Organizational Change and Strategy

An Interlevel Dynamics Approach

David Coghlan, Nicholas Rashford, João Neiva de Figueiredo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317433255
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Organizations change, usually driven by strategies, yet strategic management and organizational change are generally understood as separate domains in the business world. This book integrates the behavioural dynamics of learning, change and strategy at and across individual, team, interdepartmental, group and organizational levels.

This new edition emphasizes what can be done in organizations to enable strategy to be effective and to help organizations to change and learn. Central to the book is a reflexive engagement approach through inviting the readers to apply concepts to their own organizational situations and via reflective exercises. The authors also offer cases from a wide range of organizations, from universities to steel and digital businesses.

This practical book addresses managers, consultants, students and researchers and provides specific orientation to assist each readership group to learn from its own perspective.

PART I

Setting up

Reflexive engagement, levels and interlevels

In Part I, comprising four chapters, we provide foundations for the approach to learning and to studying organizing which we use throughout. First we propose a reflexive approach to engaging with this book in which you are invited to confront what you read with your day-to-day experience, to discern possibilities, and to test hypotheses through action which will lead to learning and to new experiences. Chapter 2 provides some templates which help you benefit the most from the experience of reading this book. Chapter 3 introduces the framework of organizational levels as four modes of behaviour in the process of organizing. These four levels are: the individual, the team, the interdepartmental group and the organization. We present the four organizational levels as essential for understanding the dynamic inter-relationship between individuals, teams, aggregations of teams and an organization’s strategic endeavours in a complex world of discontinuous change. Finally, in Chapter 4 we go on to show how the four organizational levels are implicitly interconnected. Each level is linked to each of the others. We argue that an understanding of this interconnectedness is essential for the manager or consultant in assessing the workings of each level and in preparing and implementing interventions.

1

An invitation to reflexive engagement

There can be no learning without action and no (sober and deliberate) action without learning. Those unable to change themselves cannot change those around them.

Reginald Revans (2011)

This chapter introduces you to the learning approaches that underpin this book. We are taking a reflexive engagement approach to this book whereby we invite you, the reader, to reflect on your own situation in light of the concepts and case situations presented and see how they inform your own assessment of what is going on in your organizational setting and what action you might plan to take. The methodological framework under which you may be doing this may have different titles, for example: action research (Coghlan and Brannick, 2014), action learning (Revans, 2011), clinical inquiry (Schein, 1987), developmental action inquiry (Torbert, 2004), experiential learning (Kolb, 1984), reflexive inquiry (Oliver, 2005), to name a few. While we are using the term, reflexive engagement, we are using it inclusively to cover the many applications of reflexive, action-oriented approaches that exist.

By taking a reflexive engagement approach in this book we mean that we invite you the reader, whether you are a senior manager, a non-executive organizational member, an external OD consultant or a student not only to understand the concepts developed in this book, but to question what is going on around you, both inside and outside the organization. This questioning is supported by the concepts which help you make sense of your experience and then engage in action, evaluate outcomes, reflect on learning and develop knowledge. We recommend that you not do this on your own or keep your reflections private, but that you engage relevant others in conversations and shared reflections.

Inquiry can be focused outward (e.g. what is going on in the organization, in the team, etc.) or inward (e.g. what is going on in you). Throughout the book we outline some conceptual frameworks that provide a basis for understanding organizational processes, which then are utilized for outward-focused inquiry and reflection. The reflexive engagement activities at the end of many of the chapters enable you to reflect on an organization with which you are familiar. Indeed, we invite you, wherever and whenever possible, to engage in these reflective activities on the same organization throughout the book so as to build up your analytic skills. If you are external to the organization, either as an OD consultant or a student, then your reflections are in collaboration with colleagues or with local managers. The vignettes within chapters and the cases at the end of chapters provide illustrations and aim to provoke further reflection and discussion.

