A New Guide to Change

We’re overdue a serious study of change. The subject has been hugely compartmentalised in the past few decades – with scientists focusing on technology; psychologists on the individual; economists on the organisation; and sociologists on society as a whole. When I last looked I could find only one (14 page) article which did justice to change in the round – by Scott London. And that’s in a period of some 25 years! 

So I’ve now produced this Updated Annotated Bibliography on Change as a replacement for something I produced some decades ago. The earlier version consisted of short notes I had made about the range of books my assignment from 1990 in countries recently liberated from communism had required me to become familiar with – the challenge of transitioning to new systems of accountability and public management, European systems of local government, the variety of civil service systems, the nature of organisations and the management of change.

Those interested in this range of subjects can access the original version here

 

This new updated version focuses less on the governmental aspects of change and more on the intrinsic issues of change – as it affects individuals, organisations and societies. It’s 50 pages long but doesn’t pretend to update Scott London’s original paper (which constitutes the middle section of the Guide). Although it’s reasonably strong on the management of change, it remains an illustrative guide – with a nod to some of the other interesting texts published recently which try to bridge the three levels eg Life and How to Survive it R Skynner and J Cleese (1993O; The World We Create Tomas Bjorkman  (2019); and Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation Hans Burmeister (2021)

 

So here it is again A commentary on - and guide to - Change (2022)

A Recent Convert to Twitter

 Twitter has a lot to answer for – it makes screeching dervishes of the most sane individuals. I realised this when an erstwhile friend whom I thought the very epitome of rationality used his Twitter account to release bitter diatribes against public figures. One of the reasons this blog doesn’t cover current affairs is that you are expected to take sides (with a bipolar choice) and I find that reality is too complex for such simplification.

But I found myself enrolling on Twitter a few months ago and am actually enjoying the experience – for two reasons.

First, it forces you to be brief. My posts tend to be both long and complex. A couple of years ago, the blog started to use tables which I found a very useful discipline forcing me to summarise what I was trying to say in a couple of sentences, And Twitter gives that same discipline. So far I’ve only seen Ian Leslie recognise this positive feature. And it is, of course, only a potential – which requires skill and experience to develop. But brevity is, of course, something to be encouraged in all writers – as this blog has emphasised in recent years.

 

But there is a second, equally powerful reason which may smack to some of the “echo-chamber” argument of which social media is (justifiably) accused. By blocking the rubbish which assails us when we start to use Twitter, I’ve found amazing new worlds opening up to me Of course I have a few of the same websites I have long known about - but they’re feeding me with new material. And as I select the first few individuals to “follow”, I’m alerted to others who don’t have blogs but have a book to market and interesting comments to make.

And it can also help improve my French and German – I can follow journalists from those countries and get a much better sense of what’s going on there than sticking within the Anglosphere eg https://twitter.com/carstenknop

And virtually all of is positive – it’s referring to books, articles and discussions which are considered worthwhile. This I hadn’t expected. I had been put off Twitter because of the level of outright venom it seemed to encourage. But here are thousands of twitter users who are using the platform to point us to a healthy world.

It just needs us to make the right choices.

an interesting political map

Dave Pollard has a terrific discussion here which puts our current ills in a great perspective 

A lot of people who profess to be atheists or pantheists in their youth, tend to adopt religions when they get older. More than anything else, this seems due to their running out of capacity for feeling responsible for all the world’s ills. Deciding to believe in some higher power and authority — a god, a guru, a Gaia — to some extent gets you off the hook.

Most of my friends throughout my life have been salvationists of one stripe or another (right half of the chart above), and the lion’s share of them have been what I would call Humanists — people who, in wikipedia’s words have a “philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings”. They believe that humans can and must exert social and ethical responsibility for our personal and collective actions, and the stewardship of the entire planet. More importantly, they believe, mostly, in the myth of progress, and that there is almost nothing that humans cannot accomplish if we set our minds to it.

This can, of course, be exhausting, especially when things are going particularly badly for the human experiment, as they are now.

