Sitting in an Story Circle yesterday, a fairly up-front and direct manager responded to a question I had asked with, "BOHICA!"
My question? Well, I asked about the way the company has been traversing the multiple changes they've had to their organisation of late. Simple answer it was. It makes me wonder about how well we are doing in building organisations who know that change is part of their DNA?
Chris Corrigan, over at Parking Lot , is beginning a year-long inquiry into how hosts (group facilitators) can be forces of conscious evolution.
Nice term ... conscious evolution.
From his post:
Conscious evolution is as simple as having the experience of becoming “bigger” in terms of consciousness of forces and systems and the impact we can have on those forces and systems.
I have my criticisms of how people approach change in organisations. Corrigan's work will be important in establishing an optimism in the way in which individuals, groups and organisations can deal with discontinuous change.
The leaf-in-the-wind-like position groups and organisations find themselves in reminds me of a Hasidic motif: A traveler loses his way in a forest: it is dark and he's afraid. Danger lurks behind ever tree. A storm shatters the silence. The fool looks at the lightning, the wise man at the road that lies - illuminated - before him. read more »
I interact often on the TomorrowToday blog, ?ic@TomorrowToday, and it's a rare occurance that we point towards formal academia that underpins the stuff we speak of on ?ic and in our TomorrowToday frameworks. So, as a treat, I'd like invite you to step away from our uber-sexy TmTd language and delve into some academic viewpoints. Why, you may ask? Well, it's because a few customers of late have asked me what resources and background we draw on in our frameworks. Somehow, the answer of "killer experience and superior intelligence" have not ellicited the responses I was hoping for. Oh, and because I sometimes find comfort in reading academic stuff. So, let me point you to a journal article on Organizational Change & Development by Weick & Quinn (from Michigan Business School). Yep, I can already hear you yawning. Let me say that I found this article very useful as it provides some background to what we say around the current age of discontinuous change, how we "do" change in organisations and what role culture plays in the midst of change. Here's a snippet:
The basic tension that underlies many discussions of organizational change is that it would not be necessary if people had done their jobs right in the first place. Planned change is usually triggered by the failure of people to create continuously adaptive organizations.