Reflexive engagement is grounded in the inquiry-reflection process. Schon’s (1983) notion of the ‘reflective practitioner’ captures the essentials of knowing-in-action and reflection-in-action. Knowing-in-action is tacit and opens up questions that fall within the boundaries of what you have learned to treat as normal. Reflection-in-action occurs when you are in the middle of an action and you ask questions about what you are doing and what is happening around you. The outcome is immediate as it leads to an on-the-spot adjustment of your thinking and of your action. As Kahneman (2011) demonstrates, catching how your mind works is an exciting adventure.

Reflexive engagement

At the heart of this book is Revans’ famous learning formula, L=P+Q (Revans, 2011). L stands for learning, P for programmed knowledge (i.e. current knowledge in use, already known, that which is codified in books, and that which prescribes solutions) and Q for questioning insight. The concept of programmed knowledge relates to technical expertise, functional specialism and the fruits of research and instruction. P typically includes a basis for the analysis of a problem in terms of what was done before. This book contains a lot of P in the theories of behaviour, change and strategy. However, to follow the guidance of P in an unquestioning way may be foolhardy. For Revans, P is insufficient for learning. Questioning insight (Q) involves asking fresh questions, unfreezing underlying assumptions, and creating new connections and mental models. Q challenges both the usefulness of programmed knowledge (P) to the current situation and the ignorance of the participants. Questioning others both admits to lack of knowledge and increases the scope of the search for solutions. It also carries the potential for new insight into the current state.

Underpinning this approach to learning is a distinction between and among different kinds of issues. Revans distinguished between puzzles and problems. Puzzles are those difficulties for which a correct solution exists and which are amenable to specialist and expert advice. Problems, on the other hand, are difficulties where no single solution can possibly exist. Most complex organizational issues of behaviour, change and strategy fall into the category of a problem, as there is no single solution while there are likely to be many opinions as to what the preferred course of action might be. For Revans, puzzles were difficulties from which escapes were thought to be known and, therefore, amenable to solution by programmed knowledge. If the task is to solve a puzzle, then L=P. The experts solve it! However, if the task is to solve or ameliorate a problem, then, for Revans, L=P+Q and learning always begins with Q.

In inviting you to engage your learning in terms of L=P+Q, we lay the foundations in this opening chapter by first introducing the notion of taking a clinical perspective that works to make sense of what is going on in an organization. Second, we describe the process of knowing and learning and thereby introduce a method (reflexive engagement) that you can use throughout the book. Third, we relate learning to three practices: engaging in self-learning (first person), working collaboratively with others (second person), and being able to generalize one’s learning for an impersonal audience (third person). Reflexive engagement helps you to understand our intentions, to enhance your capacity to plan and develop strategies that reflect your aspirations, to reflect on the skills of your implementation, and to see the impact of your actions.

Taking the clinical perspective

Edgar Schein (1987) writes about taking what he calls a ‘clinical perspective’. This he describes as six activities, which we are adopting to engage with the behavioural, change and strategic issues we explore throughout the book (Schein, 1997):

1. In-depth observation of crucial cases of learning and change. Here you are invited to think about what you understand as critical incidents and study what happened, why and to what effect.

2. Studying the effects of interventions. Here you observe what happens when individuals and groups (especially management) do something, i.e. you frame a new strategic direction or introduce new procedures for dealing with customers.

3. Focusing on pathologies and post-mortems as a way of building a theory of health. Here you can look back on incidents and ask critical questions as to how these incidents inhibit the organization from functioning effectively.

4. Focusing on problems and anomalies that are difficult to explain. What puzzles you?

5. Building theory and empirical knowledge through developing concepts which capture the real dynamics of the organization. Here you link your experience and understanding to your reading and to relevant theory that helps you explain what is happening.

6. Focusing on the characteristic of systems and systemic dynamics. In your study of organizations you learn to go beyond blaming individuals and develop insight into how an organization works as a system.

This clinical approach gives focus to the learning formula, L=P+Q as it sharpens the questioning when confronting problems, and engages that questioning with knowledge of organizational behaviour, change and strategy so as to generate learning and change.

