Leading Change As We Attempt to Understand It

Introduction: What Does It Mean to Lead Change?

There is tremendous interest in leading change. Some people are interested in “How (can I) be a leader?” “How can I can lead change?” Many ask “How can I avoid change—I’ve got too much already!” There seems to be a lack of clarity about why and what we are changing? Public policy is all about change, organizations espouse their need to change, and in the global dislocations and climate crises we are facing, change is becoming the norm, not the exception.

The assumption of this paper is that one must be clear about the lens or paradigm one chooses to use when looking at change for that will determine the type of policy and associated organizational actions or interventions one might take.

Swampy vs. Bedrock Assumptions

We get in to some of our biggest troubles as policy actors when we assess a situation as being stable when it is swampy or when we assess a situation as swampy when it is bedrock. The late Professor Robert P. Biller emphasized that we act on totally opposite assumptions based on whether we view a problem field as bedrock (routine, predictable) or swampy (nonroutine, political). All public administration functions can be appraised using these heuristic principles. Do you do program evaluation differently in a bedrock situation than a swampy one? Examples include:

• Planning

  • Bedrock: One does a full investment in comprehensive planning and the imposition of a template only when one feels confident that one’s knowledge base will not be severely altered or degraded by emergent change.
  • Swampy: One invests only to extent one confidently knows what the next logically incremental step, accounting for new emergence, will further overall purpose and minimal requirements.

• Organizing

  • Bedrock: One invests in functional bureaucracy and rule structures for predictable, routine outcomes which provide efficiency.
  • Swampy: One creates fluid, temporary alliances, task forces, project organization with persons who know the terrain even “a team of rivals” who can jointly create common purpose

• Control

  • Bedrock: Top-down policy and rule maintenance with management by exception to insure uniform equity.
  • Swampy: Exception is the rule. One uses locally based feedback to self-organize and particularize agile responses to emerging situations.

• Conflict

  • Bedrock: Conflict is a problem to be handled.
  • Swampy: Conflict is a resource to elicit emerging, collective intelligence

• Leadership

  • Bedrock: Technical
  • Swampy: Adaptive-Reflective

Neither bedrock nor swampy are “correct” responses. It depends upon what Mary Parker Follett calls “the law of the situation.” Understanding patterns and cycles of operating values, precedents, and agendas in a dynamic situation allows for skill-in-action in diagnosing the context, integrating conflicting desires, and doing what is required.

Especially in swampy situations, the administrator must account for “emergence” of unforeseen factors. A manager must be able to draw upon a vertical axis–drawing down the best principles of the public “good” through public policy to form good “intuition”– while navigating uncertainty on a horizontal axis by drawing out different standpoints from public policy players, creating a field of trust, deliberation, and joint fact-finding to establish common “ground” for collective action. In short, the manager must “build a bridge as they walk on it.” See Professor Robert Quinn’s volume Building A Bridge As You Walk On It for the personal requisites for traversing uncertainty.

This essay will review how we can think and act about change under conditions of complexity and chaos. Changing is reality. It is different than managing change when we perceive the situation is simple, routine, and bedrock.

The Paradigm of Self-Organizing Systems

Self-organizing systems are living systems. Life is born from an unquenchable need to be. Life begins from the desire to create something original, to bring a new form into being. The term employed for self-creation is autopoiesis. In the cycles of living systems, life creates forms, maintains, and yet breaks or destructs forms so they may regenerate or reconstitute into higher, more coherent forms. Forms facilitate purpose. New expressions of old principles appear not simply for utilitarian reasons, but because life is the freedom to experiment, to grow, and learn.

In human systems the organizing activity of living systems is in the mind. In other words, all levels of living systems, is mental activity integrated with deep feeling. Life and cognition are inseparably connected. Mind, or more accurately mental process—making connections—is both transcendent and immanent in matter at all levels of life. There is not really a mind-body split.

Further, all of nature, including human beings, are an interdependent web of relationships. Satish Kumar writes, “You are therefore I am”. In nature, living processes respond to one another, coevolving and co-creating the complex system of organization and forms we see in nature.

