Perceptions of change

Management, as it is taught in business schools, is rife with abstractions such as “strategic alignment” and “organizational culture”. The incident I’m about to relate happened about nine years ago, a few days after I had read Claudio Ciborra’s brilliant critique of strategic alignment and published an article about it.

I was at a company dinner where I happened to be sitting next to a senior executive from headquarters.  At that time the organization was in the throes of a large-scale IT transformation initiative aimed at “aligning IT with the business.” As might be expected, the conversation turned to the impending changes and how they would achieve “strategic alignment.”

Perhaps unwisely, I started talking about Ciborra’s critique and the gap between management abstractions and coalface reality. The conversation segued into the differences between management and employee perceptions of the changes we were going through, and at some point I said, “employee perceptions tend to become their reality.”

 The executive set his fork down on his plate. “You’ve got that wrong,” he said with a tight smile, “my perception is your reality.”

–x–

Management theorists invented the concept of organizational culture to deal with the “problem” of aligning employee values with those of the organization.  However, as noted in a classic paper by Hugh Willmott, the concept is inherently flawed, not to mention a shade Orwellian:

“[the notion of organizational culture is based on] an implicit understanding that the distinctive quality of human action, and of labour power, resides in the capacity of self-determination [of purpose and action]. This insight informs the understanding that corporate performance can be maximized only if this capacity is simultaneously respected and exploited…corporate culture invites employees to understand that identification with its values ensures their autonomy. That is the seductive doublethink of corporate culture: the simultaneous affirmation and negation of the conditions of autonomy.”

And then, a bit later in the piece:

“[Advocates of organisational culture] take it for granted that the objectives of the organization can be engineered to become consensual. Since every employee is assumed to share these objectives, and to benefit from their realization, there can be no moral objection to corporate cultural demands.”

However, such thinking is morally ambiguous:

“Instead of contributing to the development of a societal culture in which individuals learn to appreciate, and struggle with, the problematical experience and significance of indeterminacy, [organisational] culturism promotes what is, in effect, a totalitarian remedy for this existential problem. [Organisational] culturism directly exploits the feelings of insecurity and ‘irrationalism’ that are intensified by the capitalist process of commodification [of skills and labour].”

Employees tend to toe the corporate culture line because of the security it appears to offer. However, such buy-in is largely in letter, not spirit: although you might be able to control what people do, and may even get them to pledge allegiance to “organizational values,” you cannot control what they think. This is the point I was trying to get across to the executive.

I left the organization three years later, surprised that I lasted that long.

 –x–

Perceptions of change depend on where one sits in the organizational hierarchy.

Many years ago, I was part of a project team that was working on replacing a venerable Lotus Notes–based system with a newer customer relationship management (CRM) product. I was tasked with integrating data from the CRM with other syndicated and publicly available data sets. The requirements were complex, but the system design evolved through continual, often animated discussions between the development team and key business stakeholders in an environment characterized by openness and trust.

The system was delivered on schedule, with minimal rework required.

Five years later, I was invited to participate in a regional project at the same company. The objective, which was set by the corporate IT office located in Europe, was to build a data warehouse for subsidiaries across Asia.  Corporate’s rationale for the project was quite reasonable. The data landscape across Asia was messy, with each subsidiary taking a bespoke approach to data management in order to address their local reporting needs. From corporate’s perspective, this was a situation crying out for standardization. On the other hand, the subsidiaries were happy with their existing systems. They perceived the push for standardization as a corporate power play that would result in a loss of local autonomy over data. 

To top it all, there were cultural differences around how such conflicts should be resolved.

Predictably, the discussions aimed at reaching a consensus devolved into heated Skype exchanges between stakeholders, forcing regional IT to step in and call a meeting to resolve the issue.

The story of how we resolved differences between corporate and local perspectives is documented in this article and this paper so I won’t reproduce it here. The point I wish to make is that the larger the change, the greater the effort required to align perceptions. Moreover, success depends entirely on developing trust-based relationships between warring stakeholder groups. This involves surfacing key points of contention and developing consensus decisions about them in a way that is acceptable to all parties. This is a matter of communication, not culture.

–x–

That said, I don’t like the term “communication” much. It glosses over details of what one must do to resolve differences, and the details matter because they are not obvious.

