Empower your business with a dealing with change in the workplace PowerPoint for businesses

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[Music] good afternoon uh everybody my name again is tan I'm a professor in change management but um I am what we call a critical uh scientist so my uh opening sentence would be the more you try to manage change the more it comes to a hold that is my basic principle and the second second one is that a lot of change in organizations uh is going on in spite of change management so I'm a very critical scientist trying to not to to to go along with the Hypes but really look beneath the surface uh about what is going on in organizations so first let me show the way I was announced on internet apparently uh I am going to talk about how schools can transform smoothly and that is exact ly what I am not going to talk about because this assumes that there is a change which is needed and there is someone managing the change and that someone is managing the change in such a way that it is going to be smoothly and the dream of managers is of course that people are changing without them knowing it yeah that's the ideal but I think change is never smoothly nor can it be managed so that's what I going to talk about I don't think uh it's relevant and don't expect all kind of solutions about uh how to change people in organizations because I think that is not the reality what is going on in schools and organization but first I want to talk about a reflective perspective about how can I understand change and how do I look at change in organizations and again uh um also in the preparation people ask me okay what is your takeaway message what do you advise people I don't give takeaways and I do not give interventions and ideas about what to do I want to talk about what are our assumptions why we think that way of talking and doing is so relevant for us so that's what I'm going to do uh together with you and let me talk about education a little bit I walk around in that sector quite often and there of course are many things uh going on over there and I assume that also today some of those themes are presented in uh talks and sessions and so on but these all these themes I would think are what we call the what the content side of change and I do not want to talk about the what of change but about the how of change and in many organizations what my experience is that people talk a lot about what how can we do Blended learning and how can we what kind of systems do we need and after we we know what we want to do then we're going to talk about change and usually the change paragraph is the thinnest paragraph in the plan but I think it is the most important one and that's why I'm a professor in that field but I'm going to talk about the how of that site typically the whole idea classical idea about change management like a smooth transition is that I intend something as a teacher or director of a school or member of the board and I devise a plan and then I do the right things the right interventions and I involve everybody and we have nice sessions and speeches and inspirational moments and when I do that correctly um there is a straight line towards the goal which I intended and which I wrote down in my plan before I started so this assumes that changing People in organizations is like doing the right interventions and then the things are going to happen which I hoped they were going to happen but when you look at the reality yeah what this means is that managers who are working from this perspective have an intense need for tools and techniques and of course the whole consultancy industry is thriving on that need but the typical question is what should I do and that means what kind of interventions can I do appreciative inquiry large scale interventions uh uh process sessions inspirational sessions so um maybe you can ALS would also expect from me that I would say okay this is how you have to change your school as if I could say that here standing on the Red Dot but the basic assumption here is when I as a manager do the right thing they predictably will go into the right direction that's the basic assumption between for this way of looking but my experience on the bottom side is that change projects are not so smooth even though the nicest interventions are rolled out and from research it's a very known fact that almost 70 to 80% of the plan change project fail and I think even the percentage is even higher but my most prominent question is and that is what I still not understand why do we continuously go on with managing change in this way when we also know it is scientifically proven that it does not work and for me that is a dilemma I'm still thinking about but the typical reaction on a failed change project so we change the structure of our school the people don't change so what we do is we uh uh until we start another change project for instance on Behavior or culture or things like that using exactly the same assumptions about change uh uh for the the structural project which apparently failed so for me I don't understand it but this question more or less triggered me to think about what are our assumptions what are we assuming when we are doing change management in the conventional way we are used to do it and I would like to draw your attention to two different perspectives on sets of assumptions and the one is monocentric change and that assumes that change is managed or uh triggered from one sender and that is the change management or I have a polycentric development that I say where say change is coming from everywhere and it is not exactly managed by one specific person or party so I would like to start out with the monocentric perspective and you'll recognize this I call this the cender perspective this assumes the manager has to do the right s things the right manage sessions the right interventions and then all what we call the noses are going to stand in the right direction so that assumes first the manager does something and then bosis will change assuming this way of thinking the manager is the one who moves the une math so the assumption is that the organization is not changing is inert and that the manager is the one who has to create movement and of course