If you read my CV or wander around here on my blog, you will probably notice that I worked across many industries.
And not only bottom-line oriented: also non-profit and cultural.
This post is about the difference about changing rules and changing minds, and some potential uses in the political, business, personal environment.
Highlights:
who controls the controller?
first extreme: the consensus-building inserted in a rule-oriented environment
Second extreme: the rule-orientation inserted in consensus-building environment
Weaknesses in training, weaknesses in results
do your new rules consider the organizational cultural environment?
introducing a change in rules requires changing mindsets
step-by-step: “terraforming” for rules change
The interesting side-effect of being called to manage projects or be a consultant in different industries is that you can build a cross-section of “cultures”.
What I consider a “culture”? I do not want to step into an academic wordfight, so let’s say that, in this context, a “culture” is:
- an established formal or informal communication framework,
- whose members associate with and use to recognize each other;
- moreover, it is an exclusive framework: either you belong or you don’t
- if you don’t belong… you can slowly adapt and be coopted
The communication framework includes many components, but usually you have rules,customs,behavioral patterns.
The latter deserves a short clarification.
If you start working in a certain environment right after leaving school or university, and keep being in that line of activity for the rest of your life, you will eventualy adopt a way to react to the unexpected that is consistent with what is considered “normal” behavior.
As an example: in certain organization cooperation is the backbone of the organizational culture.
Therefore, when something unexpected happens, resources are shifted to the point where are needed.
In other organizations, for various reasons, the approach is heavily top-down.
And you end up with a Gosplan, the Soviet-time centralized planning organization, where the company producing the left-foot shoe has no links with the one producing the other half of the pair.
Laughable: but divide and conquer wasn’t just limited to the Roman Empire, or the Gosplan.
When an organization is too complex to control, splitting tasks is the usual approach to keep the overall organization together.
What I mean with “too complex”?
Well, any control structure generally follows the principle that the controller cannot control her/him self.
This is a generally accepted practice in corporate governance, and an issue that, post-Enron, probably produced enough printed material to require forests the size of Austria, and enough ink and bleach to pollute (again) lake Bajkal.
Complexity implies that you cannot put too much power into the hands of a single controller, or otherwise the controller should be controlled by somebody else.
Add more layers, and you lose track.
And, therefore, you embed most of the control into the activities, using the controller not as somebody overseeing regularly the activity, but as a roving controller.
This also avoid the corruption of the controller.
Before discussing the title of this post, let’s see some examples of how culture affects rules application.
First extreme: the consensus-building inserted in a rule-oriented environment
Let’s say that you are used to have people following the rules- willing executioners, as somebody wrote.
And that you want to have them to use a little bit more of their brains in their activities, notably in decision-making.
I had in Italy meetings about meeting about meetings about planning for potential meetings- if you are lost after the second “meetings”, welcome to the club.
Most people attending one in the string of meetings attended as it was required, but minded their own business, while being always non-committal.
If you, unfortunately, built a such a meeting-oriented process (instead of a result-oriented one), usually you did so because you wanted consensus to emerge.
A laudable initiative- if you can keep the consensus building within the framework of a free-for-all brainstorming, and then move on with the operational meetings.
Rule-oriented environments are unused to unrestricted discussions: anything that is said or done has to refer to a specific rule- you might hold a grudge about a new rule, but eventually you comply.
Therefore, I saw sometimes organization avoiding the necessary step to move toward consensus building: let go, somewhere along the process, of all the rules and hierarchy, and focus on the objectives.
If you want, move from the trees to the forest.
So, while they claimed that they wanted consensus, the started every meeting with a neat, detailed agenda- and, therefore, in the new spirit, often ended with just few points of the agenda really discussed, and needed additional meetings on this or that, or to set a new agenda.
They got the worst of both world.
But also the opposite is true.
Second extreme: the rule-orientation inserted in consensus-building environment
Just by chance, I will again give an example from Italy (as I hold an Italian passport).
Let’s say that your organization grew quite fast, or that you started working more often not just with your own resources, but by assembling ad hoc teams, with people provided by different partners.
You try first to keep the consensus orientation.
But there is a catch: consensus-first is fine if you know that you will still be there to benefit in the future, or, if you give some terrain, get some “credit” later on.
If the team is a one-off, this approach does not work.
In this case, you can call on a rule-based approach.
The issue is: people are used probably to brainstorm and then reach a consensus, not necessarily in writing.
