Book review: The Science of Successful Organizational Change
There’s too much pseudoscience in Management and Leadership — high time for a more scientific approach
Poachers, they say, make superior gamekeepers. Perhaps that is why Paul Gibbons, a former management consultant, is well placed to address a persistent problem in organizational change, and business management in general. “The craft of business leadership today pays too little attention to the science of how humans tick, and too much attention to folk and pop psychology”, he says in the concluding chapter of a book that exposes bad management practices, half-truths and pseudoscience with the kind of enthusiasm you see in the TV-show Mythbusters.
And there is a lot of it. The book is jam-packed with facts, factoids and references (the bibliography runs to about 150 items). That can sometimes leave the reader a bit overwhelmed – something Gibbons acknowledges early on. That means it is not an easy book: you really need to engage with the content, as it challenges received wisdom, introduces new angles, describes concepts, and proposes alternative models.
How big is the problem of unscientific practice really? The first fantasy that is demolished is the zombie statistic claiming that 70% of all change initiatives fail. Good! But one debunked superstition doesn’t mean everything is fine. We keep on treating traditional models and metaphors as sacred, despite the fact that they rest on little or no evidence. For example, organizations are not really static, needing “unfreezing” before being “frozen” again into a new steady state.
Over eight chapters, Gibbons tackles an array of myths (he lists 20, but here and there he shoots down a further one). These range from the assumption that a burning platform is essential for driving change, to the idea that people know what they want and will act rationally in pursuit of it. Most (arguably all) of these myths overlook (or oversimplify) how people really behave – organizational management appears to be the last bastion of rational, utility-maximizing homo economicus. “It is time to euthanize change management as we know it”, Gibbons says, and to rebuild our approach to change based on scientific insights from psychology, social psychology and economics.
The aspiration to adopt a more scientific approach conflicts with the comfort of straightforward ‘truths’. The simplicity of models like McKinsey’s 7S, or the Burke-Litwin and the EFQM models, is appealing. But it conceals the complexity of real businesses which, Gibbons says, “is radically ignored”. When we try to force a fuzzy, ambiguous reality in a comfortable, simplified model, we sacrifice accuracy.
The bulk of the book consists of two sections: one on Change Strategy and one on Change Tactics.
Change Strategy
The first one starts off with a chapter on risk – “where mathematics meets organization culture and individual psychology”. Our brains have not evolved fast enough to handle complex probability calculations. Instead, we see connections where there are none, and we extrapolate happily from small samples or even single events. We are prone to wishful thinking (“this could never happen to us”), and to the planning fallacy (underestimating time and cost of projects). What to do? “Risk governance is a people problem, not a mathematics problem”, says Gibbons. This is reflected in the approaches he advocates for better risk and uncertainty governance, like the use of pre-mortems, originally proposed by Gary Klein.
The second one focuses on decision-making. Business decisions are often complex (which, as Gibbons says, is often misunderstood to mean ‘complicated’ or ‘difficult’). Business problems are complex when they combine three features: (a) the multiple moving parts in an organization, (b) the fact that the size of a change is often unrelated to the size of its consequence (nonlinearity), and (c) the intricate interplay between the moving parts, making the whole thing pretty unpredictable.
It would be tempting to invoke the panacea of Big Data to help out with this. But Gibbons sounds a warning bell: unless you have a robust way to separate signal from noise, you’re going to make the problem much worse. Instead, we need to rely more on the science of systems theory, complexity theory, network theory and learning theories. But even science-based instruments still need people to operate them competently, says Gibbons: “the human-machine interface is where data becomes wisdom”.
The final chapter in the Change Strategy section deals with cognitive biases. There are many dozens of them, but the author makes a selection of 15 that are relevant to the topic and places them in three categories: perception, problem-solving and solution-selection biases. This helps put them in context, and explains how they are particularly pernicious in strategic decision-making.
Change Tactics
Change Tactics is defined as the alignment of culture, behaviours, hearts and minds with a change. And this is a domain rife with ideas that are used without questioning and followed blindly and slavishly. Often they are based on theories that have long been deprecated, e.g. the behaviourism behind the use of rewards and incentives to change behaviour.
Managers and practitioners have a poor understanding of human behaviour, Gibbons argues. He lays the blame for this at the door of folk and pop psychology. Our own experience, together with what we see as common sense, does allow us to work together with others to build “cathedrals, corporations and computers”. But experience and common sense also feed our confirmation bias. And the simplified messages propagated by popularizing authors (including quality ones like Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Pink, let alone the “coaches and self-help gurus who pay no attention to science at all”) reinforce this. They overpower the nuances of the underlying scientific research and get adopted as gospel.
Even worse than pop psychology is pop leadership, “one of the most destructive forces in the business world, spreading misinformation and untruths”. Real scientific ideas, like Hawking’s, Turing’s and Einstein’s did get plenty of challenge and remain open to revision. Where is the criticism of management thinkers like Drucker, Kotter, Bennis and Christensen?
