informal coalitions

Facilitating change #4 – Expanding the view of organizational resources

On setting out on this quest, to compare my 1980 thoughts on specialist planning with the dynamics of informal coalitions (see Footnote), I suggested that it would be a voyage of discovery. I hadn’t yet reacquainted myself with the original text!  This point was brought home when I first read the source chapter for this post, entitled Acquisition, Deployment and Management of Resources.  

At first sight, there didn't appear to be any extracts that drew attention to the underlying dynamics of organizations by way of analogy with the planning task.  However, on re-reading the text, I discovered three important areas in which parallels can be drawn between the paper's comments on specialist planning and the informal coalitions perspective of organizational dynamics.

Facilitating change #3 – Who are the organization’s decision makers?

Previous posts in the series (see Footnote) have highlighted the need for the change facilitator to influence the organization’s ongoing decision-making and action-taking process. But who are these decision makers? Is it the Senior Management Team? Or line managers?  Or is it members of the organization at large?  This post addresses this question; drawing inferences from my 30-year-old paper on the analogous role of the specialist planner and ‘testing’ these against the informal coalitions view of organizational dynamics.

Facilitating change #2 – A question of influence?

This post continues the review of my 1980 paper on the nature of the planning task in organizations and its comparison to the dynamics of change as embodied in Informal Coalitions (see Footnote). The focus here is on the suggestion that the planner’s task (and, by inference, that of the change facilitator) is to influence the ongoing decision making and action taking of line managers.

A central proposition of the informal coalitions perspective is that overall outcomes emerge from the organization-wide interplay of people’s everyday decisions and actions.  Through their ongoing conversations and interactions, people perceive, interpret and evaluate what’s going on and decide how they are going to act.  This is not a neatly packaged, linear and step-wise process but rather the complex and emergent interweaving of in-the-moment sense making and action taking.  Seeking to influence the nature and dynamics of this conversational process, in a deliberate and informed way, is then the essence of change leadership.  And the change specialist’s role is one of facilitating this practice in ways that are intended to be organizationally beneficial.  Crucially, of course, those who are seeking to lead and facilitate change can act with intention, but still can't be sure as to the outcomes that will emerge.

Facilitating change #1 – A continuous process

This is the first leg of our quest to see what insights - if any - we might gain into the challenges of change facilitation from my 30-year-old paper on the nature of the planning task in organizations (see Footnote). The proposition here is that change facilitation is best considered as a continuous process.

From an informal coalitions perspective change itself is seen as a continuous process. It is not something that happens in pre-packaged episodes between periods of stability.  Also, a fundamental assumption of this perspective is that organizations are complex social processes rather than, for example, complex adaptive systems – or systems of any kind, for that matter.

So we appear to be ‘in the right ball park’.  But what specific inferences can we draw from the original paper on this aspect of the role?

Re-membering the past - Uncovering the seeds of informal coalitions?

When I was writing the previous post on Zero-Base Budgeting (ZBB), I looked out some old papers dating back to the 1980s. By chance, I came across a copy of the thesis that I had written 30 years ago, as part of a post-graduate management qualification.

The document, with its matter-of-fact title of The Planning Task in Power Station Management, sounds less than riveting!  However, I was pleasantly surprised to read the definition of "specialist planning" that I had put together at that time. This early thinking on organizational dynamics has clearly influenced my view of the leadership and facilitation of organizational change; much of which has now found its way into the principles and practice of informal coalitions.

Back then, I suggested that specialist planning was …

a continuous process intended to influence the station’s decision makers in the acquisition, deployment and management of resources under their control so that, under conditions of uncertainty and complexity, their decisions and actions will affect the future of the station in a consistent and realistic manner and in line with the organization’s objectives.

If we substitute "change facilitation" for "specialist planning" and "organization" for "station", I would be reasonably happy to embrace most – if not all – of the above statement as descriptive of the change facilitator’s role.