Religions offer the comforts of tradition, rigour, continuity and ritual, all salves for the exhausted and disenchanted. 

https://howtosavetheworld.ca/images/The-New-Political-Map-2015.png

Dervla Murphy RIP,

There are some writers who defy categorisation – listeners, accessible, principled, strong on research. The Irish travel-writer Dervla Murphy who has just died at age 90 was one such. She was one of my favourite writers – covering the globe on her famous cycle rides – particularly countries (for me) such as Cuba, Gaza, Russia, Yugoslavia and Transylvania. Her accounts were highly political – she didn’t just talk with people, she listened to them. She had done her homework on the places she visited and wrote fascinating accounts – totally sensitive to the context and, on that account, so unlike most of such visitors.

The book which perhaps best embodies her careful research was probably “Through the Embers of Chaos – Balkan journeys” (2002). I have a lovely first edition of "Transylvania and Beyond" (John Murray 1992 - with a superb jacket) from one of the Bucharest 2nd hand bookshops...

An amazing woman https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2022/may/25/dervla-murphy-an-appreciation-of-the-great-irish-travel-writer-who-has-died-aged-90

What exactly IS a “theory of change”?

Everyone these days apparently needs to have a “theory of change” – although such an expectation has been with us for only a couple of decades. It’s something we can largely thank the development field for – although I suspect the “change management” literature had a big hand. None of the many documents available when you google the term bother to give a history of the term – and it is Wikipedia that comes up trumps with a fascinating history of the phrase 

I spent April musing about “change” because a friend had invited me to do some zoom interviews about the significant change strategy I had been responsible for in Scotland’s largest Region for more than a decade. Here's the first interview - which may take a few minutes to download.

The subsequent posts covered a lot more than the strategy – exploring such things as the wider social, political and context of post-war Britain; the influence of the Johnson’s “War on Poverty”; issues of power and powerlessness; how those with power manipulate us; and the curiously compartmentalised way we talk about change.  

I’m still trying to make sense of what was an important series of posts and offer one of my tables to help me (and my readers) in that process. Just click on the relevant title and you’ll get the post  

Title	Issues covered
Talking of change	Change is normally discussed in a highly compartmentalised way – with psychologists looking at individuals; consultants at organisations and sociologists at entire societies. Only recently have a few people tried to make the connections between these levels
Theories of Change	“Pincers”, “windows of opportunity”, “contagion” and the “laboratory” have been useful metaphors
Tools of Manipulation	The seven ways in which we are kept in line - as citizens, employees and consumers. And the variety of methods used to do so. Although there’s been a huge interest in past decade in behaviour, I haven’t seen anyone else  attempt such a tabulation.
Speak, memory	Recalling the spirit of the 1960s – the UK version of the US war on poverty – participation
The powerless	How the US debate on “community power” helped shape Strathclyde Region’s “Social Strategy for the Eighties”
Pragmatic idealism	the texts which influenced my generation
There are no experts	Offering a tentative explanation of how and why we developed the Strategy – and what its main planks were
Reviewing the strategy	Using a “change management” writer’s checklist to test the Strategy – it works!
Healthy societies	We’ve forgotten the wisdom of 30 years ago

 For those interested in how new strategies are developed - particularly at a sub-national level, here's the recent interview I did with a former colleague in Strathclyde Region about early initiatives

Google erases history.

We all know that “history is written by the victors” – although a more literal translation would be that it’s “written by victorious scribblers” since it’s the academics who do the writing. As long as we relied on our memories, this wasn’t a problem.

But now that Google increasingly makes our memory redundant, it is academic texts we unearth when we google. The new gatekeepers are the academics. And with that come new responsibilities for truth, neutrality and fairness for which they are simply not equipped.

This was brought home to me recently when I was trying to check my memory of events in the late 1960s and 1970s when I was involved in initiatives which swept across Scotland and had influences further afield. But as far as Google is concerned, these events never took place. If you have the patience to search long enough, you will find a few academic references to the events but they are generally schematic and show little understanding – let alone interest – in the conditions of the time.

“So what?” I can hear you say. It means basically that we are writing out of history the struggles of ordinary people. It’s only recently that social history started to be respectable – thanks to people such as David Kynaston although Ralph Samuel was an important forerunner    

Life is lived in our localities. But the life has been sucked out of our municipal institutions by a process of power grabs over the past half century. Time was when people felt they had some control over their lives but a fixation on central systems of power has been insidiously encouraged by journalists and politicians alike.

