Participative Transformation

Learning and Development in Practising Change

Roger Klev, Morten Levin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138272798
• eBook ISBN: 9781317083948
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In Participative Transformation, Roger Klev and Morten Levin insist that participative learning and developmental processes are essential in organizational change. They focus on introducing the kind of learning and development that shapes a self-sustaining developmental process that is an integral part of the daily activities of an organisation. This process is essentially one of collective reflection in order to develop alternatives for action, experimentation to achieve desired goals, then collective reflection on the results achieved. Reflection on own practice can contribute to direct improvements of own practice, but may also contribute to new practices, new frameworks of understanding, and to processes involving other participants and fields of interaction. The first part of the book provides an introduction to participative change management and particularly to the concept of co-generative learning inherited from action research, in which change becomes a joint management and employee learning, development, and knowledge creating process. In the second part, the focus of each chapter is on an aspect of the practice of leading change. There is practical guidance for leaders, internal problem owners, external change agents, or action researchers on how employees can be actively engaged in shaping their own work conditions. Readers will learn how experiencing negative results as well as success can form a basis for continued development, even on how to handle an organisational development process when it is in terminal trouble, to ensure there is still learning from it.

PART I
TRANSFORMATION OF ORGANIZATIONS

People are inclined to see organizations as stable and permanent. A common perception is that they have been around forever, or at least as long as memory stretches back in time. The public seem to prefer to see stability instead of transition, and this leads to a profound misunderstanding of stability as the normal and organizational transformation as the exception. The perspective of this book is to turn this argument up-side down. We see transformation and change as the stable process while stability is an unsteady state, and this is in clear opposition to the dominant perspective on organizational change inherited from Kurt Lewin’s (1943) “iceberg” metaphor: This model has three phases; unfreeze – change – freeze (untie roles and structures – change them – create a new stable structure). As a contrast we see the transformational processes as a continuous flow of small or larger incremental and evolutionary changes. That is the grounding perspective developed in this book.

The point of departure is a short tour through the literature on organizational theory. The intention with Chapter 1 is to investigate how different strands of organizational thinking conceptualize change. In Scientific Management and in theories of bureaucracy, change is viewed as transforming structures leading to an understanding that change emerges from making a new organizational blueprint. Modern perspectives build a dynamic perspective that organizations (and change) are shaped by the members’ active involvement and accordingly that all organizational change is mediated by employee participation. No change will occur unless employees participate.

In Chapter 2 the focus is on how OD is constituted as a separate professional field. Different modes of practice and conceptualizations are discussed and the argumentation in the chapter points to participation as a central value and key driving force for change. The essential challenge in OD is to create a space for active participation and involvement by the people affected by the change. This is the important argument for the co-generative model of organizational change.

Before embarking on the co-generative model, it is necessary to step back and question the context within which organizational change take place (Chapter 3). Is it so that an OD process has no restrictions? This is of course a misleading perspective. All organizational change processes are constrained by the available technology because the organization of work is highly impacted by production technology. The socio-technical perspective informs this relationship. In addition, social and cultural norms and values will impact the transformation process. The national work culture and work life institutions (public institutions, trade unions, confederation of employers etc.) will create possibilities and shape constraints for what change processes can be effective. In short, all organizational change processes are constrained or made possible by technology and the political economy (culture, history, traditions and economic institutions).

In Chapter 4 the co-generative model is introduced as the central conceptualization of organizational change. This is a participative model where a change agent or a change leader join with the participants (problem owners) in an experimenting and learning activity in order to construct new organizational solutions. The change process emerges through the creation of new organizational structures, practices and individual skills and the subsequent evaluation and learning whether the actions had the desired outcome. The change moves forward in circles of experimentation, reflection, learning and subsequently new actions. In this learning process the focus will shift as new knowledge and understanding is created.

In Chapter 5, learning and knowledge are in focus. Different modes of learning are discussed and alternative forms of knowledge are presented. In a change model that builds on learning and knowledge creation, it is important to see the spectrum of knowledge from tacit knowing to explicit knowledge and in addition to understand the relationship between cognitive and organizational learning.

Chapter 6 pays attention to participation in change processes. Different forms of participation are addressed and special attention is given to resistance to change. Basically resistance to change emanates as rational reactions to change processes where control over the development is either unclear or still in the hands of leaders who are not participating in the change process.

Finally, in Chapter 7 the threads are pulled together in modelling leadership in change processes and in resource generation processes as a co-generative developmental process. The essential issue is to see leadership as a process of creating learning opportunities that will develop the employees’ capacity both to handle daily work and to enable active involvement in long term strategic change.

1 Organizational Theory and Organizational Change

What is an organization?

How does the organization become what it is?

How is the organization changed?

There are different schools of thought when it comes to answering this overall question: “What is an organization?” One possible answer might be “an organization is a division of work which is coordinated and controlled by management, and that produces a planned outcome”. Based on this thinking, change is about design and redesign of the organization and a top down approach to change is almost mandatory. Another possible answer is: “the organization is what its members create by their everyday practices”. In such a perspective change is very much about how people inside the organization transform the way they think and act, inviting a more bottom-up and participative approach.

