Disruption, Change and Transformation in Organisations

A Human Relations Perspective

Andrew Day

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000735345
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psychology
• Sous-sujet: History & Theory in Psychology

This book explores the psychological and social dynamics of continuous, disruptive and discontinuous change. It examines the emotional strain and challenges of disruption, studies the nature of organisational transformation and examines what can be done to develop an organisation's capacity to adapt and thrive in turbulent environments.

An organisation's long-term survival increasingly rests on its adaptive capacity, ability to continuously change and transform itself. Yet, people experience ongoing and fundamental change to be disorientating and unsettling as it challenges accepted assumptions and identities. This book assists leaders and change practitioners understand these dynamics, help people to make sense of change and to create the conditions that enable people to self-organise and creatively adapt.

With case studies and personal accounts from individuals and companies, this is an ideal resource for practitioners and managers dealing with organisational change, as well as students, academics and researchers.

1Introduction

We are currently experiencing a period of ongoing and disruptive change as we move from the industrial into the digital age, and globalisation continues unabated. We stand on the edge of another breakthrough in technology which the World Economic Forum has called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This involves the application of digital technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning and quantum computing to transform society and how work is done. We are only starting to see the impact of these new technologies and the possibilities of disruption and transformation they will bring. In this context, the central challenge facing contemporary organisations is how to adapt quickly enough to respond to these profound shifts.

In stark contrast to today, if we look back over the history of humanity, for most of the time, whilst life was unpredictable, the dominant social order remained relatively stable. For the first 70,000 years of human life we existed in small groupings of hunter gathers. Approximately 30,000 years ago, small agricultural settlements started to emerge. It has only been in the past 300–400 years that we have witnessed more dramatic periods of social upheaval with the formation of cities, the industrialisation of society, the acceleration of technological developments and globalisation. This exponential shift in the rate of change is unambiguously clear if we examine how the speed of travel has changed for mankind over the millennia. For most of our existence, this was limited to walking and running speeds; this changed when humans mastered the horse, increasing in both speed and range of travel. This situation remained static until the discovery of the wheel and the design of the chariot, which led to an incremental increase in travel speed. It was not until the invention of the steam engine at the start of 18th century that the speed of change started to increase dramatically. Talking of the rate of change in this way presents it in absolute terms. Our experience of change, however, is relative to our concept of stability. Nevertheless, I think it is safe to argue that our lived experience of change is that it is accelerating and that our lives and organisations are becoming increasingly unstable and unpredictable.

It is human nature to desire continuity and order. We have a need for coherence in our lives and to understand our place in the social order. Change disrupts familiarity and challenges our sense of self. Our first response is often to attempt to re-establish order. When this is not possible, we are thrown into a paradoxical struggle to find continuity in the face of change as we grieve the loss of the familiar and have to acknowledge and adapt to the reality of what is emerging and unfolding. In the early 1970s, the sociologist and futurologist Alvin Toffler (Toffler, 1970) coined the term ‘future shock’ to reflect the stress and disorientation that we experience when we are subjected to too much change in too short a time. He described this as a feeling of impermanence that arises with the premature arrival of the future. We each therefore experience an inherent tension between the dynamic nature of modern life and our capacity to adapt. This represents a fundamental conflict between holding onto the past and moving on. At an individual, organisational and societal level, we are at risk of exceeding our capacity to adapt to change.

We already know a great deal about the difficulties people faced in adapting to disruptions to the social order brought about during previous periods of social upheaval. Karl Marx (1844 [1964]) wrote about how the early period of industrialisation brought about alienation for many workers. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1893 [1933]) documented how the process of industrialisation of European societies in the early 20th century led to disorientation, alienation and a sense of up-rootedness, which he called ‘anomie’. He observed that:

Whenever serious readjustments take place in the social order, whether or not due to a sudden growth or to an unexpected catastrophe, men are more inclined to self-destruction.

(Durkheim, 1893 [1933], p. 246)

Unfortunately, his observations proved to be prophetic for the coming century. The sociologist Robert Merton (1938) made similar observations of the breakdown of the social structure and cultural chaos of American society in the period between the World Wars. In the post-war era, Fred Emery and Eric Trist at the Tavistock Institute studied how the introduction of new technologies often disrupted the existing social system, which led to the alienation of workers and the failure to fully utilise the potential of new technology.

Similar social and political dynamics can be seen today. Technological developments, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, are fundamentally changing organisations and disrupting existing organisational forms. We are witnessing a disintegration and reconfiguration of both society and organisations. The social is breaking down. This generates uncertainty and a sense of chaos which people find destabilising and anxiety provoking. A sense of loss prevails as social bonds are broken, norms are lost and identities fragment. These conditions are the antithesis of those that are required to foster the vibrant, creative and dynamic organisations that are necessary in turbulent environments.

In contrast to the above, when seen across a longer time horizon we can observe the success of humankind’s capacity to adapt to different environments and changes in those environments. Our behaviour does change over time and in different contexts. When I read Toffler’s (1970) book, two themes stood out to me. Firstly, he described changes that were fundamental and disruptive 40 years ago but are now simply accepted or even seen as dated; and secondly, it is evident how dramatically society has changed in reaction to the technological developments he describes. Human systems are nothing if not adaptive, yet this is often a painful and difficult experience.

The need for a different map of the world

Change is difficult because it questions how we make sense of and interpret our world. Thomas Kuhn (1970), in his ground-breaking book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, observed that different scientific communities develop shared ways of understanding and seeing phenomena. He called these ‘paradigms’, which he defined as: ‘the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by members of a given community’ (Kuhn, 1970, p. 175). If we extend Kuhn’s ideas beyond science, we can observe that paradigms exist across different social communities, including organisations. These paradigms influence the problems that we perceive and the solutions that we enact. In organisations, they influence how people organise, their measures of effectiveness and how they make sense of and engage in organisational change and development. Paradigms also influence organisational theory and the praxis of practitioners, including managers and consultants. How people understand, react and respond to disruptive change thus reflects the paradigms they hold. At the same time, disruption often emerges from different ways of thinking which challenges and threatens the established paradigms.

Many organisations are still based on the bureaucratic model that has its roots in the Industrial Revolution. This paradigm is underpinned by metaphors of machinery and engineering (Morgan, 2006) which reflected the need for organisations to be efficient producers of standardised products. This way of thinking about organisations reifies them, assuming they are ‘things’ that can be engineered, taken apart and put back together or controlled by those in charge. In this paradigm, control is valued and change becomes a matter of social engineering. Since the 1980s, we have also seen the emergence and dominance of the neo-liberal economic paradigm, which has influenced how we think about organisations. This paradigm sees an organisation as existing primarily for economic reasons whose purpose is to maximise profits and returns to shareholders. The underlying metaphor is that the organisation is an ‘economic’ entity in a competitive world. Economic value is privileged over other forms of value. At its heart is a belief that human beings act on the basis of self-interest and strive to maximise financial rewards. Competition rather than collaboration is the basis of survival and success.

Both of these paradigms discount the role of social connections, emotional attachments and a deeper sense of purpose to the development and growth of organisations. This has profound consequences for how organisations respond to ongoing and disruptive change. The drive to change and control organisations without due involvement of those affected is creating a crisis in the psychological well-being of employees. In part, I believe that the denial of the importance of human relations has become a defence against the pain of constant and unresolved loss that is inherent to organisational and social change. If organisations are to adapt to a constantly changing world, we need to think differently about them and how they change. We cannot create new forms of organisations whilst we continue to think in old ways (Morgan, 2006). We live in a non-linear world but pretend it is linear (Wheatley, 2006). We need to change our world view – our maps of the world – yet this does not come easily to us.

Over the past 50 years, science has undergone a paradigm shift. Chaos theory (Gleick, 1987) and complexity science (Capra, 1996; Prigogine, 1987) have encouraged us to understand phenomena as patterns of relationships, connections and interdependencies between phenomena rather than as independent and separate parts. The world is an integrated whole, in which there exists a fundamental interdependence of all phenomena, rather than a collection of dissociated parts (Capra, 1996). In other words, everything is related to everything else. This challenges the fundamental premise of traditional science that assumed order to be determined by hidden forces that if understood can be manipulated to produce a desired order. We need to accept that our world is fundamentally uncertain: we cannot fully predict the future.

To understand organisations in an unstable and uncertain world, we therefore need to study patterns and focus our attention on relationships, connections and interdependencies between different processes. This paradigm encourages us to see organisations as communities of interactive processes, or ‘living systems’ (Capra, 1996; Wheatley, 2006). This does not mean to say that we should discount technology and economic dynamics, but rather see them as shaping and being shaped by social processes. If we pay attention to the full complexity of the social patterns of organisational life, we can see that organisations are not ordered and structured phenomena but messy and dynamic social processes. These give meaning to organisational life and come into being through the complex process of collaboration that emerges as people work together to achieve the organisation’s aims.

This frame for understanding the world encourages us to see change and transformation as natural processes that are necessarily messy, unpredictable and uncertain. Organisational change cannot, hence, be controlled or managed. Leaders and change practitioners can only help create the conditions that support the processes of creative adaptation, learning and transformation. This paradigm draws attention to the role of social relations and networks, revealing their importance not just to the effectiveness of organisations but also to their resilience and capacity to adapt to change.

This book is an attempt to understand how people respond to, cope with and adapt to sudden, dramatic and disruptive organisational change. As a psychologist and organisation development consultant my interest is to try to understand what is happening and to find ways to help employees and organisations to adapt, function and perform in dynamic and turbulent environments.

I have three hopes in writing this book.

Firstly, that it will help the reader understand the complexity of social, psychological and emotional responses to ongoing, disruptive and discontinuous change. We need to go beyond simple prescriptions or facile methodologies that promise much in their simplicity but overlook the complexities and uniqueness of social contexts. Secondly, that leaders and change practitioners will be more able to act in a manner that recognises the needs of employees during periods of disruption. Finally, I hope that my writing will demonstrate that it is through developing relationships, connection and social cohesion that new flexible and adaptable organisational forms can emerge which create a collective sense of meaning and purpose.

I believe it is possible to mobilise people and communities to take charge of changes in organisations rather than change requiring those at the top to impose new organisational forms whether for benign or more coercive motives. All the evidence, and my personal observations, suggests that the latter is a flawed change strategy, yet it is the most commonly deployed approach for bringing about change.

Throughout this book, I have drawn on findings from research, observations and direct experience from internal and external consulting assignments and my managerial roles. I have included direct references to these experiences to illustrate arguments in the text. These references are based on my experiences, observations and interactions with clients and colleagues. I offer them as a perspective on the social processes that I am describing in my writing. I have attempted to be considered and descriptive in my accounts, coming from the perspective of an enquirer into change and disruption in organisations. I am in no doubt that others who were involved in the situations that I describe would have contrasting experiences and viewpoints to my own. My account is reflective of my own position at the time, and my assumptions and prejudices.

Works cited

Capra, F. (1996). The web of life. New York, NY: Anchor.

Durkheim, E. (1893 [1933]). The division of labour in society. Translated by George Simpson. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Gleick, J. (1987). Chaos: Making a new science. London, England: Vintage.

Kuhn, T. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Marx, K. (1844 [1964]). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. New York, NY: International Publishers.

Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682.

Morgan, G. (2006). Images of organisation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Prigogine, I. (1987). The end of certainty: Time, chaos, and the new laws of nature. New York, NY: Free Press.

Toffler, A. (1970). Future shock. New York, NY: Random House.

Trist, E., Emery, F., & Murray, H. (1997). The social engagement of social science: A Tavistock anthology. Vol III: The socio-ecological perspective. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania.

Wheatley, M. J. (2006). Leadership and the new science: Discovering order in a chaotic world. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

Part 1

Turbulent fields and organisation dynamics

2Dynamic complexity and disruption

On 15 September 2008, the world’s press reported the collapse of the US bank Lehman Brothers. The bank had become, in the words of The Guardian: ‘the biggest victim so far of the credit crunch and sub-prime crisis’ (Wearden, Teather, & Treanor, 2008). The news brought about a system-wide collapse in confidence in the financial sector, which triggered the fall of the stock markets around the world. The bank’s UK staff arrived at work that morning not knowing anything about what was happening. Emblematic images of the collapse show employees carrying boxes of their belongings out of the building, looking bemused and sombre.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers is an il...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1 Turbulent fields and organisation dynamics
• Part 2 Psycho-social dynamics in turbulent fields
• Part 3 Transformation, learning and adaptation
• Index