informal coalitions

Reframing organizational change

The diagram below summarizes three elements of leading and facilitating change from an informal coalitions/wiggly world perspective.

 

Organization as conversation

We are immersed in conversation - even when we are alone. Throughout our waking hours we talk to ourselves. For a lot of the time we talk with others as well. It’s through this ongoing process of conversational interaction that we make sense of our experience and act into the future. In this way we (along with everyone else) perpetually construct the future in the currency of our present interactions. The past is similarly a product of today’s conversations. It is not fixed and unchanging. We re-member it – i.e. put it together afresh each time – in the context of our current interactions [1]. 

So how does this relate to the dynamics of organization?

From controlling to enabling business performance

Performance-enabling leaders: 

• Pay attention to what’s actually going on in the business, rather than relying on the supposed indicators of performance that find their way onto “scorecards”, “dashboards”, and the like.
• Recognize that organization is ‘wiggly’ - that is, things don’t happen in the neatly packaged and controllable ways that conventional management wisdom suggests they should.
• Expect surprises - helping people to anticipate and respond creatively to what actually emerges, rather than to those things that might have occurred if the real world had been kind enough to comply with the planning assumptions.
• Maintain high expectations of people’s willingness and ability to contribute.