There have been many attempts to present a formal definition of an organization or to deal with the concept of organization. The authoritative work of March and Simon (1958) entitled Organizations omits for example any definition of an organization. Bolman and Deal (1984) present organizations as complex, surprising, deceptive and ambiguous, which could describe almost any kind of social institution. In fact, it does not clarify very much. Another major book in the field is Morgan’s (1986) Images of Organization where the author bypasses the whole issue of definition by stating that an organization is best understood through associations with a wide set of metaphors. A fascinating approach to organizations is also presented by Hatch and Cunliffe (2006) where the authors detour the definition by presenting organization “theory” as a way of mapping a certain kind of activity as something called an organization. What social life in an organization is, depends on the theory (conceptual construction) that is applied, whether it is a metaphor or a conceptual frame.

These three questions in the introduction could serve as an introduction to a lengthy philosophical and substantive debate, but that is not our intention. Instead, we see the questions very much as practically grounded. Anyone who takes on the challenge of making significant changes in an organization will indeed have to ask themselves the pragmatic questions: “why is the organization the way it is, and how could it become different?” and “why should this particular approach make anything happen?” This creates the backdrop for how our thinking about participative transformation relates to these underlying assumptions about what makes an organization.

Organizations as Stable Structures: Classical Organization Theory and Top-Down Change

By the beginning of the twentieth century, certain ideas about organization theory already had a lasting impact on the substantive theoretical issues in the field and on how human work is conceptualized. This is often referred to as the classical structural thinking in organization theory, and the main features were bureaucratic institutions, hierarchical power, clear organizational communication lines, division of labour and specialization. Two people are associated with these conceptual developments. The German sociologist Max Weber (1978/1922) presented an understanding of the bureaucratic structure of public administration where the core issue was to support a public service that was impartial, efficient and stable. On the other side of the Atlantic, the US-based engineer Frederick Taylor (1911) coined and formalized what he saw emerging in manufacturing as scientific management Fragmentation of work (separating manual and intellectual labour) combined with control systems would create an economically efficient production system.

Classical organization theory was formed during and as a consequence of a social and technological period of massive industrialization. The industrial structure of the Western countries in the mid-nineteenth century consisted mainly of relatively small craft-based manufacturing companies. By the end of the century, the Industrial Revolution led to the rise of significantly larger manufacturing companies. The interaction of new technologies, mass production, capitalism and strong monopolies created a growing working class and a new industrial reality. At the same time, research became substantially more important, not just within science and technology, but in the emergence of new professions (anthropology, psychology and sociology), which made human beings and social interactions objects of science. Mass production created entirely different challenges and possibilities that, alongside the development of nation states in need of rational government, shaped the foundations of what we now know as classical organization theory.

Frederick Taylor personified the “mechanical” organization of human work. In his short and prosaic book Principles of Scientific Management (1911), Taylor argues for the potential inherent in the scientific design of work. This latency, if applied in a proper manner, would improve a company’s efficiency and profit as well as workers’ wages and health. In Taylor’s “Scientific Management”, tasks were to be performed according to predetermined criteria and rules. Taylor described a system where the first step was to study every detail of the individual jobs. Every single operation was scrutinized, so that the most efficient performance could be defined. Based on this analysis, the idea was to select the worker with the correct set of capabilities to do the job, train them, pay them by piece rates and keep them under close supervision by the shop floor foreman. Particularly in combination with assembly line technology and mass production (also known as Fordism, named after Henry Ford), this approach was highly profitable. A characteristic feature of this production system is the separation between processes of tight management planning and control and the subsequent manual execution. This process can be seen as the first significant step towards specialization both on the shop floor and of management functions. Today a final stage in the Tayloristic mode is approached when company functions are outsourced (that is, moved from the manufacturing organization to other specialized units or firms). The result of the Tayloristic approach was manufacturing organizations where people were viewed as disposable cogwheels in a complete and detailed production machinery.

Another main pillar of classical organization theory is the bureaucracy model. For many practitioners, “bureaucratic” is synonymous with inefficiency and almost unchangeable organizational structures. There is hardly any organizational phenomena that are more contradictory in people’s minds than “change” and “bureaucratic”. The rational foundation of bureaucracy is to ensure that everyone receives equal treatment based on the objective content of needs and factual problems. Each case is to be solved based on rules and not by personal whim. Bureaucracy is basically meant to be an ultimate impartial and rational system of administrative procedures and decision-making. The career pattern is quite predetermined. The route is the move up to the next level in order to gain more authority, control and power. The positions are impersonalized in the sense that an employee in any position can be changed without impacting the factual operation of the organization.

Bureaucracy is highly critiqued and two lines of critical assessment are dominating. First, a bureaucratic organization is difficult to change and the transformation process has to come from higher echelons in the organization. Second, bureaucracy might be dysfunctional because it creates vicious circles of inefficiency (Crozier 1964).

