address the inherently paradoxical nature of organizations. This view of Wenger's work arises from the ways in which he discusses the concepts of “participation” and “reification” (below), which sit at the core of his theory.

Ralph Stacey and Etienne Wenger #3: On Wenger’s use of abstract concepts

This is the third post on the parallels that I see between Etienne Wenger’s writing on communities of practice and Ralph Stacey’s “complex responsive process” view of organizational dynamics.  This has been prompted by comments made by Stacey himself, in Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics, where he brackets Wenger’s perspective with others that are based on more mainstream conceptions of organizational theory and practice.

Earlier, I looked at Stacey’s comments on Wenger’s use of systems-based language, as expressed in his Communities of Practice. Here, I will focus on a second criticism of Wenger’s take on organizational dynamics, in which Stacey argues that “… he moves away from the daily lived experience and talks in terms of abstract (in the sense of removed from direct experience) macro processes …”.  To avoid doing so is a touchstone of the complex social process approach to practice. This emphasizes the importance of actively engaging in the ongoing conversational reality of organizational life; focusing on the detailed local interactions between people in “the living present”, without recourse to abstract models and concepts.

Ralph Stacey and Etienne Wenger #2: On systems v processes

In a recent post, I suggested that I could see many parallels between Etienne Wenger’s writing on communities of practice and Ralph Stacey’s “complex responsive process” view of organizational dynamics.  This runs counter to comments made by Stacey himself, in the 5th edition of his Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics textbook. 

The first criticism that Stacey makes relates to Wenger’s use of what might be termed “systems-based” language.  And it’s this to which I want to turn in the second post in this mini series.