once it is created the manager has to monitor progress and correct things when they are not going in the right way oh sorry and um but the excuse me there was a sorry oh anyway but um the the whole idea here is that the manager is the highest strategy is the higher so the manager has to give the vision to say this is where we have to go because the environment changes so we have to change and the manager has to say which direction the change has to be into and then a change only comes about when it is change managed there's a very fundamental assumption so when we do not manage change then the assumption is nothing will happen and that and entails the last assumption that in the regular way of looking at change people in organizations are assumed not wanting to change or being resistant to change given that assumption it is logic that you have to manage change and when you have to manage change you have to to know the direction and that is what the management determines the whole idea about monocentric change is that the organization is the result of good change management yeah that is the very basic assumptions and it is very very deep in the where we live go to an academic bookstore and you will find a Shelf with management literature but there is no shelf of employee literature so we are very management Centric focused that managers have to change the organization well the other perspective has to do with the recipients and here is a manager talking about the vision of his organization but the recipients when you look at them they are not a homogeneous group you can see it the that somebody is looking some people are looking away some people are talking to each other and and even I know look at the yellow arrow some somebody is sleeping I think yeah so there is not a homogeneous group and people are talking and doing and thinking about all kind of different things so to make it a bit more realistic suppose this is our organization and in the conventional perspective people in organizations are assumed to be the result of what managers do well they are instructed by here I would say people are working in organizations and trying to make the best of things given the circumstances they are involved in so they are continuously impr vising uh reacting to what is going on but they are living in their own mini world trying to make the best of things and there are a lot of mini worlds so in this world then there is the guy with in the green box and starting a change project but the whole change literature is about how to manage change but the problem is usually there are already several change projects going on in the organizations meanwhile people are also talking about all those and they are also dealing with their reality and maybe there are some political coalitions going on in the organizations about what we really think about things this way of looking at change management entails that the one who is managing chain change does not have an overview of what is going on you cannot know everything which is talked about in the organization yes yet what people talk about is for them the most relevant reality yeah so you are managing change not knowing everything not being completely in control and Main meanwhile everybody else is doing their own thing and making the best of the situation these are for me very important assumptions given that assumption so that everybody is trying to make the best of things given their own circumstances you would suggest or would think that an organization would be a chaos when everybody is minding that own business yeah it'll be very chaotic but and I mentioned the word one time the complexity uh Theory or the sociological complexity Theory I'm working with exactly says the contrary that it means that in organizations always different orders plural will emerge so those orders are just emerging in the interactions between people and that means that an organization is not inert but an organization is blooming with change everybody is changing continuously in order to do the best thing given their circumstances I also like the sentence all those improvisations so to speak are changes wanting to happen I think this is the best what I can do so and but in the normal way in the regular perspective managers say we have to bring about order so they lay their order from a very limited perspective on the reality of many people who did live in a completely different reality but here it says the order which emerges is not the result of only good management but the order which emerges and like this sentence is influenced by everyone yet controlled by no one so exactly the contrary of the traditional management perspective where the manager is controlling what is going on in the org ganization the complexity perspective would say of course managers are controlling but next to them there are about 50,000 other people trying to control things and what emerges is not a linear result of what a manager does but on what all those actions together do to each other so I have a picture of that I think the different orders in organizations do can be metaphorically shown like this some people say uh we should do this in our organization and some say well we have to start a competition with another school and some people will say well we have to put the the pupil more Central and all that kind of stuff and I would say that there is a competition between different orders in organizations and when you look at the bottom little Cloud there with the blue arrow you can say well that's the management they want also want something but what is actually going to happen in organization is the RO the result of what I would say the power D Dynamics between all those little orders so to say it more formally I think the real development of organizations is not the result of change projects but the result of change projects and millions of other things at the same time and I would say that change is a power Dynamic not a an ordering or plan damic Dynamic but the results of changing power configurations so my next last bit is about how do this what do those patterns which emerge look like and I came in my experience in my work in organizations on the big difference between What I Call On Stage and offstage behavior