The anthropologist and polymath, Gregory Bateson once noted that “what [we lack] is a theory of action within large complex systems, where the active agent is himself a part and a product of the system.”

In the very next line to the one quoted above, Bateson offered a hint as to where an answer might lie. He noted that Kant’s categorical imperative – “act so to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in another, always as an end and never as only a means – might provide a starting point for such a theory.”

He then went on to say something truly intriguing: “It seems also that good teachers and therapists avoid all direct attempts to influence the action of others and, instead, try to provide the settings or contexts in which some (usually imperfectly specified) change may occur.”

This line resonated deeply when I read it first because it spelt out something that I had learnt through experience but had not found the words to articulate: change is best achieved by framing (or creating) a context within which individuals will see things differently and change of their own accord.

–x–

“I can’t handle failure,” she said. “I’ve always been at the top of my class.”

She was being unduly hard on herself. With little programming experience or background in math, machine learning was always going to be hard going.  “Put that aside for now,” I replied. “Just focus on understanding and working your way through it, one step at a time. In four weeks, you’ll see the difference.”

“OK,” she said, “I’ll try.”

She did not sound convinced but to her credit, that’s exactly what she did. Two months later she completed the course with a distinction.

“You did it!” I said when I met her a few weeks after the grades were announced.

“I did,” she grinned. “Do you want to know what made the difference?”

Yes, I nodded.

“Thanks to your advice, I stopped treating it like a game I had to win,” she said, “and that took the pressure right off.  I then started to enjoy learning.”

–x–

The student reframed her thinking in a way that changed her perceptions of the task at hand. Instead of treating it as an obstacle or race, she began to view it as an opportunity to learn. Doing so enabled her to meet the academic requirements of the university. Paradoxically, she passed the course with ease when she stopped obsessing about doing well and focused on learning instead. This echoes Bateson’s advice about changing a system from within and is an example of what John Kay calls obliquity: the idea that certain goals are best achieved indirectly. 

You do not get people to change their perceptions by telling them to change. Instead, you reframe the situation in a way that enables them to see it in a different light. They might then choose to change of their own accord.

As a change agent, isn’t that what you really wish for?

–x–

The two tributaries of time

How time flies. Ten years ago this month, I wrote my first post on Eight to Late.  The anniversary gives me an excuse to post something a little different. When rummaging around in my drafts folder for something suitable, I came across this piece that I wrote some years ago (2013) but didn’t publish.   It’s about our strange relationship with time, which I thought makes it a perfect piece to mark the occasion.

Introduction

The metaphor of time as a river resonates well with our subjective experiences of time.  Everyday phrases that evoke this metaphor include the flow of time and time going by, or the somewhat more poetic currents of time.  As Heraclitus said, no [person] can step into the same river twice – and so it is that a particular instant in time …like right now…is ephemeral, receding into the past as we become aware of it.

On the other hand, organisations have to capture and quantify time because things have to get done within fixed periods, the financial year being a common example. Hence, key organisational activities such as projects, strategies and budgets are invariably time-bound affairs. This can be problematic because there is a mismatch between the ways in which organisations view time and individuals experience it.

Organisational time

The idea that time is an objective entity is most clearly embodied in the notion of a timeline: a graphical representation of a time period, punctuated by events. The best known of these is perhaps the ubiquitous Gantt Chart, loved (and perhaps equally, reviled) by managers the world over.

Timelines are interesting because, as Elaine Yakura states in this paper, “they seem to render time, the ultimate abstraction, visible and concrete.”   As a result, they can serve as boundary objects that make it possible to negotiate and communicate what is to be accomplished in the specified time period. They make this possible because they tell a story with a clear beginning, middle and end, a narrative of what is to come and when.

For the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph, timelines are often used to manage time-bound organisational initiatives. Through their use in scheduling and allocation, timelines serve to objectify time in such a way that it becomes a resource that can be measured and rationed, much like other resources such as money, labour etc.

At our workplaces we are governed by many overlapping timelines – workdays, budgeting cycles and project schedules being examples. From an individual perspective, each of these timelines are different representations of how one’s time is to be utilised, when an activity should be started and when it must be finished. Moreover, since we are generally committed to multiple timelines, we often find ourselves switching between them. They serve to remind us what we should be doing and when.

