Organizational Change Built to Change
I-O Psychology & Organization Development can work together for change
“Why is Organization Change So Difficult? And What Can We Do About That?” These two questions are on the minds of Organization Development professionals, Industrial-Organizational Psychology practitioners, change management pros, and well, many many (many) people in the workplace.
Our local Industrial-Organizational Psychology association, the Minnesota Professionals for Psychology Applied to Work (MPPAW) recently hosted Dr David Jamieson — Professor, Organization Development & Change, University of St Thomas. Dr Jamieson visited this group of I-O psychology practitioners to discuss organizational change. I was a little uncertain what to expect, although I had seen him speak before so I knew it would be a good discussion. I did not think it would be an hour and a half T-Group, but considering the audience of around 70 Industrial-Organizational Psychology practitioners, academics and students I was not sure what information on organization change would be presented (and how).
Change is hard work. I think that few would disagree with this statement. However we received elaboration “Organizations are complex socio-technical systems with numerous interdependent, moving parts.” So I looked up socio-technical systems for your convenience on Wikipedia and wiki says:
Sociotechnical systems (STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behaviour.
3 big buckets of why change fails
- Systems
- Individual Perspectives
- Change Process.
Systems/Organization Perspective: This is the perspective that any company is made up of many moving parts. As you attempt to move an org from a current state of functioning to a future state of functioning — the organization must keep on functioning. Dr. Jamieson quoted Kurt Lewin
Dr Jamieson talked about “Stakeholders and ‘stakes’ managed”. What does this mean anyway? Although common sense, when looking at stakeholders, it is impossible to please all people all of the time. Some change will benefit some stakeholders, but not benefit other stakeholderss. This can get oversimplified in change efforts to imply the change is a win/win for all, and it may not be. Not at all. So in essence there is a process of trade-offs to be managed in change. If we can make those trade-offs more transparent, all the better. Trade-offs can be dragged into the light and you can help the individuals in the organization make conscious choices for more successful change. Note — I see a future separate post on stakeholder management.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast(Drucker);
and Culture dominates ‘change’ at lunch (Jamieson)
You have to have a good model when dealing with organizational change (practitioners may use the Burke -Litwin model or one of the many others). Dr. Jamieson provided his model as a framework to provide context:
Individual Perspective: People do not necessarily do what you want them to do. There are many complex emotional factors that impact a person’s readiness for change. People have a mess of conflicting needs, and power distributions between each other. All of these come into play when dealing with organizational change. You need a critical mass of consensus for a change to move forward. You do not however need 100% unanimous agreement.
Change Process: This is made up of a strategy and path which must take into account context. Dr Jamieson elaborated that we are very bad at teaching solid change process to people. The design of the change process and what he referred to as “Whole-part-whole” (from the learning model) which means courtesy of Wikipedia “A method of learning a skill in which the learner tries to perform the whole skill from time to time after practicing parts of the skill, particularly those parts which are difficult.” It is also important to utilize leverage points in the change process. Doing an intervention? Keep in mind: where, who, when, and how! In organization change, CONTEXT MATTERS.
21st Century Drivers Making Change More Complex and Difficult
Too many change theories assume relative stability-which is no longer true.
Complexity means we cannot completely understand what the current issue is that the organization is facing. But with our incomplete information we will still start to help facilitate change. Incremental learning and adaptive action are key to organizational change and sustainability. Planning is still good but….
“Navigating deviations is the new skillset”. ~ David Jamieson
Action Research: You learn from the action taken, (reflection) and this helps to inform the next action. Then lather rinse repeat. (note: does this sound similar to Agile Methodology to anyone else?). My current thoughts around action research after this session is that we need to encourage more experimentation in organizations, with good data collection and use of evidence. The key here though is the reflection piece as we learn from actions both individually and collectively. To obtain more information, do an image search on Action Research with Google. There is some fun stuff out there….
I-O & OD — “our dominate foci & skill sets differ and are complimentary”
I-O has a stronger data orientation and in general favors quantitative data over qualitative data. I-O is more individual focused while OD is more systems focused. (And yes, I-O is more reductionist). Both tend to not understand the overall business well or at least are not trained in this extensively in graduate school. But both disciplines want to create a better work environment. “In organizational reality, many disciplines need to converge to get good results, e.g..HRM, HRD, OD, PM, I-O, CM….” Dr Jamieson acknowledged this is an oversimplified view, but provided the following slide for discussion:
To me this is a good high level overview of main differences between the two related but different disciplines. Although presented as a dichotomy, of course there is overlap.
So what were a few of my key take aways on the 17th? I may not be the most impartial since I have one foot planted in each discipline, but here you go. …
- There is much room to learn from one another. I-Os may have cornered the market on measurement and and individual behavior, but could really benefit from a systems view and more process consultation. There is a great deal the complementary disciplines could provide to organizations.
- We can too easily become insulated and view organizational issues through our disciplinary lens. In a perfect world, a consulting team with I-O, OD, Change Management, Project Management, Human Resources and a Business Analyst would ROCK! Throw in facilitation experts and L&D then you may have a more rounded view and broader spectrum solutions. Yes, one person can develop many of these skills over time, but also needs to know where they have gaps in their abilities.
- Dr. Jamieson at one point was discussing how organizations build strategy and then (hopefully) an organization designed to execute that strategy. But this must be an iterative process. Each time an organization builds a new strategy, a new organization design must be implemented. Otherwise, the strategy is doomed to not be executed well. If not a new design, at least make sure to do an assessment to see if what you have is what you need and tweak accordingly.
- There was a nice shout out to the change management profession in that Dr Jamieson said that often OD is too systems oriented and can neglect impact of change at a personal individual level. Change Management often does a much better job of with individuals (two way communication, training, etc.) than the OD profession might do. This struck me as generally accurate and surprising at the same time. Also, my thoughts turn to… how is it that the I-O profession has (in general) missed this boat with helping individuals navigate organizational change?
How did this program go with the audience? Well there was good discussion and I think in general many were receptive to the message. I could not help but think though that a correlation matrix, a few beta weights, (or at least some Cronbach’s alpha etc.) may help the message to land with this crowd. A few research-based outcomes would have gone a long way with I-Os IMO. Also I am just one person, I do not know what the rest of the room thought :-)
I leave you with more Jaime McGeathy tweets AKA “Psychology at Work” (who must have taken awesome notes during the MPPAW session)
P.S. Program slides will be posted on the MPPAW website.