A lot of lip-service is paid to the need for decentralisation and “localism”. But it’s only –lip-service

Should we focus less on Change – and more on healthy organisations and societies? - Part X of a series

As I try to pull these notes about change together, let me start with Donald Schon’s 1970 Reith lectures, called “Beyond the Stable State” which caught the mood of the times very well – 

we’re experiencing a general rather than an isolated or peripheral phenomenon. The threat to the stability of established institutions carries with it a threat to the stability of established theory and ideology, because institutions like the Labour movement, the Church, social welfare agencies, all carry with them bodies of theory, ways of looking at the world, and when the institutions are threatened, the bodies of theory are threatened as well.

Most important, when the anchors of the institution begin to be loosened, the supports that it provides for personal identity, for the self, begin to be loosened too. We’ve lost faith, I think, in the idea of being able to achieve stable solutions to these problems. 

This was, of course, the same year that Alvin Toffler published Future Shock

But it was during the 1970s that the critique of both democracy and of government started – coinciding curiously in the UK with talk of greater democracy being one of the purposes of the massive reorganisation of local government which took place in 1975. 

Coincidentally this was the very year the Trilateral Commission produced its infamous The Crisis of Democracy – report on the governability of democracies which effectively argued that democracy had gone too far - and was endangering the very stability of the system. This was the report carrying the names of Michel Crozier and Samuel Huntington that made respectable such phrases as “state overload” and launched neoliberalism.

But that took time - which Strathclyde Region used to fine-tune its Social Strategy for the Eighties – while continuing to have no real guidance on how to do this effectively. The first book on the management of change appeared in 1988 and Rosabeth Kanter’s recipe for effective change was published only in 1992. Kanter’s checklist suggests that we got it right. 

I want to link this to the remark made earlier in this series about how little has been written about the generality of change - proving my point by suggesting that “Life and How to Survive it” (1993) by R Skynner and J Cleese (a psychologist and a comedian respectively) was the only book I knew of which attempted to build a bridge across 3 very different types of literature – the personal, organisational and societal. Interestingly the issue they tried to address was not about change per se but what it took to create healthy individuals, families, organisations and societies. Perhaps, therefore, the focus of our concerns should not be change as such which, in a sense, we can only celebrate (eg Blair) or regret.

Perhaps it would be far more fruitful for us to be exploring how we might be able to develop healthier families, organisations and societies. It would certainly allow us to focus more on how to rid ourselves of the toxic leaders we find in so many organisations and societies. Google “bibliographies on toxic leadership” and you’ll be amazed at the number of references you unearth – particularly in the managerial and military literature.

Intriguingly, in view of the scare Trump gave us, there doesn’t seem as much as you might have thought in the political science literature. Earlier this year a post on Leaders we Deserve gave pride of place to a book of that name published as far back as 1983 by Alistair Mant who explored the psychological aspects of the phenomenon.  It starts by making a fascinating distinction between binary and “ternary” personalities - the central binary question is: ‘Will I win?’ The central ternary question is more intelligent: ‘What’s it for?’ The latter term was introduced by anthropologist Geoffrey Bateson to describe those grounded by what Mant calls “the third corner” or a belief outside of themselves. Binary leaders are “raiders” – ternary leaders are “builders”

This series has used a case-study of a successful strategy in Strathclyde Region which started with a system of dual political leadership – one who handled the public side, the other who handled the internal discipline behind the scenes. They were both “builders” - but later group leaders were “raiders”.

Reviewing Strathclyde Region's Social Strategy - part IX

Rosabeth Kanter is one of the most famous management writers and suggested in 1992 "Ten Commandments for Executing Change" which are worth reading in detail (click on link)

1.             Analyse the organisation - and its need for change

2.             Create a shared vision and common direction

3.             Separate from the past

4.             Create a Sense of Urgency

5.             Support a Strong Leader

6.             Line up Political Support

7.             Craft an Implementation Plan

8.             Develop Enabling Structures

9.             Communicate, Involve People and be Honest

10.           Reinforce and Institutionalise the Change 

This gives us a useful checklist which I'll use to test the approach we adopted in 1982 -

·         The shocking 1973 “Born to Fail?” report identified the West of Scotland as a UK leader in “multiple deprivation” and a few of us – instead of acting defensively - saw this as an opportunity to ensure that the Region, set up in 1974, recognised this need as its basic priority - and it certainly did establish and sustain a shared vision.