In the Tayloristic and Weberian thinking, an efficient organization is a unit characterized by rational decision-making processes (where personal preferences and whims have no place). The organization has a well-defined hierarchical authority (everyone knows who is their boss), and which has a clear-cut division of work and specialization with a distinction between planning, decision-making and actual performance of work. This is perhaps the most important link between classical organization theories and approaches to change that we find as dominant today; the clear separation in time and roles between planning, decision-making and concrete practice. This basic understanding will of course invite a top-down or expert-driven approach to organizational change. Change is seen as a consequence of rational analysis that subsequently leads to redesign which initiates a separate process of implementing the decided changes.

The Ultimate Expert Driven Redesign: Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

The most elaborate example of this thinking was the global wave of Business Process Reengineering in the mid-1990s. When it comes to powerful marketing of a new management fad, few can rival Business Process Reenginering (BPR) (Hammer 1990; Hammer and Champy 1993). The main thesis in BPR is the exploitation of the opportunities provided by IT to carry out work processes (particularly those related to so-called business processes) in a completely different way. In many cases, early information and communication technology (ICT) based solutions were applied to automate old and often cumbersome work processes. Instead the BPR ethos was to see ICT-solutions as an opportunity to take giant leaps and to think and act in completely new ways, using the end-product as a starting point for the systemic analysis. The most controversial aspect of BPR was the message to completely disregard old ways of working. Building on experience, its proponents said, was the same as paving cattle trails when a new motorway was the best solution.

The “Clean sweep!” recipe required making a fresh start where experts could work out the best solutions. Even though the main message was to prepare the company for the ICT age, time was turned back to Frederick Taylor. The “one best way” and the expert-based methods of designing other people’s workday were reintroduced with great force. This is precisely the ethos of Scientific Management. The popularity of BPR led to impressive financial resources being allocated to the change efforts, but as companies embarked on BPR processes considerable critique was launched. Worldwide evaluations of BPR projects concluded with rather disappointing results, in particular compared to the ambitions and promises. According to Thomas Davenport, referring to a 1994 survey of BPR projects “67% were judged as producing mediocre, marginal, or failed results” (Davenport 1995). The supporters and true believers of BPR often explained this as a consequence of projects not being sufficiently radical or carried through with enough force. For others, including Thomas Davenport, one of the trend’s early supporters, the reflection in hindsight was that BPR was “the fad that forgot people” (Davenport 1995). Adaptation and change were understood as purely technical processes, and not as human development and adaptation.

Responding to the Japanese: Manufacturing and Improvement Concepts

Although BPR was extreme in its approach, it was far from alone in a market that promises to deliver clear recipes for good organizing and change processes. From the 1980s there was a growing recognition in Western industries that Japanese manufacturing companies, particularly in the car industry, had an advantage because they could manufacture and deliver products more reliable and cheaper than foreign competitors. How could this be? A first answer was that the Japanese had a different way of thinking about production and quality. This distinctive approach was named “Total Quality Management” (TQM), and was communicated as something far more than techniques, because quality was founded on philosophy, attitudes, organizational design and leadership and communication. Instead of correcting errors in the final product control, the idea was to build quality into every single step in the production process. The effect of TQM was to avoid errors in the first place by improving the organization, administrative systems and employees’ attitudes. In the wake of TQM, a number of new concepts and practices for efficient production were introduced as new perspectives explaining why Japanese manufacturing companies were so competitive. Examples were production control, supply chain management, quality and logistics. “Just in time” and “lean production” were phrases that emerged as a way to coin the Japanese mode of production. The idea behind “just in time” production was to enable increased security of delivery and reduce in-process inventory. “Lean production” focussed on eliminating superfluous inventory and unnecessary work, but also on getting rid of machines and tools that were not needed.

Management Fads

New concepts, solutions, and recipes are emerging at a seemingly constant rate. These new trends or fads can be interpreted as a response to a new understanding of basic challenges and opportunities in business life. Fads like Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan and Norton 1996) argue for a focus on enablers (factors that produces results) instead of on the results themselves. If improvement has to take place, the effort must be to change the enablers. Other examples include Intellectual Capital (Edvinsson and Malone 1997) which seeks to measure intangible values, and Corporate Social Responsibility which gives guidance to companies which will operate ethically and legally in a very complex global arena. We will not relate to the substance and promises of such new trends in business management, but just point to the fact that there is a huge market for concepts that promise certain results if the company implements the new solution. Most of these have very predesigned solutions developed by experts, and the challenge in change process is typically defined as a process of implementation. It is fair to say that most companies experience such processes of implementation as more challenging that they have hoped and/or expected.

These trends or fads seem to have a fairly short lifetime. Every three to five years a new “promising” trend or fashion is introduced and they are usually connected to management “gurus”. Micklethwait and Wooldridge presented a critical analysis of these fads in their book The Witch Doctors (1996). They point to the close relationship between gurus and international consulting, where the fads create new market possibilities for consultancy. Another critical analysis is done by Bradley and colleagues (Bradley et al. 2000); in their perspective, fads become the myths that are the safety harness for hard proven businesses.

Scientific management and the theory of bureaucracy established the important principle of a clear division between int...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgement
• Preface
• About the Authors
• Introduction: The Practice of Leading Change
• PART I TRANSFORMATION OF ORGANIZATIONS
• PART II WORK FORMS IN LEADING PARTICIPATIVE CHANGE
• References
• Index