Where It All Started

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How We Got To This Point

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The Only Way Out

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An Historical Perspective

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The Future Of Organizational Change Management

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The Moral For Organizational Change Practitioners

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Disclaimer

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There is no progress without deviance.

Frank Zappa

This is a short review of the first meeting of the Organizational Change Practitioners Group of LinkedIn. Over the past years this group has been growing to more than 22.000 members, so it was time for us to meet up. The theme of this meeting was ‘Change Management best practices in projects’.

Earlier I announced that we would be starting in 2012 with local informal meetings where we share experiences and lessons learned with short presentations – NOT commercial pitches. So this was it. In the below video you can see how it all went.

What I learned from this session is that Organizational Change Practitioners is a community worth meeting. We all value conversation and we all value each other’s opinion. I will be using this blogpost to share any materials, links and learnings that sprung up from this meeting. So if you would have any additions to make, do not hesitate to send them to me or to directly share them in the comments.

1. Mega conversations: Opening Spaces that give power to the people (Jeffer London)

In this session, Jeffer made us experience the most valuable tool of a change manager: words and conversations. In a few minutes the group could have a taste of the facilitation he brings about for very large groups. Did you make any pictures that are worth including here? I’d be happy to post them here.

2. The age of multi: Change Management has left traditional company borders (Bert Van Bergen)

Bert was kind enough to share his presentation on Slideshare. Let’s hope his luggage will finally make it back home from Peru!

3. Making Change Work – What Managers, Executives and Staff Tell us that Really Matters (Joanne Celens)

In her presentation Joanne shared the findings of a recent Synthetron survey. At first sight the findings are not so shocking for Organizational Change Practitioners. It gets interesting when we look at the weight that is given to certain findings and the phases of a project when they are important.

The research paper can be downloaded on Synthetron’s website.

4. 101 Ideas (Katia Van Belle)

Without making any arrangements upfront, Katia did a similar live survey in the room we were in. Based on the question ‘what is the one idea you came across that really sticks?’ we got to vote and prioritize the most popular lessons we have learned from this evening. The lessons are categorized on a scale from 0 to 21 points and the idea was to share them with all other Organizational Change Practitioners who could not be there. Here they are:

• 21 pt – people are change subjects (creating change), not change objects (undergoing change)
• 18 pt – all change initiatives should start with an authentic story that gives future concrete vision
  18 pt – finally the end of the war language of change. Scientific proof has been presented: people can’t be called “targets” anymore. Halleluia!
  18 pt – conversation = fuel
• 15 pt – change is a combination of hearts, heads and hands
  15 pt – head hart hand. We need to influence the three H’s in balance and monitor them.
  15 pt – change needs to take into account heart, head and hands
• 13 pt – hierarchy of communication: AHA  why > how > what
  13 pt – who is afraid of the big bad change?
• 12 pt – people are subjects of change. They make the change possible, not objects of change
  12 pt – don’t break down change in 1000 mini-projects: it’s too much hand and not enough hearts and heads!
• 11 pt – people are not change objects but they are change subjects
  11 pt – don’t try to change the people. People are the change…
• 10 pt – creating shared vision to deliver authenticity and encourage involvement
• 9 pt – experience is not enough – it must be examined and evaluated
  9 pt – motivate people to WANT to change. LET them change. MAKE them change.
• 8 pt – change is not a gun to the head! It’s not about convincing, it’s about showing added value
  7 pt – key for change: give us tools, give us budget
  7 pt – collaborative strategizing! successfully implementing a strategy requires substantial input from those expected to implement the change
• 6 pt – the evolution of technology may have brought change in transformation and marketing consulting, but bottom-line remains: set them to do what you want or change what you want.
• 5 pt – real life change success starts with a dialogue to get things right and clear
  5 pt – ensuring anonymous conversations to create new peer groups to discuss change
• 4 pt – people are not resistant to change, only to bad change
  4 pt – treat employees with the respect you want them to show your company
  4 pt – change management is a verb
• 3 pt – ask for forgiveness after, rather than permission before -> speed in the mission
  3 pt – change is evolution, it’s not a barrier.
• 2 pt – what is the function of a change manager? I feel that it’s more a market research

Does this list spark any new idea you would like to add? Please let us know in the comments.