·         “Separating from the past” was easy at one level since the Region was starting from scratch but enormously difficult at another since it was an amalgamation of six large powerful bodies – each with its distinctive style – let alone the strength of the professional cultures to be found in departments such as Education, Police, Water, Fire and Social Work

·         That indeed had created a lot of potential enemies for the new Region – its very scale made it difficult to defend and its power left a bitter taste in the mouths of the politicians and officials working in the lower tier of local government. There was an urgency in the Region having to prove itself – which gave us the incentive to do things differently.

·         For the first 4 years, leadership was shared by 2 very different characters – a community minister being the public persona and a miner being the behind-the- scenes deal-maker. It allowed a rare combination of practicality and idealism to flow in the wider leadership

·         And community activists were brought into that

·         With the implementation plan taking several years to evolve

·         With the appropriate enabling structures – at both political, administrative and community levels

·         Communication was intense and continuous – as you would expect of a democratic system

·         And appropriate strategic changes reinforced and institutionalised 

A couple of years after I had left Scotland I had an opportunity to present the Region’s strategy to an OECD committee and it’s interesting to recall the 5 points I made - 

"(a) RESOURCE the Priority Programmes with "MAINLINE" money

Urban Aid money from central government was essential for the strategy – but ran out after 5 years. Senior departmental management did not feel a strong sense of ownership - and the subsequent project management generally had its problems. Not least because of

·       the relative lack of experience of those appointed 

·       the complex community management arrangements of the projects

·       the uncertainty about funding once the 5 year point was reached.

 

"(b)  SUPPORT CHANGE AGENTS !

No self-respecting private company would introduce new products/systems without massive training.  The more progressive companies will pull in business schools and even set up, with their support, a teaching company. The time was overdue for such an approach from the public sector; for a new type of civic "entrepreneur". And certainly the reaction of much of the public sector in the 1980s to the various threats they faced - not least privatisation - has been to put new life into the public sector. We do appear to be amateurs in many respects compared with the United States as far as managing change is concerned.

Many organisations exist there for training and supporting these, for example, in community economic development corporations. At least 3 levels of training need can be identified for urban development - political, managerial and community. And the most neglected are the first and last, particularly the last.

One of our recent reviews of Strathclyde Region`s urban strategy decided there was a need to give more support to the development of local leaders - for example by giving them opportunities to travel to see successful projects elsewhere - not only in the UK but in Europe.  This had multiple aims - to give the local leaders new ideas, to recharge their batteries, to make them realise their struggle was not a solitary one: to help develop links, as Marlyn Fergusson has put it, with other "con-spirators" (literally - "those you breathe with").

Such a venture by an elected agency required some risk-taking - sending community activists not only to places like Belfast but to Barcelona ! - and one too many was apparently taken with the result that it was quickly killed off !

 

"(c) Set DETAILED TARGETS for Departments to ensure they understand the implications of the strategy for them

Information is power.  It is only the last few years that information has been collected systematically about how the local authority resources in areas of priority treatment relate to the needs.  Without such sort of information - and a continual monitoring of the effectiveness of action taken in relation to clear targets - any strategy is just pious good intentions.

 

"(d) Establish FREESTANDING Community Development Agencies

The combination of social, economic, environmental and housing objectives involved in regeneration requires local, free-standing agencies operating from a position of equality and self-confidence: and able, as a result, to challenge the narrowness and inertia which, sadly, tends to characterise normal public bureaucracies.

 

"(e) Be realistic about the TIME-SPAN the change will need!

The task we are engaged on is the transformation into a post-industrial world: the changes in skills and behaviour - and in organisational forms - cannot be achieved in less than 20-30 years. Hence the need for a learning strategy." 

To cut this long story short, the Region got it about right. Our management of the strategy may not have met everyone’s standards but least we were spared Gordon Brown’s infamous target-setting!  

Recommended Reading

Chapter 6 (Change Management) of In Transit – notes on good governance (1999)