As human beings, we have thoughts and actions about who we are based, in part, on the relationships we choose to be attracted to. As Fritjof Capra writes in The Web of Life: A New Understanding of Living Systems, write that attractions coalesce aspects of nature, identifiable networks emerge, and the self-making, autopoetic network decides what to be attracted to or not. These create boundaries. “The entire system is organizationally closed, even though it is open with regard to the flow of energy and matter. The organizational closure implies that a living system is self-organizing in the sense that is order and behavior are not imposed by the environment but are established by the system itself. In other words, living systems are autonomous. This does not mean that they are isolated from their environment. On the contrary, they interact with the environment through a continual exchange of energy and matter. But the choices—whatever degree there may be—of interactions determines their organization—they are self-organizing.” P.176

Human systems are constantly organizing. Simultaneously, the process of organizing involves developing relationships from a shared sense of purpose, exchanging, sifting, and creating information, drawing out meaning, acting, and learning, co-adapting, co-evolving, being alert to change in all directions

Organizational Change and Mental Models

Margaret Wheatley argues that our current mental models of our organization and culture revolve around the machines and mechanisms. In particular, the market mechanism (buying and selling as a way of valuing and relating) is viewed as “an invisible hand for coordinating large numbers”. Similarly our organizations, bureaucracies, are viewed as machines. Their belief in prediction and control originated in clockwork images. Everything could be known. Organizations and people could be engineered into efficient solutions. People come and go, but organizations persist. We still search for “tools and techniques” and “change levers” to “drive change” through our organizations; we want to “build solutions” and “reengineer” for past efficiencies. However much we want to change in this way, it is difficult and prone to failure. Thus, we wonder in spite of the evidence about the planets dis-ease and our information society for disseminating this data, why such a meager response? Wheatley suggests while we want organizations to be more humanistic, adaptive, and behave like living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines and depend upon these structures and their associated benefits for our external status and self-identity preservation.

However, two factors are helping us to change the way we look at society, organizations, and even ourselves. First, citizens are become more awake and some better educated. There is a worldwide movement, supported by communications technology, which allows more individuation which is indicated by the possibility of greater connectedness and affinities with others and identification with suffering humanity. Professor Raghavan Iyer notes the revolution at hand is “an adjustment on the part of each person in every situation of the critical distance between the human agent and limited structures, systems, and ideologies, which he handles as instruments of his human purpose.” page 70 Novus Ordo Seclorum (Concord Grove Press). In short, many people are reclaiming their substantive rationality and reshaping their institutions as instruments for a more common good.

A second factor changing our world view is that people are experiencing a level of complexity for which most organizations and even societies are not suited. Organizations and their members attached to their roles and statuses are losing their coherence either slowly or with unexpected crises. People are learning that now, as Robert Biller proposed, “organizations come and go and people persist.” So individuals are now open to questioning and searching for better mental maps to better understand a world where they are thrown back on themselves to question and search for deeper meaning.

The result is that people are beginning to entertain doing more informal, self-organizing to develop coherent response to chaos. People can respond intelligently to a changing environment by regulating themselves. They can organize (and then reorganize) themselves into adaptive patterns, networks, alliances, or project organizations without any externally imposed plan or direction.

This faith as Wheatley writes will be sorely tested. When things get difficult, everyone wants to resort back to the old modalities of command and control, external imposition of standards, and pre-set models of doing which avoids fresh thinking how to self-organize to obtain feedback and manage error.

Dynamic Balance: Policy Leadership under Conditions of Complexity

A complex of theories out of living systems including chaos, complexity, and theories of emergence are beginning to give policy leaders and entrepreneurs greater ability to cope with change as the rule, rather than exception. Self-organizing systems can evolve from the build up of flows (resources and needs) , and collective intelligence and local knowledge can be mobilized to create more sustainable and credible responses. At the same time, self-organizing systems have to fight for their proportional share of resources and authority from larger units who have desires for centralization and uniformity of outcome as emotional reactions to greater complexity and change. Both larger and smaller scale capabilities are important but each may have a different role to play. The larger scale unit can set the overall policy objective, provide the inspirational leadership, and grant a good portion of the resources to the smaller units. The smaller scale unit can organize around local responses, mobilize local resources and legitimacy, do pilot programs and experiments, and learn what works in different situations on the ground. Mark H. Moore points to many of the themes in this think piece in the context of professional accountability in his case study, “Harry Spence and Mass. Dept of Social Services”, in Recognizing Public Value Harvard University Press 2013.

As policy leaders, we need facilitation skills to create these dynamic balances including accounting to our authorizers, while skillfully facilitating the emergence of public policy in diverse settings. Living systems theories gives us alternative mental models to top-down approaches for accomplishing these things especially in environments of complexity and change.

Further Reference:

Margaret Wheatley Finding Our Way: Leadership for An Uncertain Time 2005,2007 Berett-Koehler Publishers

Postscript: An aid to whether one understands change is what Deming cites as profound knowledge: variation–how to differentiate true signals from noise—emerging from different class of problems from variability. Then one can become more clear about what type, if any change, is necessary for improvement. Donald Wheeler’s volume, Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos works with systems and statistical process control which can point to conditions where we can make complexity worse rather than creating a mental posture outside the system to be able to manage it with greater clarity and potential for learning.