As humans we have been domesticating animals for tens of thousands of years, taming wolves for protection, horses for transportation and livestock for food. Our relationship with domesticated animals began for these kinds of practical reasons, however when we consider the definition and purpose of the pets we know and love today, it is drastically different.
What Is The Most Effective Way To Achieve Organisational Change? New Research Results
Ever felt that the traditional approach to change doesn’t deliver the results you hoped? Wondered if there is a better way? Well interestingly Bradley Hasting and Gavin Schwarz[i] recently published a lengthy paper comparing the effectiveness of two different approaches to organisational development. One is the traditional mode, known as diagnostic, and the other a more recently developed approach, championed particularly by Bushe and Marshak[ii], known as dialogic….
Some Challenges Posed by Hybrid Working and How We Can Meet Them
Hybrid working, for many a necessity induced by lockdown, is rapidly becoming a work pattern of choice for the future. Goldman Sachs are one of the few organizations so far to have declared against the trend with their boss David Solomon rejecting the idea of remote working, labelling it an “aberration”. The more common view seems to be that the working pattern has changed for good. Google, for example, expects 20% of staff to work from home permanently in future, while Microsoft is to make remote working a permanent option. This shift towards more flexible working patterns poses some tough questions for managers and leaders.
Boosting your resilience and adaptability
Lockdown is easing, but that doesn’t mean we are going back to normal. We need to think instead of ourselves as moving forward in to a new normal. This new normal involves living with the reality of coronavirus: a winter surge is predicted by many experts. Navigating this new normal will take resilience and adaptability.
What helps us be more resilient and adaptable?
Resilience can be defined as having the resources, mental, physical or experience-based, to cope with unexpected, difficult or adverse situations.
Being adaptable means being able to flex our expectations and behaviour when circumstances change.
For both resilience and adaptability, being resourceful is key.
Energy state transformation is the key to Appreciative Inquiry effectiveness
Book Review – Holocracy The Revolutionary Management System that Abolishes Hierarchy: Brian Robertson (Originally published in AI Practitioner)
Brief account of the book
The book has noble, honourable and inspiring intentions: it offers holocracy as a ‘new operating system’ for organizations that will create a ‘peer-to-peer distributed authority system’. This operating system creates empowered people who are clear about the boundaries of their authority, about what they can expect from others, and are able to be highly effective in their roles.
The Distinctive Nature of Co-creative Change
Working with the need for convergence in a divergent conversation
Appreciative Inquiry and other co-creative methodologies are essentially divergent ways of working together; the emphasis is on the value of diversity and variety. Such ways of working can trigger a pressure to converge on a few key points very early in the process, indeed sometimes before the event has even begun. This pressure can be the expression of various different needs, for example:
How ‘Change Management’ Can Be A Hindrance To Achieving Organizational Change
Given this is it surprising the extent to which organizations struggle with the concept of change in organizations. Myths abound. Working with organizations I constantly hear the refrain ‘people don’t like change’ and ‘change is hard’. Neither of these statements are necessarily true, as we see below. What is true is that the way we understand organizations, understand change, and go about achieving change can make the job much harder than it need be.
Many Hands Make Light Work: Crowd-Sourcing Organizational Change Using Appreciative Inquiry
Barack Obama famously crowd-sourced the finance for his election campaign, a powerful example of the ability of new technology to create a great aggregate result out of lots of small voluntary actions. But this process is not as new as it seems: Sir James Murray used a similar approach to creating the Oxford English Dictionary back in 1897.
So while crowd-sourcing is a new and sexy concept, it really refers to the age-old process of recruiting groups to complete tasks that it would be difficult if not impossible for one person to complete alone.
‘I wouldn’t have started from here’ - The Challenge Of Bringing Emergent Change Insights To Planned Change Projects
Planned change approaches inadvertently encourage people to give up trying to contribute to the change conversation or to influence how it happens. They can become passive, demotivated and demoralised, waiting to be told what to do. It is when the downsides of this approach become apparent that people find their way to me, presenting their challenge as a problem of dis-engagement, poor morale, people needing support during change.