If you try to structure that approach and move toward a strict “agenda setting” approach, sometimes people will not really understand the change, and keep contentious bits off the table, to introduce into the discussion whenever feasible and less disruptive.
Of course, this does not work: anything left off the table is gone. And introducing the changes later on could be the starting point of further recriminations.
Weaknesses in training, weaknesses in results
I think that MBAs should give more ethics and cultural anthropology / organizational training to students.
While originally the MBA was supposed to be complementary to, say, five years of post-graduation work experience, nowadays most MBA students complete their MBA well before they have had any managerial experience.
Therefore, the excessive quantitative focus of most programmes creates a tunnel vision.
Because most students lack the experience to assess which tools should be used in each activity, and to understand the real social dynamics within the environment where they are going to apply their new tools.
Hence, the obsession with the quantifiable, and the absolute ignorance about the complexities of organizational cultural development and change.
In the past, I had extended on-the-job discussions with valiant and expert consultants with their MBA or degree in economics- and their usual approach could be boiled down to “remove what is irrelevant, and streamline”.
It is an over-simplification, of course.
But when you hear of these spreadsheet toting consultants running about the office and spreading and collecting questionnaires, without ever trying to profile the activities, get ready for a constant oversimplification.
And this brings another subject: the use of formal interviews and questionnaires in change management.
My point is: what are you questioning about? Did you consider that the expectation of the employee could generate false results?
Having worked in different environment, also before I was 25 (I had a peak of about a dozen projects where I was involved, on decision support systems model design), sometimes I needed only few minutes to spot the inherent weakness of most questionnaires.
Which is: irrelevance to the real activities.
What’s the point of interviewing top managers about what they would like to see into their “corporate dashboard”, if there are no resources to generate, collect, digest the necessary data?
Yes, I know the objection: it is a consultants’ approach- to generate the need for something that wasn’t requested or needed, and then have the customer create the budget to pay for that now “critical” need.
But, as a consultant, I must say that I saw that sometimes the consultants are the usual scapegoats for a misunderstanding that they did not generate.
Anyway, if they are paid for that, they do not certainly complain 
It is not a matter or technology, funding, or simple rules.
Anytime that you set new rules you have to consider not only the rules- but also their direct and indirect effects (of course), and how to make the rule work with limited additional costs (notably in control).
And this is were most rule-changing initiatives, in any environment, fail.
Ask youself, when introducing a change: do your new rules consider the organizational cultural environment?
In some cases, this is a deliberate choice, for example to let an organization grow, by introducing some structure.
The side-effect? Losing members by attrition- people that are unwilling to comply with the new rules will move on.
Unfortunately, this is only partially true.
The reality, in my experience, is more sinister: people who can move on will move on, most will convert (they would adapt to any change, anyway), but few that are unable or unwilling to move on will stay- as a constant organizational pain.
But these “professional sappers” (a military engineer who does sapping, i.e. digging trenches or undermining fortifications) are not always visible.
In some cases, I saw them pop up as a jack-in-the-box at the most inconvenient occurrence.
If you don’t like the military reference, then refer to them as your own Jago (from the Othello).
They spin doubts, as they never really adapted.
If you do an assessment before (as I did everytime I worked with a new team or organization, from 1990), you can profile the parties involved, and consider that a risk.
Some “sappers” will eventually join, and some others will go away. And some others could even become beneficial, as a kind of “organizational memory”, helping to avoid half-baked changes, as they will certainly not lose the chance to remind everybody of previous botched attempts at chaning a rule.
Yes- in my approach, you need some institutional “naysayers”- give you a perspective; and they are even more important if you are operating a consensus-based system.
The risk of a consensus-based system that does not motivate also open brainstorming is that consensus will take the precedence.
And the ones being more assertive will carry the decision, no matter how flawed their argument.
In my experience, introducing a change in rules requires changing mindsets
I am currently studying the MSP,. the learn a new lingo for old activities.
Being a framework, and being anyway linked to other OGC frameworks (PRINCE2, ITIL, etc), it does not go into the details of operations of specific parts of a programme.
But gives a considerable attention to “stakeholder management”.
If you see at most recent public programmes, you will recognize a pattern that, until early 1990s, I saw only in The Netherlands in urbanistic planning.
I could call this “pre-emptive communication”. Others call it: defusing the issue.
The idea is: involve everybody before you define something, so that you can position and identify potential or expected objections, and manage accordingly.
In any case, most programmes are the results of a top-down initiative: somebody decides that something has to be done, and, before defining one project, one programme, or dozen of initiatives, the financial and human “goodwill” has to be corralled.