One of the reasons why pseudoscience can prosper so well, according to Gibbons, is that psychology is still in its infancy, and even its “status as a science is hotly contested.” That produces a climate in which myths (he lists several, from Kübler-Ross’s grieving cycle to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) persist, thanks to self-proclaimed gurus and uncritical media.
But Gibbons is encouraged by the coming of age of what he calls the ‘adolescent’ psychological science, including the growing interest in evidence-based practice and integration with other disciplines, like law, finance, philosophy, anthropology and economics. This should fuel the debate. (Since the book was published, the ‘replication crisis’ in psychology broke, which is evidence of this happening.)
Gibbons singles out simplistic behaviourism as a particular problem (Rory Sutherland once said that the way employees are made to behave is either by bribing them or by punishing them). Such practices are coercive and ineffective. But a strictly cognitive alternative has its limitations too, for example because the intention/action gap means that changing hearts and minds is not always enough to produce different behaviour.
The author’s solution is what he calls Neobehaviourism. This improves on its original variant through better measurement of behaviours and through recognition of people’s thoughts and feelings. It also makes use of habits and nudging to help change behaviour. Habits have long been a crucial instrument in embedding safety-related behaviours – from holding the handrail on stairs to systematically going through a checklist in the cockpit of an airliner. Nudging relies on judiciously changing the environment in which choices are made judiciously, so can be people can adopt new behaviours without being coerced. But this route requires a profound rethinking of management education, though, which is way too theoretical, says Gibbons. To become a doctor, you need several years of practical training – so does learning how to change behaviour.
He then turns to the science of changing hearts and minds, in a chapter that strangely feels less robust than the previous ones. Inevitably, it deals with the controversial concept of resistance to change. Quite a few practitioners reject this as a lazy term with little scientific evidence behind it, which had better be abandoned. Yet Gibbons appears to stick with the conventional idea that resistance to change is a thing to be managed in its own right. He is also surprisingly uncritical about mindfulness – arguably even more controversial than resistance to change, and definitely the subject of hype. There is growing evidence of its successful application in certain clinical settings, but elsewhere — e.g. in organizations — the research is young and far from conclusive. Nonetheless it is given an easy ride here, with nearly four pages under the heading ‘Anecdotal benefits of mindfulness practices’.
The final chapter returns to the central issue of the book: the challenge that embracing science entails for business management and organizational change. People prefer the certainty of simple, clear-cut messages and instructions. Yet science, and more specifically the scientific method, is inherently uncertain: the next failure to replicate a finding is sure to bring down any emerging certainty. This is inevitable – as Gibbons says, science is not a corpus of indisputable facts, but an experimental, social learning process. Scientific knowledge is constantly revised.
So if we want to take a more scientific approach, we have to test stuff. Even respected authors like John Kotter and Clayton Christensen provide little validation of their ideas. These ‘look about right’, and we then rely on heuristics for their credibility (famous authors teaching at big business schools; bestselling books; following on social networks and so on).
It’s all too easy to join in this self-sustaining delusion. We need to be more critical of ourselves – and this is something that Gibbons graciously does throughout the book. “For two decades I have been talking about burning platforms, unfreezing and a sense of urgency”. I sympathize.
Practitioners – whether within the organizations, or outside advisers – must break out of this cycle, and reject pseudoscience (ideas that pretend to be science but are not – like astrology) and antiscience (a mindset that rejects science out of hand and prefers opinion and dogma). Scepticism, curiosity and a sense of experimentation are essential to bring about the adoption of evidence-based practice in management.
This is an ambitious book. Cataloguing the pseudoscience, half-truths and unvalidated approaches that are widely used is a herculean task. Identifying scientifically sound alternatives for every debunked myth and demolished nonsensical practice is no less so. Yet Paul Gibbons comes pretty close to accomplishing that mission impossible.
Of course it is not (and could not be, certainly not in less than 300 pages) comprehensive. But that doesn’t really matter much. The book’s value is not as a reference for scientifically designing and implementing change. Instead, it’s a passionate argument for practitioners and managers to adopt a scientific mindset. Letting go of presumed truths can be uncomfortable, especially if – as is the case – there are no real truths with which to replace them.
It is also an important book because it reassures us. Letting go of what looks like certainty is uncomfortable. But Gibbons’ book shows there are many ways to get a better understanding of human behaviour, and of both the robustness and the flaws in our thinking. It offers no ready-made solutions, but it does offer confidence that a scientific approach is the right way towards better outcomes.
Sure, I found it not always as critical of certain ideas as it should be (and as it impels us to be!), but I am happy to forgive the author – if only for his candid acknowledgements of having been taken in by hype earlier in his career as a consultant. If anything, the parts where certain ideas are accepted a bit too easily illustrate how important it is to remain on our guard.
The Science of Successful Organizational Change is not the last book you should read on the subject — it’s the first.
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This article was written by Koen Smets and Paul Thoresen.
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