2020s and Organisational Change

Welcome to a new decade: The 2020s!

As people return to their desks for 2020, I want to begin a conversation in the coming weeks from some observations about change management within current, complex, sometimes turbulent, institutional worlds in which we work.

We live in complexity. We work in it.

We are immersed culturally, economically, emotionally, rationally and irrationally, socially, psychologically and physically in elements of deep complexity. I need not mention the numerous challenges we hear and see and read about daily in the news media, social media and everyday organisational lives. It is all with us, surrounding us and ahead of us, as potential leaders of change.

It is up to us. No one is coming to help!

A key question for us as potential agents of organisational culture change within complex adaptive systems in which we work as leaders is to firstly consider our own perceptions of our organisation.

What is our perception of our organisation today?

What does this organisation look, feel, act, be like? How does it "breathe", give us energy to perform, sustain life, generate excitement, or stop us in our tracks etc? How do we lead change with people at our workplace within our many organisational hierarchies? Is our current institution a “tree”, “flower” or “fractal”, "a bridge, a house, a box"…what is it? Unpacking this perception of our organisation/s can begin to reframe the way we lead change.

You are aware of the surfing metaphor and organisational change…I am a fan of it...“surfing the waves” of change, so to speak, in differing degrees, within the complex and sometimes dramatic, dynamic and turbulent worlds of the sea: our workplaces.

A key way to assist us to be stronger, smarter navigators through the sea of change is to be aware of the latest thinking about organisational change and leadership…to build a platform of understanding about our organisation, our organisational stories, narratives of case histories of people and leaders and our organisational language, and cultural metaphors of practice. It is the first base for more effective changes to happen.

As leaders we have to be cultural observers and action researchers with people in organisations and groups; watch how they are shaped, unshaped, and re-shaped through critical events and processes of leaders and managers navigating through the ocean reefs, so to speak.

Underpinning these change processes are often elements of uncertainty, chaos and complexity. These concepts are key platforms of understanding to be able to find ways forwards in current complex worlds of institutions. Understanding complexity and chaos as organisational platforms can assist us as change agents to more effectively, efficiently, adaptively and flexibly action plan and implement change.

If we use the complex adaptive systems platforms of organisational research, as an example, in which we accept the proposition that our organisations are complex systems, we need to find ways to think about complexity and how to deal with it as leaders going through complex business and IT organisational change. It helps us "surf the waves" better.

A long time ago, Isaac Newton came up with a number of key scientific principles. He introduced mechanical laws of, for example, action and reaction; logical, linear, rational ways to problem solve, which has influenced many areas of managing and leading change in Western institutions for hundreds of years. We apply these ideas in thinking, planning and decision making within our institutions of engineering, medicine, education- yes, and in our schools, health, immigration, corrective services, customs, police and many others. We use logical rational assumptions and values in many aspects of our change leadership approaches. We have hundreds of years of historical precedents in relation to structuring, restructuring, building, engineering and leading cultural change in organisations in rational logical, Newtonian, scientific ways.

However, what we are still adapting to these days is what happened early last century, in the 1930s…when researchers went further than Newton and began to think and study more broadly in what has been termed “the new sciences”. Albert Einstein et. al. introduced new questions and thinking about theories of relativity and quantum physics. He and others said, for example, something akin to “there is no rationality and no truths about the universe”… things are not always “logical” in the old sense; which shook the world in terms of our thinking and how we applied this to new scientific thought and then to the fields of leading and managing change in our organisations.

More recently, researchers and writers who I respect like Margaret Wheatley in “Leadership and the New Sciences”; Nick Obolenski in “Complex Adaptive Leadership- embracing paradox and uncertainty” and Edwin Olson and Glenda Eoyang in “Facilitating organisational Change- Lessons in Complexity Science”, and, of course, the Father of Organisational Culture and Leadership, the perrenial Edgar Schein, among numerous others; have added to our leadership of change thinking. We need to understand the thinking that these people teach us about how to change our institution/s for the benefit of our clients and staff and many stakeholders.

Principles of adaptive leadership from quantum physics and other new sciences…used as management metaphors help us make sense of what we do. They tie our leading change thinking with the discoveries of the natural and physical sciences…biological systems, botanical, physiological, mathematics and physics, for example. They link and show and reinforce our people systems to those of the scientific world.

This is a long and deep conversation for another time. Watch this space! We need to re-set our thinking for the coming decade/s. We certainly have complex, chaotic challenges ahead. As change agents all we can start thinking about change management, change leadership and organisational culture change.

I think it is time in 2020 to refresh- rethink our change management approaches, techniques, how we lead, listen and respond.

Leading organisational change circles and workshops to consider complexity, chaos and change is one way to build smart and strong change management platforms, foundations of understandings.

I believe that in the next decade we need smarter organisational thinking, leaders and change managers to address the reality of institutions and what our challenges are...we are burning, flooding, dying, failing, and we really need to deal with the challenges and universal laws and creatures that surround and swarm over us; we need to be able to surf these waves, with much more intelligence and skill as human beings.

We can do this in 2020 by beginning circles of complexity and change leadership conversations in our institutions, at communities of practice, in courses, universities of thought, places of learning, and our everyday workplaces: to inform our collaborative decision making for real, effective, efficient, people-oriented, cultural change to happen.