But there’s more: one of the key aims of developing a timeline is to enable all stakeholders to have a shared understanding of time as it pertains to the initiative. In this view, a timeline is a consensus representation of how a particular aspect of the future will unfold.  Timelines thus serve as coordinating mechanisms.

In terms of the metaphor, a timeline is akin to a map of the river of time. Along the map we can measure out and apportion it; we can even agree about way-stops at various points in time. However, we should always be aware that it remains a representation of time, for although we might treat a timeline as real, the fact is no one actually experiences time as it is depicted in a timeline. Mistaking one for the other is akin to confusing the map with the territory.

This may sound a little strange so I’ll try to clarify.  I’ll start with the observation that we experience time through events and processes – for example the successive chimes of a clock, the movement of the second hand of a watch (or the oscillations of a crystal), the passing of seasons or even the greying of one’s hair. Moreover, since these events and processes can be objectively agreed on by different observers, they can also be marked out on a timeline.  Yet the actual experience of living these events is unique to each individual.

Individual perception of time

As we have seen, organisations treat time as an objective commodity that can be represented, allocated and used much like any tangible resource.  On the other hand our experience of time is intensely personal.  For example, I’m sitting in a cafe as I write these lines. My perception of the flow of time depends rather crucially on my level of engagement in writing: slow when I’m struggling for words but zipping by when I’m deeply involved. This is familiar to us all: when we are deeply engaged in an activity, we lose all sense of time but when our involvement is superficial we are acutely aware of the clock.

This is true at work as well. When I’m engaged in any kind of activity at work, be it a group activity such as a meeting, or even an individual one such as developing a business case, my perception of time has little to do with the actual passage of seconds, minutes and hours on a clock. Sure, there are things that I will do habitually at a particular time – going to lunch, for example – but my perception of how fast the day goes is governed not by the clock but by the degree of engagement with my work.

I can only speak for myself, but I suspect that this is the case with most people. Though our work lives are supposedly governed by “objective” timelines, the way we actually live out our workdays depends on a host of things that have more to do with our inner lives than visible outer ones.  Specifically, they depend on things such as feelings, emotions, moods and motivations.

Flow and engagement

OK, so you may be wondering where I’m going with this. Surely, my subjective perception of my workday should not matter as long as I do what I’m required to do and meet my deadlines, right?

As a matter of fact, I think the answer to the above question is a qualified, “No”. The quality of the work we do depends on our level of commitment and engagement. Moreover, since a person’s perception of the passage of time depends rather sensitively on the degree of their involvement in a task, their subjective sense of time is a good indicator of their engagement in work.

In his book, Finding Flow, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes such engagement as an optimal experience in which a person is completely focused on the task at hand.  Most people would have experienced flow when engaged in activities that they really enjoy. As Anthony Reading states in his book, Hope and Despair: How Perceptions of the Future Shape Human Behaviour, “…most of what troubles us resides in our concerns about the past and our apprehensions about the future.”  People in flow are entirely focused on the present and are thus (temporarily) free from troubling thoughts. As Csikszentmihalyi puts it, for such people, “the sense of time is distorted; hours seem to pass by in minutes.”

All this may seem far removed from organisational concerns, but it is easy to see that it isn’t: a Google search on the phrase “increase employee engagement” will throw up many articles along the lines of “N ways to increase employee engagement.”  The sense in which the term is used in these articles is essentially the same as the one Csikszentmihalyi talks about: deep involvement in work.

So, the advice of management gurus and business school professors notwithstanding, the issue is less about employee engagement or motivation than about creating conditions that are conducive to flow.   All that is needed for the latter is a deep understanding how the particular organisation functions, the task at hand and (most importantly) the people who will be doing it.  The best managers I’ve worked with have grokked this, and were able to create the right conditions in a seemingly effortless and unobtrusive way. It is a skill that cannot be taught, but can be learnt by observing how such managers do what they do.

Time regained

Organisations tend to treat their employees’ time as though it were a commodity or resource that can be apportioned and allocated for various tasks. This view of time is epitomised by the timeline as depicted in a Gantt Chart or a resource-loaded project schedule.

