The Transitional Approach to Change

Gilles Amado, Anthony Ambrose, Gilles Amado, Anthony Ambrose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367329006
• eBook ISBN: 9780429922527
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Bringing together several different facets of what is termed "the transitional approach", it will be valued by consultants, management students, practitioners and all those who want to gain a deeper understanding of the processes of organisational change. It will also be a highly welcome addition to the currently available literature that aims to provide a deeper understanding of society. This book is designed to stimulate, encourage and facilitate the transitional process in people to the benefit of themselves and the social systems in which they are invoved.

Chapter One
An introduction to transitional thinking

Anthony Ambrose

Transitions, particularly those occurring in organizations, are notoriously difficult to manage: the best-made plans easily go awry, whether due to unanticipated side-effects, to the unexpected intrusion of new influences, or to lack of cooperation by the workforce. Not only are transitions fraught with uncertainty about the outcome, in many cases they are continuous and open-ended.

It is because of the problems of managing organizational and societal transitions that a network of management consultants and social scientists has been giving special attention to the analysis and guidance of transition as a particular kind of change. Transition has been looked at in a number of different but related fields: in society as a whole (Perlmutter & Trist, 1986), in organizational and community change (Bridger, 1980a, 1980b, 1981), and in developmental change within the human life-cycle (Winnicott, 1951, 1963). As a result of such a wide-ranging perspective, it has become apparent that transition is not just a particular kind of change: it is also a particular kind of process that works itself out in the same basic manner whatever the human context in which it occurs, be it societal, organizational, or personal. It will be referred to here as "transition process", and a main aim in this chapter is to unravel the nature of this process and to describe its properties and how they operate.

Management literature in the last two or three decades has burgeoned with ideas about and solutions to the problems of managing organizational change. (All organizations—whether commercial companies, institutions, charitable organizations, and so forth—are social systems. What differentiates them is their purpose, the nature of their task. Therefore, one can say that all are confronted with managerial problems.) Some of these ideas emphasize the importance of inculcating certain developments throughout the workforce, such as the capacity for innovation, flexibility, and excellence in job performance. Others direct attention to the effectiveness of certain processes that managers should promote, such as the flattening of management hierarchies, getting greater autonomy in work groups, retraining, inspired leadership, organizational learning, and changes in organizational culture. Yet others point to the value of certain conceptual frameworks for approaching the problems of organizational restructuring such as systems thinking, sociotechnical thinking, holographic thinking, and futures thinking. These ideas, themes, and conceptualizations have all made major contributions to the repertoire of knowledge relevant to the management of change.

Nevertheless, there is a growing feeling that there is something missing in all this. It has to do with the fact that, although there is so much rhetoric for change, the problems in making it happen effectively seem so great and so complex. The position adopted in this chapter, and indeed in the whole book, however, is that this feeling is due to the fact that the phenomenon of transition itself is being insufficiently understood and therefore not taken into account appropriately. Consequently, there is little or no appreciation of the fact that transitional change processes in organizations and social groups differ in important respects from other kinds of change mechanisms commonly discussed in the literature. Getting to grips with transitional change therefore first entails gaining an understanding of how the transition process itself operates—a process in its own right, which it is possible to study, and which, if not allowed for, can be an unrecognized source of many of the difficulties with which managements today are having to grapple.

Transition is a process in which a previously established structure or set of structures that composed the system is modified or even relinquished, new forms of structure may emerge, and the mutual alignment of structures within the whole is altered. In the physical and biological spheres, such transitions just happen as a result of the physical and chemical properties of different types of matter which, combined into different types of dynamic system, interact with one another in ways that are partially determined by forces acting upon them from their environmental context.