Now What?

Like me, you may be wondering what the next step will be. We have made no arrangements for a next meeting, but the feeling was so positive that I will be organizing another one in the coming months. My silent hope is that in the mean time, somewhere else in the world an Organizational Change Practitioner will have done the same.

There is no passion to be found in settling for a life that is less than the one your are capable of living.

Nelson Mandela

Keeping You In The Loop

Before starting the seventh part of this series, have a look at the summary of the 6 previous articles below:

Part 1: The situation we are in determines the roles we play and the rules we follow; and we reciprocate every request with a response. We also saw that each situation determines the face-value that we can claim for ourselves. The face-value comes with the situation and it is scripted in our roles.

Part 2: The way human interaction actually works is through the constant exchange of social currency (love, attention, acknowledgement, etc). In the end, human interaction can easily be summarized as a series of “+1″ and “-1″ in order to equilibrate the face-values that have been claimed. We build and deepen relationships through cycles of testing and response. Building a relationship can be compared to making deposits of empathy (the exchange of “+1″) on the emotional bank account of trust.

Part 3: In the same way as our reciprocity-reflex forces us to equilibrate the “+1″ and the “-1″ statuses of a situation, we have another reflex: the chameleon-like tendency to resonate with the influences of a situation.

Part 4: The PDI (Power Distance Index) of the culture you are from determines what the “+1″ and the “-1″ exactly are worth to you. It turns out that formality provides a system of calibration when cultural differences are too big. You can think of formality as the use of a single currency (like the Dollar or the Euro) in order to make the transaction safer between parties from different cultures.

Part 5: In digital communications the same rules and laws of gravity apply, but we lack non-verbal cues of feedback. Therefore the best strategy is to rely on “connection” instead of “control” in order to equilibrate relationships.

Part 6: With the help of Transactional Analysis we can separate transactions that increase the tension in a relationship (and thus decrease the level of trust) from those that equilibrate it (the adult response). A second learning from Transactional Analysis is that ‘games people play’ are a powerful dynamics causing people to behave very chameleon-like in certain situations.

The Helping Relationship

Since the beginning of the series I have been referring to Edgar Schein’s book Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help. By now you will have noted that I consider this book an absolute must-read for any organizational change practitioner. Consider the following thought every time you are in a meeting with a customer:

Emotionally and socially, when you are asking for help you are putting yourself “one down”. It is a temporary loss of status and self-esteem not to know what to do next or to be unable to do it. It is a loss of independence to have someone else advise you, heal you, minister you, help you up, support you, even serve you.

Chances are that you will start to develop a different opinion on what resistance is. According to Shein, every helping relationship is in a state of imbalance. The person being helped is “one down” and therefore vulnerable. The helper is “one up” and therefore powerful. Much of what goes wrong in the helping process is the failure to acknowledge this initial imbalance and deal with it:

The reason the helping relationship has to be built rather than just being assumed is that , although the imbalance is clear, the social economics of how to fix it are not.

It is when a relationship or team hits a bump, we need a conversation about the conversation. But most of the times we short-cut to the content. In the end we wonder what on earth went wrong… The answer:  we failed to focus on the relationship. Worse: we did not make use of our personal toolkit.

Becoming Aware of Your Personal Toolkit

Taking care of the relationship is too simple to be true, because the tools at your disposal are as straightforward as a Swiss Armyknife. The knife below displays the tools that are available to all of us – all the time. I repeat: ALL-OF-US and ALL-THE-TIME. The knife is the ultimate relationship equilibration tool.

Asking for help: Peter Drucker once said:

The leader of the past may have been a person who knows how to tell, but the leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.

Asking for help opens doors with honesty and is difficult to resist. It allows your counterpart to have a stake in the solution – to ‘win’ – while you are the cause for this situation to occur.