I will, for the time being, focus on something practical.
When I was, in early 1990s, asked to suggest a methodology, it started as a simple training course.
Out of that, the customer asked to prepare a guideline (a project).
Then, it became a change management, and I was asked what to do.
I suggested the usual steps: understand
- where you are
- where you want to go
- who is going to be involved
- when do you need to be ready
- and so on
The cost wasn’t an issue, but the methodology had to cover all the organization, and all the processes.
I had already delivered information technology “methods” training to adults (as a volunteer, while in the Army, to both soldiers and NCOs and officers), and then to senior managers in decision support system model-building and associated decision making processes.
Therefore, I was used to the issue of training adults, not students.
With adults, you have to integrate whatever you deliver in their framework of reference.
And while students would follow what you say, adults will “take a leap of faith” (in themselves), and try to jump to the conclusions.
Moreover, there is this inherent skepticism about something so intuitive as a method.
The (often unsaid) rationale being: why should I learn something new to do what I am already doing now?
Therefore, with the CEO I agreed to both deliver the formal part, and be a “roving consultant” within the company, to support specific project managers or manager (for organizational programmes), and to give visibility to the value added by the new methodology.
Few months later, jokingly the CEO said that I wasn’t simply delivering a methodology, processes, organizational changes- I was building a sect of adepts across the company- converting them into what he called “lofariti”
Anyway, the approach was useful, but the CEO was right about the risk: that’s why, from day one, I integrated with company employees, to transfer knowledge.
Eventually, I applied a similar approach also in other countries and other customers.
The basic rules of my approach to rules changing is, in the end, integrating what the MSP and similar approaches suggest, with an approach that in science is called “terraforming”.
step-by-step: “terraforming” for rules change
The idea is:
- know the target
- know the resources available to you onsite
- assess the path to generate the change
- set the monitoring system in place, to adapt the pace and means of change if and when needed
- prepare everything required to identify the use of the locally available resources
- identify “reality checks” and “communication feed-back” point, to ensure motivation
- identify “oasis” to start with, as easy success story to keep the motivation up
- start communicating on multiple levels: sponsors, stakeholders, “oasis dwellers”
- outline the plan, and start communicating about it regularly
- start the activities- every activity should have a visible results that you can communicate
- keep in touch with the different communities through you monitoring: you need permanent feed-back
- regularly assess the response, and never report an issue, unless you can also propose a solution
As you can see, my approach to change is not really about the change- but how to prepare and manage the change visibility.
Because the secret to introducing an organizational change, in my experience, is in really “converting” (at least in part) most of your audience to the new approach.
As I wrote above, I think that naysayers have a place in any organization- and that any change should focus on delivering what defined, not on nailing the opponents.
Also, never forget the 12th point: nothing is more annoying than somebody reporting just excuses for not delivering
In late 1980s I was working for an Andersen unit in Italy, on decision support systems;
An Andersen partner showed me the application of this rule.
I was then a kind of “roving consultant on dss models”, and an Andersen partner called complaining that he wasn’t getting enough of my time or support.
The other partner told him: if you have a specific issue, let’s see how it can be solved; if you are just calling to complain…
And also when I was eventually managing my projects, I always encouraged, when something happened, to think and suggest potential alternatives.
Often, when the mindset was developed, team members were able to identify a potential solution that did not affect other parts of the activities- and eventually understand their own “degrees of freedom” (an engineering term) within their own activities.
The constant monitoring and feed-back is closer, in a programme, to a political campaign than a business, as you have to keep your overall constituents in the fold.
Otherwise, you risk spending too much time defending the activities from continuous stop-and-go, ultimately derailing your efforts.
Therefore, if your team is heavily focused on the quantitative, try to get somebody from the HR department to help you at least on brainstorming about the progress and feed-back.
Otherwise, you risk getting the “we are 98% on target attitude”- that’s fine, but if that 2% was originally a naysayer, you are feeding the negative spin.
And, in the XXI century, with all the communication channels available at almost no cost, that 2% grudge could communicate their disaffection to 3000 others.
While almost none of the 98% would care about being told “everything as planned”.
And if you are curious about the reference to 3000, read here.
I will eventually publish online a revised edition of my extract research on social networking online for marketing, but for the time being… this is all for today.
Any comments are welcome (direct message me on twitter).
R
Tags: change, cultural, evolution, methodology, mind, msp, programme