In the human sphere, however, where our concern may be with transition in human activity systems such as organizations or social groups, although the process is basically similar to that in non-human fields it becomes vastly more complex because of the intervention of human awareness, motivation and purpose, thought and choice, and unconscious phenomena. It is not just that we are concerned with alterations in structures that are of a quite different type—namely, technological and social-organizational structures—but that transition in these does not just happen automatically as it does in physical fields. It will only happen as a result of the voluntary choice of the people who are involved in the system, or of a set of characteristics that facilitate such a process. Even then, it may not happen effectively if their choices and decisions are not based on a real understanding due to the process. For it is people who modify or relinquish structures, it is people who create new ones and realign the whole. Transition process in this field, therefore, heavily implicates what goes on in the minds of the people involved as they try to bring about, or to resist, alterations in organizational or group purpose, structure, and functioning. It is a process that involves human perception, cognition, and feeling as much as it also involves organizational and social interactional variables.

Since transitional thinking is based on an understanding of the process of organizational transition, its introduction in this chapter is necessarily preceded by an analysis of this process. In order to highlight as simply as possible the main features of both, the chapter proceeds in a number of steps. It starts by considering the process of transition as it occurs in organizations, showing it to be a two-level process involving both an objective sociotechnical system in which individuals participate and also the subjective, experiential, cognitive-affective, and unconscious systems of the individuals concerned. The chapter goes on to describe the basis of transitional thinking. This, founded upon studies of ongoing transition process, is a way of thinking about and approaching the most difficult of all the problems associated with organizational transition—namely, how to manage it. Its central concern is with the way the people involved in such transition actually experience it, referred to as "transitional experience". The work of Donald Winnicott and of Harold Bridger, and his colleagues, directs attention to key variables in this experience and to the conditions affecting them which can critically determine whether or not the transition process is able to take place. The chapter culminates in a description of the key features of transitional thinking as they are applied to the management of change in organizations.

Societal and organizational transition as a psychosocial process

Conceptualizing the process of societal or organizational transition is a particularly complex task because, as we have seen, the scope of such transition covers changes that are of very different kinds. On the one hand, they include changes in technology, the environment, and social structure which people perceive and act upon as aspects of the real world that are outside them. On the other, they include changes in paradigms, values, and other internal representations which are felt as existing inside their minds, as parts of their selves.

This contrast can be put another way: the changes in societal and organizational transition involve both changes in social groups and organizations and their concerns, and changes in human beings and their concerns. It has been recognized for a long time that the processes of change in each of these two areas, even though related, are quite different. After all, organizations are phenomena at a system level different from that of the human beings who constitute them, with different system properties (Vickers, 1978): the processes in organizations have to be understood in social and technological terms, whereas the processes in individual human beings have to be understood in psychological terms. Indeed, the concepts used to describe these different types of processes are at different logical levels and only make sense at their own level. It is because of this that study of these different processes has traditionally been divided up into different scientific disciplines, each with its own distinctive concepts, theories, and methods. Social phenomena such as social institutions, social structure and process, and small groups of all kinds have been the domain of sociology, social psychology, and social anthropology. Concepts at this level include status, roles, relationships, authority, collaboration and competition, group norms, conformity and deviation, social conflict, and culture. Phenomena at the level of the individual—such as motivation, learning, perception, thinking, and individual differences—have been the domain of individual psychology, biological psychology, cognitive psychology, and psychoanalysis. The concepts used at this level include behaviour, thoughts, feelings, needs, anxiety, reward and punishment, cognitive maps and models, memory, and the unconscious.

As progress in these different disciplines has also revealed their limitations, a new image of the human has gradually emerged, and such artificial divisions no longer seem relevant. Correspondingly, the long-standing dualistic view of the individual versus society is gradually giving way to an integrated view that each is part of the other. The influence of culture on the individual is ubiquitous: it is not just because of their genes or their conditioning that individuals are what and who they are; it is also because of the internal representations of their social worlds which they have constructed from the cultural realities they have experienced. Similarly, organizations and other organs of society are what they are because they are composed of individuals—that is, individuals in social relations who strive to achieve together what none could do alone. The strategies, rules, and operations of an organization, and the undertaking of change within it, only happen as a result of what goes on in the minds of those individuals, in their social and technological context, as members of the organization.

