The Science Of Organisational Change Review
Trusting your gut is a reliable decision-making process. Changing habits is about having a big goal to get you motivated. Brainstorming (going for quantity of ideas first) is the best way to generate high-quality new ideas. When stakeholders dissent about a complex problem, bringing experts in to talk to them is essential.
How often have you heard these statements and believed them to be true? There’s definitely been times in my life when I thought I should go with my gut. I’ve also felt that if there’s a difficult problem to solve, it makes sense for people who know more than me to solve it.
The thing is, these beliefs are myths, at an individual and group level. Especially in the case of change management in organisations and creating training programmes that make a difference.
Such is the bold stance that Paul Gibbons takes in The Science Of Organisational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behaviour and Create An Agile Culture. Here’s why this book is essential reading for training providers and founders of all backgrounds.
Making the case for agile and effective change
“In the business world (especially in HR/change), we have a war between the ‘validity people’ (academics and people like me) and the ‘usefulness people.’ The validity people berate the usefulness people for lack of evidence and pseudoscience.
The usefulness people, when they do not just ignore the researchers, respond, “leave me alone, I have a job to do.” The usefulness people, in their desire to get on with things, are guilty of dropping rigorous evidential standards. Hence, we get fads, pseudoscience, antiscience, and a lack of accountability. They then berate the validity people for not ‘being in the real world.’
This theory-practice destroys value and not just in business. I once asked a criminology professor above the evidential basis for what happens in the criminal justice system. He replied, ‘“Whatever the evidence proves, the system (prisons, patrols, courts) does precisely the opposite.” To what extent is the business world similar?”
Gibbons poses this theory to start his book - For long-lasting and impactful change to take place in companies of all sizes, there must be a strategy that eliminates unhelpful change mythology and pop psychology. Rather, a culture of change agility should be developed in a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) world:
“Change-agile organisations have the following characteristics:
The business structure is more like a portfolio of change programmes with a smaller supporting core (rather than a large core, with episodic change projects).
Change readiness and change capability are differentiating competitive advantages, and this is reflected in HR structures, particularly in learning and development.
Businesses are anti-fragile, that is strengthened - not traumatised - by major change, that is, businesses are not change-fatigued or change-overloaded.
Businesses have a dynamic flow of knowledge, ideas, problem-solving, initiative, and innovation - including more bottom-up, and not just top-down change.
Businesses are operationally adaptable and strategically nimble - doing the disrupting rather than being disrupted.
Resistance (on today’s scale) is largely a legacy of the past because leadership, structures, processes, and skills for engagement are widespread.”
Raising awareness of cognitive biases and tried and tested behavioural change methods
After making his case, Gibbons lays out a masterclass of eye-opening frameworks and ideas from evidence-based studies on how to create change agile training programmes. In Chapter 5: Cognitive Biases and Failed Strategies, he goes into detail about the most common biases that hinder effective change, like the ostrich bias of failing to learn from past mistakes and the action bias of acting too quickly and considering too few options.
Another common blocker is the ‘report in a drawer’ phenomenon, where a company might hire a change consultant or training provider, agree with everything that is recommended and then throw the learnings into a drawer to gather dust.
The reason this happens is down to the Scottish philosopher David Hume’s ‘is ought’ bias of “from facts about the world (is), one can never derive normative statements about the way the world should be (ought)...Reason is, and ever ought to be, the slave of the passions.”
Gibbons explains:
“Many times in my career, I have seen a business commission some market analysis, benchmarking study, or feasibility study. Although they were initially interested or curious enough to ask for the analysis, that initial curiosity proved utterly insufficient to drive change.
Their team was not sufficiently committed to lead the harder work of implementation, and the facts in the report did nothing to build their ‘passions’ (Sometimes, teams may even ask for more analysis as a defence mechanism to stop themselves from taking action they fear taking).
Requesting further analysis of a problem, without a passion to act, can be a waste of time. However, with passion first in place of the data, the analysis, and recommendations are ‘pulled toward’ the problem as a means for realising the passion, rather than being ‘pushed toward’ the executives in the hopes that information (facts, analysis) will persuade them to care and act upon them.”
In Chapter 8, The Science of Changing Hearts and Minds, Gibbons offers different frameworks for battling these biases and facilitating a passion for change within companies.
A great example is Large Group Interventions (LGIs), which can be summarised as leaders sacrificing ‘power over’ for the sake of ‘power to.’ LGIs bring all departments of an organisation together. Benefits can include increased engagement and cooperation from groups formerly at odds with each other, and trust and autonomy being restored in the wider institute.
Another useful framework is MINDSPACE, developed by the Behavioural Insights Team within the UK Cabinet Office:
M - Messenger: Who communicates information is important.
I - Incentives - The incentives shape behavioural reactions in unpredictable ways.
N - Norms - Social, cultural and network effects have massive impacts on behaviour.
D - Defaults - People will either go with the flow or give options.
S - Salience - We're hardwired to be interested in the novel or anything with personal relevance.
P - Priming - What we do is influenced by unconscious thoughts.
A - Affect - Emotional associations shape actions.
C - Commitments - We value being consistent and reciprocating.
E - Ego - We act in ways to make us feel better about ourselves.
These principles are just a couple in the universe of powerful change management tactics Gibbons recommends throughout the book. But even these principles will fail to achieve real change if there isn’t a wider strategy developed beforehand.
In his words, “we need more business (and political leaders) who see beyond the urgent, and who, when they say ‘the next quarter’ sometimes mean the next quarter century. We need to build more ‘cathedrals,’ those instruments in our future that took half-a-century or longer to complete.”