In contrast, at an individual level, the perception of time depends rather critically on the level of engagement that a person feels with the task he or she is performing. Ideally organisations would (or ought to!) want their employees to be in that optimal zone of engagement that Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, at least when they are involved in creative work. However, like spontaneity, flow is a state that cannot be achieved by corporate decree; the best an organisation can do is to create the conditions that encourage it.

The organisational focus on timelines ought to be balanced by actions that are aimed at creating the conditions that are conducive to employee engagement and flow.  It may then be possible for those who work in organisation-land to experience, if only fleetingly, that Blakean state in which eternity is held in an hour.

Catch-22 and the paradoxes of organisational life

“You mean there’s a catch?”

“Sure there’s a catch”, Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions…”   Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Introduction

The term Catch-22 was coined by Joseph Heller in the eponymous satirical novel written in 1961. As the quote above illustrates,  the term refers to a paradoxical situation caused by the application of  contradictory rules.  Catch-22 situations are common in large organisations of all kinds, not just the military (which was the setting of the novel). So much so that it is a theme that has attracted some scholarly attention over the half century since the novel was first published  – see this paper or this one for example.

Although Heller uses Catch-22 situations to highlight the absurdities of bureaucracies in a humorous way, in real-life such situations can be deeply troubling for people who are caught up in them. In a paper published in 1956, the polymath Gregory Bateson and his colleagues  suggested that these situations can cause people to behave in ways that are symptomatic of schizophrenia .  The paper introduces the notion of a  double-bind, which is  a dilemma arising from an individual receiving two or more messages that contradict each other .   In simple terms, then,  a double-bind is a Catch-22.

In this post, I draw on Bateson’s  double bind theory to get some insights into Catch-22 situations in organisations.

Double bind theory

The basic elements of a double bind situation are as follows:

1. Two or more individuals, one of whom is a victim – i.e. the individual who experiences the dilemma described below.
2. A primary rule which keeps the victim fearful of the consequences of doing (or not doing) something.  This rule typically takes the form , “If you do x then you will be punished” or “If you do not do x then you will be punished. “
3. A secondary rule that is in conflict with the primary rule, but at more abstract level. This rule, which is usually implicit, typically takes the form, “Do not question the rationale behind x.”
4. A tertiary rule that prevents the victim from escaping from the situation.
5. Repeated experiences of (1) and (2)

A simple example (quoted from this article) serves to illustrate the above in a real- life situation:

One example of double bind communication is a mother giving her child the message: “Be spontaneous” If the child acts spontaneously, he is not acting spontaneously because he is following his mother’s direction. It’s a no-win situation for the child. If a child is subjected to this kind of communication over a long period of time, it’s easy to see how he could become confused.

Here the injunction to “Be spontaneous” is contradicted by the more implicit rule that “one cannot be spontaneous on demand.”  It is important to note that the primary and secondary (implicit) rules are at different logical levels  –  the first is about an action, whereas the second is about the nature of all such actions. This is typical of a double bind situation.

The paradoxical aspects of double binds can sometimes be useful as they can lead to creative solutions arising from the victim “stepping outside the situation”. The following example from Bateson’s paper illustrates the point:

The Zen Master attempts to bring about enlightenment in his pupil in various ways. One of the things he does is to hold a stick over the pupil’s head and say fiercely, “If you say this stick is real, I will strike you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will strike you with it. If you don’t say anything, I will strike you with it.”… The Zen pupil might reach up and take the stick away from the Master–who might accept this response.

This is an important point which we’ll return to towards the end of  this piece.

Double binds in organisations

Double bind situations are ubiquitous in organisations.   I’ll illustrate this by drawing on a couple of examples I have written about earlier on this blog.

The paradox of learning organisations

This section draws on a post I wrote while ago. In the introduction to that post I stated that:

The term learning organisation refers to an organisation that continually modifies its processes  based on observation and experience, thus adapting to changes in its internal and external environment.   Ever since Peter Senge coined the term in his book, The Fifth Discipline, assorted consultants and academics have been telling us that although a  learning  organisation is an utopian ideal, it is one worth striving for.  The reality, however,  is that most organisations that undertake the journey actually end up in a place far removed  from this ideal. Among other things, the journey may expose managerial hypocrisies that contradict the very notion of a learning organisation.