It follows, therefore, that in order to understand and deal with the real-life problems of society and organizations, we have to adopt a multidisciplinary perspective that focuses as much on psychological processes within individuals as on social processes that operate beyond the level of the individual. This means, in particular, that in order to understand the process of transition we have to conceptualize it as a process that is both psychological and social at the same time. As Trist (1990) pointed out, social systems are "more than a mere admixture of psychological and social factors, each studied separately by different disciplines". He proposed that we regard them as "psychosocial systems, a frame of reference that would focus research on processes that are essentially psychosocial in nature" (p. 540). He defined psychosocial processes as being "resultant compounds in which the psychological component attains social existence while the social component attains psychological existence" (p. 541). In achieving such attainments he attributed a central, pivotal, role to the function of culture which "as a psycho-social process, is to permit the psycho-physical human organism to operate socially and the institutional structure to operate psychologically" (p. 541).

Social and organizational transition are therefore now to be regarded as a psychosocial process that takes place in psychosocial systems. What this means, in effect, is that each of the two aspects of the process interact, giving rise to changes in the other. On the one hand, the fundamental technological, social, and organizational changes that are explicit and observable in the system are causally determined by the actions of people resulting from what goes on in their minds or psychological systems: their perceptions, their interpretations of meanings, their values and beliefs, their motivations and feelings, their habitual ways of thinking, their readiness to innovate, and the way they come to decisions. On the other hand, the content of these psychological processes is in turn determined not just by the psychological make-up and past learning of the people, but also by the explicit situation in which they find themselves—that is, by the technological, social, and organizational realities around them which call for action. In other words, there is a continual interaction between the external objective features of their surroundings and their "internal" subjective experience, and it is precisely this interaction that constitutes the psychosocial framework of transition process. It is therefore not possible to understand, let alone influence, this process without taking account of the subjective conscious and unconscious experience of the people involved.

Transitional thinking, as understood and presented in this book, is based on this frame of reference. Although much of the recent thinking in management science about organizational change has paid lip-service to it, it has nevertheless tended to concentrate on organizational, social, and cultural factors regarded as "outside" the individual. Transitional thinking seeks to redress this imbalance by drawing attention to the importance of psychological factors "inside" the individuals who, in collaboration with others, are engaged in trying to bring about fundamental change in the external factors. It does this by taking into account the way in which the individual actors actually experience the many challenges and problems that confront them in the course of organizational transition and particularly how such experiences affect thinking to generate new possibilities for constructive action. It is also concerned with the conditions in the social context, such as organizational culture and its norms and working practices, which can influence these aspects of experience by making them more likely to promote or to retard actions that will facilitate transition.

From Winnicott to Harold Bridger

What is so significant about transitional phenomena is that, besides being a revealing entry point for consideration of the subjective experience of organizational and group transition, it focuses attention on certain features of this experience that are uniquely part of the transition process and are of critical importance in determining the nature and causes of the action taken for change. Some of the subjective accompaniments of involvement in organizational transition are the sense of loss at having to relinquish current as well as long-held and valued ideas and cognitive maps, the sense of insecurity at being in an unstable situation that is far from equilibrium, the tension associated with conflicting demands and possibilities, and intense uncertainty about the future. The aspects now to be described draw attention to what is probably the deepest area of people's transitional experience and the most difficult to cope with: change in the sense of personal identity, of who one really is, as one's long-held ideas, values, beliefs, and practices are relinquished and new ones gradually take their place. Often felt as a threat to one's habitual sense of self, such change is commonly accompanied by illusory thinking which can interfere with attempts to come to terms realistically with the problems of organizational transition. It is because of difficulties in this domain that so much rhetoric for change remains as rhetoric and fails to translate into constructive action.