Knowing and learning

The structure of human knowing is a three-step heuristic process: experience, understanding and judgement (Lonergan, 1992; Coghlan, 2012). First, we attend to our experience. Then we ask questions about our experience and receive an insight (understanding) and we follow that up by reflecting and weighing up the evidence to determine whether our insight fits the evidence or not (judgement). The pattern of these three operations is invariant in that it applies to all settings of cognitional activity, whether solving a crossword clue, addressing an everyday problem or engaging in scientific research.

Experiencing

Experience is an interaction of inner and outer events, or data of sense and data of consciousness. You can not only see, hear, smell, taste and touch, imagine, remember, feel and think but you can also experience yourself as seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, remembering and imagining. In the context of being a manager, a non-executive organizational member, an OD consultant or a student, you experience events in the organization and you experience yourself having thoughts and feelings about these events and about your thoughts about having these thoughts.

Understanding

Experiences evoke questioning. What was that noise? What did it mean? What is going on? When you ask questions you receive answers (though not necessarily immediately). We are calling these answers insights. An insight is an act of understanding that grasps the intelligible connections between things that previously have appeared disparate. An insight goes beyond descriptive experience to an explanatory organization of the experience’s possible meaning.

Judging, or exercising judgement

While insights are common; they are not always accurate or true. The question then is, does the insight fit the evidence? This opens up a question for reflection. Is it so? Yes or no? Maybe. You don’t know. You need more evidence to be sure. The shift in attention turns to a verification-oriented inquiry for possible accuracy, sureness and certainty of understanding. So you move to a new level of the cognitional process, where you marshal and weigh evidence and assess its sufficiency. You set the judgement up conditionally; if the conditions have been fulfilled, then it must be true or accurate. There may be conflicting judgements and you may have to weigh the evidence and choose between them. If you do not think that you have sufficient evidence to assert that your insight fits the data then you can postpone judgement or make a provisional judgement and correct it later when you have more or other evidence.

Human knowing is not any of these three operations on their own. All knowing involves experiencing, understanding and judging.

Knowing in the physical world may be straightforward enough. You may be able to verify easily that your experience of your head getting wet means that it is indeed raining. But when you try to know the world of human behaviour and organizational engagement, it is more difficult because this world is carried by meaning. Meaning goes beyond experiencing, as what is meant is not only experienced but is also something you seek to understand and to affirm. There is the task of seeking to understand the many meanings that constitute organizations and social structures, in language, in symbols and in actions (Schein, 2009; Argyris, 2010). Accordingly, you may inquire into how values, behaviour and assumptions are socially constructed and embedded in meaning, and what you seek to know comes through emergent inquiry that attends to purposes and framing, that works actively with issues of power and multiple ways of knowing. There is also the meaning of the world you make, through your enactment of the intentions, plans, actions and outcomes.

You may learn to construct your respective world by giving meaning to data that continuously impinge on you from within yourself as well as from w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontmatter page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface to the Second Edition
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgement
• Setting up Reflexive engagement, levels and interlevels
• 1 An Invitation to Reflexive Engagement
• 2 Context and Templates for Reflexive Engagement
• 3 Organizational Levels Theory and practice
• 4 Interlevel Dynamics
• Interlevel learning and changing
• 5 The Process of Learning and Changing
• 6 The Interlevel Dynamics of Organizational Changing
• 7 Phases and Levels of Organizational Learning and Changing
• The strategizing process through interlevel change
• 8 Introducing Strategy and the Five Strategic Foci
• 9 Framing the Corporate Picture
• 10 Naming the Corporate Words
• 11 Determining Corporate Alternatives by Analysing
• 12 Choosing and Implementing Corporate Actions
• 13 Evaluating Corporate Outcomes
• Integrating and applying
• 14 Strategizing, Learning and Changing
• 15 Integrative Case The Christian Haub era at A&P
• 16 Conclusions
• Index