and onstage behavior is the B behavior that people show when there is a manager standing in front of the room and there's somebody from HR in the room and an external consultant yeah so the manager says yes we can and we clap nice we clap blindly and we go to the L and say what a Bo you know that so there on stage behavior is the B Behavior people show when there are managers but I my research is about offstage behavior and that is that I think people continuously dayto day not in sessions or something like that or an intervention they just talk about what is going on with them and for instance look at laptop on the right suppose you are working and there's this email about okay next week There's the big management event schools for the future or whatever and I'm sitting there and I'm going looking at my colleague did you have that mail as well yeah yeah yeah well yeah well it's a busy day because I have to teach well yeah but you can't yeah but we have to be there because they have to look to see our faces there yeah but it takes a lot of time and then you know during the session you are sitting in the room and then you know there's the guy saying and saying we should do this or that and you go to your neighbor and say or something like that and when you come back to your workplace the colleagues who were so so so so good not to go to the session but continue working and was it nice said well okay the lunch was good yeah but what I mean with that is that there is a continuous process of sense making going on in informal conversations where people make sense about what is happening in the formal side of the organizations the next thing I want want to show and this is a bit of our research results I think those sense makings are not um individual sense makings but are social locally social sense makings they are about how certain groups of people talk about their reality so I think the way people look at organizations is not something from themselves or inside themselves but belong has to do with the group they belong to and the group with whom they go to lunch every day and that who they have cigarettes in the smoking room and things like that and this is why I come to the concept of clouds of meaning the orders which emerge spontaneously in the organizations I would say are clouds of meaning and given that idea I think the clouds of meaning and this is fundamental for this talk are the most strong influences of behavior in organization so not what is happening on stage but what is living in the Clouds of meaning the way people make sense about their reality so this brings me to some questions suppose you are involved in a change project would you know the clouds of meaning about that change project what do people talk about informally about what is going on and do you think those clouds are stable or are they moving this is an important question because I think organizational change is for me the same as that the the clouds are moving when the clouds are stable the sense people make about their reality is not changing I think nothing will change but there is a very funny thing here because as clouds are off stage you cannot as a manager see them all that is intrinsically impossible because they are off stage yeah so you are managing and in fact one arm is put behind your back because you do not EX L know what is going on in the organization for me this brings me to the most fundamental issue what I'm talking about we call that a management Paradox and that means that of course as a manager I have appointments about what targets I'm going to reach but how can I achieve those goals being both in control and being not in control at the same time and the traditional reaction of managers given the conventional change uh uh uh way assumptions is give me new tools give me new monetary devices more audits so that you deny this Paradox and try to become or to get into control again but I think you cannot get in control because that's always on stage and the real life is going on off stage so I would say the more you want to try to get in control the more you're disconnecting yourself from the reality of the offstage uh Dynamics in organizations well just to close my talk I think the whole instrument all the tools and techniques of change management are things which are happening on stage yeah and that's very nice but our research also showed we did we had to search in about 100 organizations that there is no direct link between the beautiful interventions on stage and what is going on off stage so basically you're doing a lot of things which are not directly influencing what is happening in the organization and I think organizational development is not a dynamic on stage but more about power relationships uh uh off stage and I have some additional questions which you can read later on going back to the starting point I think the consequence of my talk is that the most important things in traditional management for me are less important doing nice interventions on stage is beautiful heroic and things fun to do but again you are not influencing the life in your organizations on the other hand I would say do I have to change when I reach I said no because the way this conventional Paradigm is you only look at the formal side of your work but beside and around that you're continuously interacting off stage or maybe not you're just sitting in the room but I don't think so so I think that what you cannot see assuming the traditional change management maybe when you lay off those glasses you will see that you are doing a lot of things which from this perspective you would perceive as waste of time or uh frustrating or things like that but I would say that is the real work so my most important question for me would be reflect what are my assumptions about change management do I think I have to manage change or is change going around everywhere and is it more like that I have to find the change and Link myself to it and try to enhance it in that way I think that is a completely different perspective and that opens the way I think to look at all the activities which you now think are not very fruitful and useful because I think they those activities are the most important part of changing organizations thank you