Organizational Change in Practice

The Eight Deadly Sins Preventing Effective Change

Annamaria Garden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351818964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

This book challenges the practice or organizational change programmes. It uses two case studies in depth to illustrate that consulting companies can often get it wrong. Senior managers often do not know enough about managing change. The text is arranged around eight deadly sins to avoid in the practice of change: self-deception of the change agents rather than self-awareness; destruction of the identity of the organization caused by arrogance; especially of the large consulting companies; destruction of cohesion; gobbledygook language; concentrating on structural change, not behavioural change; making the organization worse, not better; the intelligence in resistance; and the deep trauma of redundancy.

The author's main objective is to get academics and practitioners to stop and think about what they are doing when they work with organizations. Organizational Change in Practice will be of interest to business professionals seeking to understand how change can impact their organization as well as organizational consultants.

Part I
Making the organization worse

1
Self-deception and self-awareness

Lying to yourself

A survey of university professors found that 94% thought they were better at their jobs than their average colleague. … [Further, a] survey of one million high school seniors found that all students thought they were above average in their ability to get along with others … and 25% thought they were in the top 15.

(Mele, 2001, p. 1)

Self-deception, the province of this chapter and the first deadly sin, is about lying to yourself rather than lying to others. Like the university professors and high school seniors, most of us do this to some extent some of the time. Self-deception simply means you are kidding yourself. This is often apparent to others more than it is to you. Self-deception in an organization can take over the whole change team, as we shall see in the case study shortly. It is not an ephemeral event but has serious consequences for the success of the change programme. Anything can be happening and you don’t know it.

No longer in reality

In the conversations I had with people in one of my two main case studies (case study A), I realized more and more that the people in front of me were no longer talking reality. There was a conversation with one manager, who used to be in charge of the insurance business in the company. He was no longer in charge of his intellect or his senses. He was associated with the change team, run by a team of external consultants from one of the larger consulting companies. He had absorbed a lot of their change talk. However, he was, at heart, a down-to-earth likeable person. I wondered about the pressures on him to appear to toe the line in the change programme. I wondered, in short, about the extent to which the people around him were living in an unreal world.

The only problem, from my point of view, was that half the time I did not know what on earth he was talking about. Nor, when he started talking about applying his version of notions of chaos to the organization did I admit that I disagreed with him. I nodded politely and he kept on talking. This kind of dynamic was general across the organization (when interacting with the change team). The change team were trying to inflict an experiment on the organization. The rest of us were avoiding dealing with this fact. We didn’t want to appear stupid or unknowing so we went along with their madness. With their kidding themselves.

In this chapter, this is what we explore: moments of kidding yourself during change that leads to unhelpful effects on the live human beings who work there.

Lying to yourself and lying to others

Figure 1.1 Kidding yourself and kidding others

As Figure 1.1 shows, when you are kidding yourself you will be ‘self-deceiving’ if you are not also kidding others. If you are both kidding yourself as well as others then you ‘haven’t a clue’. You are naïve in this position. However, if you are not kidding yourself or others you are ‘self-aware’. You are ‘manipulative’ when you are high in kidding others but not in kidding yourself. Others might put ‘self-deception’ where a person is kidding both themselves and high in kidding others. In what follows in this chapter, I have used the idea of self-deception as ‘kidding yourself’. In the next chapter, we focus on ‘kidding others’.

Key points in this chapter

The key points in this chapter are set out below. We begin with some excerpts from a case study; one of two main cases running through the book. The first one is a finance company in the UK. This leads to some frameworks which aid us in avoiding self-deception and raising self-awareness.

• Self-deception: kidding ourselves
• The events in the change programme that shouldn’t have occurred – case study A
• You don’t observe in the first place
• You don’t interpret meaning in events
• You don’t know what you don’t know
• Try to prove the opposite
• How can you tell if you are self-deceiving
• The change team has its own agenda
• A different model: self-awareness
• Ten questions
• Checklists

Case study A

What I have observed about change processes is that most organizations do not know what they are doing and most senior managers do not have a clue when it comes to change management. It is because of the latter that they hire one of the large consulting companies to make sure it ‘goes well’. Both sets of people often lie to themselves or others about what is going on or should be going on. The case study illustrates the point.

Self-deception is a frequent occurrence with change programmes. It occurs because there is pressure to achieve, the change team is in the spotlight, people want to feel good about the change, and so on. This pressure to self-deception certainly existed in the following company.

A birds-eye view of a change programme that went strangely wrong¹

During the time of the change programme, I had a birds-eye view of the series of events that unfolded during a period of about a year, when the finance company hired a large consulting company to conduct a large-scale change and transformation programme. In what follows I try to illustrate why the programme was derailed and why the consulting team was eventually fired by the board.

The excerpt that you see is the first part of the case study which we revisit in later chapters.

The team’s mission was focussed on the client’s strategy, structure, systems, skills and culture. The overall objective was to acquire greater flexibility to be able to respond to opportunities in the market place. They were faced with increasing competition and could anticipate a more difficult trading environment. The company was medium-sized and had been very successful for many years. In the past, they had ignored the management fads in the industry and had taken their own independent stance on many issues. However, they could also be rigid and certainly needed greater flexibility.

The change team had a sponsoring committee of three senior managers, who had formal responsibility for the project, reporting to the company’s main board. The team doing the work were a mix of both internal managers from the company itself as well as the team of external consultants, who led the project.

The key events that arose that shouldn’t have

During the year the consulting company was present, the company was effectively taken over by the programme. In terms of structure and decisions, as well as ongoing business activity, the project effectively became another ‘organization’ inside the client organization. The consulting team had decisive roles within the company, with little accountability to match their actual power. This kind of occurrence, in which a consulting team embarked on a large-scale programme is basically ‘running’ the company that hired them, is relatively frequent in organizations. Certainly, it was a major feature of this company during the time of the project,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of checklists
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Making the organization worse
• PART II Making the organization better
• PART III Resistance and reactions
• References
• Index