Making Sense of Organizational Change Allowing Order to Emerge from Paradoxical Tensions -- Asaf Zohar, July 9, 2003

47th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS), Hersonissos, Crete, July 9, 2002.

July 9, 2003, 5:30 p.m., Special Integration Group on Organizational Transformation and Social Change

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) at the IBM Advanced Business Institute ( http://www.ibm.com/abi ).

Came here to hear stories.

• Can we understand change?
• What makes change a transformative experience?
• What makes people commit to change?

Non-profit organization: top-down, want greater efficiency

• Original thought:  will push authority and decision-making down to the people who deliver services, so that they can be more effective.

Start with force field analysis:  what is driving change, and what is holding back change?

Two columns, forces for change, and forces against change

• For change:  vision
• For change:  external environment, pressures -- key funders, United Way; change in public attitudes, want more results.
• Managers make progress, and then have "yeah, but", and take two steps back, and they do nothing.
  • They're talking about change, but nothing is happening.
• Against change:  team non-action, reasons that things won't happen.
• Against change:  internal resistance

Want to find some way to increase those for change, and reduce those against change.

• As an icebreaker, have 12 directors stand up to hold a wake for the old organization:  wish them well, so that they can get on.
  • CFO, in the middle of the eulogy, starts crying:  said the outgoing executive director made him feel second-best.
  • Every single manager had stories about the outgoing executive director who had paralyzed the team.
  • This was held as a secret.
  • All of 12 executives felt that they were second-best, and everyone else was plotting against them.
• A shared system of meaning that wasn't in the above -- the surface meeting.
• The things that matter, they called the deep structure.
• Against change:  sibling rivalry, called themselves abused, in a dysfunctional relationship.
  • $30M to $40M operation
• For change:  needed to develop an adult identity
  • Became the avenue for meaningful change.

What worked?

• We can spend a lot of time in analysis in things that seem reasonable, but they are not at the root of what is going on, in a complex system in human beings.
• Shared systems of meaning that we don't even know we share.
• Meaningful change, as fundamental change, shifting in core identities is at the deep structure level.
  • Didn't move this at the surface level, for 4 months.
  • Have to go to the bedrock, with the surface structures as symptoms.

Can't play just one side of the equation.

• Each side of the columns are paradoxes.
  • They choose one side or the other, not both.
  • E.g. either empowered or control.
  • In real life, there is not empowerment or control.
  • Simultaneity of opposites.
• Need the creative tension
  • When empowering, need some control.
  • A healthy tension is bounded autonomy.
  • Sibling rival created a lot of constructive criticism.

Internal resistance for change was not a bad thing:  needed to preserve identity.

• Respond to external pressures, yet also preserve identity.

Need to create a context to drive change.

Question:  On paradoxes?

• Charles Hampden-Turner, needing to hold both horns of a bull (or getting gored on one horn).
• Fritz Capra.
• Lots of things at personal level, trying to take this up to the organizational level.

Question:  From here to precise questions or actions?

• Yes, this is the issue in papers.
• Provocations.
• Have to take people out of their current ways of thinking.

Question:  Psychoanalysis of the institition?

• Had no idea that he was going there.  This was an icebreaker exercise, and became very uncomfortable.
• Don't have the right to take people there.

Question:  Elements and processes of deep structures?

• It's around a typology of systems of shared meaning.