Starkly put, the problem arises from the fact that in a true learning organisation, employees will  inevitably start to question things that management would rather they didn’t.  Consider the following story, drawn from this paper on which the post is based:

…a multinational company intending to develop itself as a learning organization ran programmes to encourage managers to challenge received wisdom and to take an inquiring approach. Later, one participant attended an awayday, where the managing director of his division circulated among staff over dinner. The participant raised a question about the approach the MD had taken on a particular project; with hindsight, had that been the best strategy? `That was the way I did it’, said the MD. `But do you think there was a better way?’, asked the participant. `I don’t think you heard me’, replied the MD. `That was the way I did it’. `That I heard’, continued the participant, `but might there have been a better way?’. The MD fixed his gaze on the participants’ lapel badge, then looked him in the eye, saying coldly, `I will remember your name’, before walking away.

Of course,  a certain kind of learning  occurred here:  the employee learnt that certain questions were taboo, in stark contrast to the openness that was being preached from the organisational pulpit.  The double bind here is evident:  feel free to question and challenge everything…except what management deems to be out of bounds.  The takeaway for employees is that, despite all the rhetoric of organisational learning, certain things should not  be challenged. I think it is safe to say that this was probably not the kind of learning that was intended by those who initiated the program.

The paradoxes of change

In a post on the  paradoxes of organizational change, I wrote that:

An underappreciated facet of organizational change is that it is inherently paradoxical. For example, although it is well known that such changes inevitably have unintended consequences that are harmful, most organisations continue to implement change initiatives in a manner that assumes  complete controllability with the certainty of achieving solely beneficial outcomes.

As pointed out in this paper, there are three types of paradoxes that can arise when an organisation is restructured. The first is that during the transition, people are caught between the demands of their old and new roles. This is exacerbated by the fact that transition periods are often much longer expected. This paradox of performing in turn leads to a paradox of belonging – people become uncertain about where their loyalties (ought to) lie.

Finally, there is a paradox of organising, which refers to the gap between the rhetoric and reality of change. The paper mentioned above has a couple of nice examples. One study described how,

“friendly banter in meetings and formal documentation [promoted] front-stage harmony, while more intimate conversations and unit meetings [intensified] backstage conflict.”  Another spoke of a situation in which, “…change efforts aimed at increasing employee participation [can highlight] conflicting practices of empowerment and control. In particular, the rhetoric of participation may contradict engrained organizational practices such as limited access to information and hierarchical authority for decision making…

Indeed, the gap between the intent and actuality of change initiatives make double binds inevitable.

Discussion

I suspect the situations described above will be familiar to people working in a corporate environment. The question is what can one do if one is on the receiving end of such a Catch 22?

The main thing is to realise that a double-bind arises because one perceives the situation to be so. That is, the person experiencing the situation has chosen to interpret it  as a double bind. To be sure, there are usually factors that influence the choice – things such as job security, for example – but the fact is that it is a choice that can be changed if one sees things in a different light. Escaping the double bind is then a “simple” matter of reframing the situation.

Here is where the notion of mindfulness is particularly relevant. In brief, mindfulness is “the intentional, accepting and non-judgemental focus of one’s attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment.”  As the Zen pupil who takes the stick away from the Master, a calm non-judgemental appraisal of a double-bind situation might reveal possible courses of action that had been obscured because of one’s fears. Indeed, the realization that one has more choices than one thinks is in itself a liberating discovery.

It is important to emphasise that the actual course of action that one selects in the end matters less than the realisation that one’s reactions to such situations is largely under one’s own control.

In closing – reframe it!

Organisational life is rife with Catch 22s. Most of us cannot avoid being caught up in them, but we can choose how we react to them. This is largely a matter of reframing them in ways that open up new avenues for action, a point that brings to mind this paragraph from Catch-22 (the book):

“Why don’t you use some sense and try to be more like me? You might live to be a hundred and seven, too.”

“Because it’s better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees,” Nately retorted with triumphant and lofty conviction. “I guess you’ve heard that saying before.”

“Yes, I certainly have,” mused the treacherous old man, smiling again. “But I’m afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one’s feet than die on one’s knees. That is the way the saying goes.”

“Are you sure?” Nately asked with sober confusion. “It seems to make more sense my way.”

“No, it makes more sense my way. Ask your friends.”

And that, I reckon, is as brilliant an example of reframing as I have ever come across.