Organization Transformation & Engagement of People?

Author: Dave Crisp

2 Dec

Verity International hosted a great presentation and panel last month on Organizational Transformation and Engagement: an Oxymoron? It’s a great question. Can you change organizations while at the same time maintaining or even enhancing engagement of people in their work as opposed to what happens in so many cases… turning people off?

The answer unequivocally is yes. While it may be obvious that you ought to be able to achieve this, it clearly isn’t obvious how, since the McKinsey & Company survey presented by their head of North America (partial data here, more more data here) confirmed once again the long known fact that most mergers and significant changes fail. Only a third of all transformations succeed well or extremely well and major change tends to be even worse on average.

If you had to leave early you’d be forgiven for thinking this is old news, though always useful to know if it’s changing. And it seems to be… slightly. The study was useful in distinguishing types of change, some being harder than others, and especially for identifying what it takes to succeed and pitfalls. It was very interesting to hear these backed up by real experiences of the panelists who represented major organizations: a bank, a telco and a large hospital.

What was most interesting was to see the use of ‘complexity science’ language to describe what’s needed. Positive Deviance describes the process of looking for an example that is unusually successful and then using that to discover what works and why to replicate it. It’s a scientific advance especially in human behavior matters that again should be totally obvious, but isn’t. It’s been used with amazing results in situations as diverse as ending plagues in Africa to avoiding antibiotic resistant infections in modern hospitals (health care has been particularly active using it, but it fits in any industry).

In general what turned up was that all these organizations are using the knowledge gained from research and data more and more when it comes to managing people – again obvious, but late in developing. Many senior leaders wouldn’t think of ignoring market research or financial facts, but blithely used to toss aside scientific discoveries in the HR/people management field because "they know how people behave." After all, don’t we all. We’re people; we’ve watched people manage well and poorly for years, so of course we all think we know. Yet the success rate of keeping people engaged shows otherwise. It was gratifying to hear from such senior people in major organizations that more weight is being given to actually learning from research. I will likely find more to say over time about this particular event, which made a lot of points concretely visible. Great work!

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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, Business/Strategy, Human Resources (HR), Learning Organization, Science

3 Responses for "Organization Transformation & Engagement of People?"

Barbara Berry June 14th, 2009 at 10:59 am 1
Are there sustainable transformation results using complexity science principles? After many years of working with this science in organizations, i am beginning to question whether an organization can sustain cultural transformation.

A few of the factors for lack of sustainability seem to be:

Ownership or CEO turnover during the slow process of of developing collactive/shared thinking

Lack of effective leadership.

Individual fear of change leads to sabotage

Time commitment to new learning

I welcome your comment.

Barbara Berry
Dave Crisp June 14th, 2009 at 12:12 pm 2
Hi Barbara,
Thanks for your comment/question. It’s a great one and one more people should be asking instead of jumping on ‘flavor of the month’ solutions that don’t last. The short answer is most likely that ‘the rich get richer and poor stay poor’ (although if you look at it in North America it’s more like the ‘the rich get rich a lot faster than the poor, but even the poor make some progress.’)

I think everyone benefits to a degree, but for it to last, you need to reach a critical mass. One CEO or a couple on the top team can encourage improvement, but it won’t last unless the majority buy in, so if one key person leaves there’s still a group to carry on. The common name for this is “culture.” I take that to mean ‘a critical mass of habits and expectations’ in the organization so that if a nasty CEO arrives, they don’t last and don’t sink the good behaviors entirely. They can still do lots of damage, like Chainsaw Al did at Sunbeam, but if the underlying culture is strong enough, others will re-emerge after the storm and keep things going… that is, if the basic survivability is there for the organization to avoid bankruptcy.

Unfortunately this resilience of culture is a handicap to positive change, too, so it’s truly like trying to turn the big ship – slow, almost imperceptible progress until you build enough momentum. That can make even the most dedicated change agents lose hope at times. But we soldier on because that’s what we do.
Dave Crisp June 14th, 2009 at 12:20 pm 3
I suppose I should add, there are lots of examples of changes that do stick – some outstanding which can be found on the Plexus (Complexity organization site) – see blog roll or HERE. Unfortunately I think they are still the minority by a long ways. Most efforts fail, but that’s the nature of complexity – it’s tons of trial and error and then suddenly something works. A key strategy referred to as ‘Positive Deviance’ is to look for and copy the very few that work.

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Organization Transformation & Engagement of People?

3 Responses for "Organization Transformation & Engagement of People?"

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