The work of Winnicott

Winnicott (1951) studied personal transition at a stage in the human life-span when the process could be seen in its simplest and most transparent form—namely, in early infancy. The transition was from a phase during the weeks after birth when the infant is psychologically in a state of near union or fusion with its mother to a phase a few months later when it is increasingly able to discriminate itself and its mother as different beings and eventually to have a relationship with her as a separate person. Observing infants during this period in situations where they interacted with their mothers or played quietly on their own, Winnicott was able to unravel critical variables that affected the progress of the transition.

Initially, the infant has the greatest difficulty in experiencing any distinction between the self and the mother, between "me" and "not me". There is a near fusion or merging with the environment. The infant experiences the illusion that the caring parts of its mother— such as the breast, the holding arms, the voice—are parts of itself. The contents of conscious experience begin to arrive, as if spontaneously created by the infant. They are a succession of pleasing and unpleasing sensations and feelings, and the infant has difficulty in differentiating their source as being external or internal. There is just the near oneness of an undifferentiated subjective state in which an objective environment is barely existent. The "good-enough mother" contributes to the maintenance of gradual recognition by her "holding", both literally and emotionally. Her caring for the helpless infant ensures that the infant's pleasing experiences accompany as far as possible the unpleasing ones, thus laying the foundations for a sense of basic security. To the extent that the mother is adapting to her infant's needs, the infant can maintain for a while the illusion that it can create pleasing experiences as and when it wishes. It is for this reason that this phase is sometimes described as one of omnipotence.

Later in the process, growth in the distinction between the self and the mother, the "me" and the "not me", becomes more apparent. The environment becomes an increasingly objective experience; the infant now more readily distinguishes between external reality and its inner reality of wishes, imaginings, and fantasies. Furthermore, the infant develops further capacity to indicate a greater sense of individual desire with people and things around it and an awareness that it is separate from them. It more clearly realizes that the environment is not under its control and can often be frustrating. It is able to recognize a greater degree of reality; it is more able to have a relationship with its mother, who is part of this reality that is "not me", and to recognize its increasing autonomy and capacity to make a difference on the world around it. It has begun to find its self as an objective as well as a subjective reality. Such a profound qualitative change from the infant's initial experience is a developmental transition.

In this process, the good-enough mother is still adapted to the needs of her maturing infant, and some degree of illusion persists, but it goes along with a growing recognition that the mother is "not me". There is an overlap between what the mother supplies and what the infant might conceive as being created by its own fantasies. This is an "intermediate area of experience" to which inner reality and outer reality both contribute; the name that Winnicott gave it was "potential space". This potential space stems from the infant's dawning realization that it can actually have an effect on its environment, that "I" can make things happen around "me". This realization is now due to two factors. On the one hand, an area of illusion, though declining, still persists such that what the mother does for her infant during care-taking happens to coincide with what the infant wishes, and the thought is magically transferred into the deed. On the other hand, with its growing perceptual and manipulative abilities, the infant discovers that its own actions bring about interesting changes in the things it touches and handles. Its spontaneous play begins to open up an area of reality on which the infant is capable of voluntarily having an influence, and which then exists along with the area of illusion.

It was largely during this time that Winnicott observed what he called "transitional phenomena"—that is, phenomena that he regarded as characteristic of, and caused by, the infant's experience of transition at that age. Most infants developed a strong attachment t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PROLOGUE
• CHAPTER ONE An introduction to transitional thinking
• CHAPTER TWO Organizational change theories and practices: a critical review
• CHAPTER THREE Some distinctive characteristics of transitional change
• CHAPTER FOUR Review as a necessary ingredient in transitional change
• CHAPTER FIVE The working conference design
• CHAPTER SIX Companionship with humans
• CHAPTER SEVEN Transitional interventions
• CHAPTER EIGHT The role of facilitators as mediators in transitional process: a South African case study
• REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX