Reflections on...CHANGE

A couple of decades ago I did an annotated bibliography for change agents which you can still access. I have just put up a rather different, more reflective paper on the nature of Change – which recognises that the “field” is actually composed of four very different disciplines which have very little to do with one another –

• the individual - where psychology is used but self-help tends to dominate

• the technological as enabled by calculations of commercial prospects.

• the organisational - with various types of OD and management gurus being in evidence as organisations react to the technological changes

• the societal – where sociologists offer description of emerging realities and activists protest and try to reform

Each is therefore a strange mixture of the scientific and the intuitive

I first wrote about this earlier in the year and have been thinking about it for much of the time since then. What amazes me is how few papers or books have tried to challenge this rigid separation. “Life and How to Survive it“ was about the only example I could think of before 2000 – written jointly by a UK social psychologist and comic – although Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” and Donald Schon’s “Beyond the Stable State” from 1970 and 1971 did a certain amount of useful trespassing

But things have been looking up recently – particularly in 2008 when the NHS tried to elicit help from the literature in social movements to encourage innovation in the system (Bevan and Bate in table 3 of the attached paper). And, in 2014, we got What About Me? the struggle for identity in a market-based society by a Dutch psychotherapist, Paul Verhaege - a real gem which ranges through intellectual history, sociology and ethics before suggesting that the last few decades have seen a radical new self-identity being engineered – which he calls “The Enron Society”.

The book starts by contrasting our two basic urges as individuals - the initial sense of "belonging" and the growing need for "separation" - and how this expresses itself in later struggles eg "self-respect" v "self-hatred"

From his initial discussion of "identity", he then moves onto a fascinating discussion of values and morality - showing how the Greeks had an integrated view of our character which Christianity destroyed when it placed God as an external power. The Enlightenment dethroned religion to an extent – although Verhaeghe argues that Diderot’s emphasis on reason, passion and empathy was set aside by an unholy coalition of Voltaire and Rousseau who basically helped the French state set up a new religion. He also argues that true rationality started only after the second WW – which fits with the more recent arguments of people like Nicolas Guilhot who are beginning to analyse the role of the military in the post-war social sciences.

It’s the chapter on the Enron Society where he really lets rip – “The west has never had it so good – but never felt so bad!” leads to a discussion on mental illness and the pharma industry. How, he asks, has 30 years of neoliberalism affected our DNA – with its “Rank and Yank” systems of management; Universities as knowledge businesses; anonymous call-centres; CCTV; ubiquitous contracts, rules, regulations, league tables, fear, uncertainty - but no real accountability

Typically, however, it’s the final section which lets him down. Apart from repeating Mintzberg’s call for “balance” and praising the Wilkinson/Pickett line on equality, his only advice seems to be for greater activism – “ Ditch the cynicism!”!!

But it’s good to have a text from outwith the anglo-american core – with several interesting discoveries in his little bibliography (which doesn’t, however, mention Kenneth Gergen’s “The Saturated Self”, Robert Kegan’s “In over our heads”– let alone “Life and How to Survive it”). Even the psychologists, it seems, suffer from memory loss!

But it was 2021 before we got the first book which quite explicitly attempt to link the 3 levels together in an integral way – with Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation Hans Burmeister (2021)

In the 1990s, western confidence about its ability to manage change was positively hubristic. And with such pride usually comes a serious fall Little wonder that, within 25 years, the mood is now one of downright despair.

Update; Significantly, I realised I had omitted one level of change from my typology - namely the technological as enabled by calculations of commercial prospects. I have now amended the paper accordingly - although I will need to include more than the 2 texts which I have so far mentioned in table 1. 

So here’s my Updated Reflection on Change. Tell me what you think