Listening – or rather, the act of acknowledging: listening is a two-way act, as it involves listening AND acknowledging what you have understood. You need to demonstrate that you are totally engaged. Acknowledging is the part that makes people feel understood and connected.

Thanking: Gratitude is a skill we can never display too often. And yet for most people it seems like they need to wait for the perfect moment … but it never comes. It is always the right time to say ‘thank you’. Gratitude is not a limited resource and an overdose never harms.

Apologizing: Marshall Goldsmith calls this ‘the magic move‘, because an apology is a recognition that mistakes have been made and it contains an intention to change for the better. But most of all, an apology is an emotional contact with the people you care about. It is a disclosure which lets you move forward.

You will note that these four ways have one thing in common: they require you to be humble and to position yourself ‘one down’ with regards to the person you are talking to. As Goldsmith concludes:

When you declare your dependence on others, they usually agree to help.

It’s a very awkward feeling when you start to use this toolbox for the first time, because the one downness makes you more vulnerable. You are deliberately giving away control over the situation. However, by doing so it is clear that you are managing the balance and the reciprocation of the relationship.

In the end, there is nothing more powerful than that. And nothing is more difficult than that, because it requires us to let go of something that is so deeply wired into our reptile brains, i.e.: the need to be in control of a situation.

The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.

Norman Vincent Peale

Did you know that there is a specific field of psychology that specializes in what we have previously called ‘social theatre’ and ‘social economics’? This field is called Transactional Analysis (TA).

Flashback: What We Learned So Far

One of the models of TA describes very well what happens when we throw our emotions into the power-play of status and face-value. This is the sixth article on Unraveling Human Interaction, therefore a small flashback of what we observed so far:

1. The situation we are in determines the roles we play and the rules we follow; and we reciprocate every request with a response.

2. We also saw that each situation determines the face-value that we can claim for ourselves. The face-value comes with the situation and it is scripted in our roles.

3. The way human interaction actually works is through the constant exchange of social currency (love, attention, acknowledgement, etc).

4. In the end, human interaction can easily be summarized as a series of “+1″ and “-1″ in order to equilibrate the face-values that have been claimed.

5. We build and deepen relationships through cycles of testing and response. Building a relationship can be compared to making deposits of empathy (the exchange of “+1″) on the emotional bank account of trust.

6. In the same way as our reciprocity-reflex forces us to equilibrate the “+1″ and the “-1″ statuses of a situation, we have another reflex: the chameleon-like tendency to resonate with the influences of a situation.

7. The PDI (Power Distance Index) of the culture you are from determines what the “+1″ and the “-1″ exactly are worth to you. It turns out that formality provides a system of calibration when cultural differences are too big. You can think of formality as the use of a single currency (like the Dollar or the Euro) in order to make the transaction safer between parties from different cultures.

8. In digital communications the same rules and laws of gravity apply, but we lack non-verbal cues of feedback. Therefore the best strategy is to rely on “connection” instead of “control” in order to equilibrate relationships.

The Problem With Emotions

The problem with emotions is not their intensity, but the fact that they always come in disguise. You will almost never hear people say that they are scared, angry, or sad because of a certain situation.

In 99% of the cases people (and yes – this includes me and you) communicate their emotions through “playing games.” The classic result is an emotional competition between people which – regardless of who is the winner –represents a loss for the relationship. Transactional Analysis expert Steven Karpman created a simple decoder for games like these: it is called the Drama Triangle.

Basically, there are three roles on the drama-triangle and they all have the same purpose: to create drama and to stay miserable. For example: when I behave helpless because of the train-delays today, this may trigger you to respond with resentment (‘You could have taken the car to get here’).  This is how a victim creates a persecutor. Without any doubt this interaction will also create a rescuer, i.e.: a person taking a stand for me either by offering help or by justifying your situation. The interaction between a victim and a persecutor has made it very tempting for a third person to step into the role of a rescuer.

How The Roles Play Out

This is a very brief summary of how the roles play out:

1. Persecutor (prefers Anger)

I am OK – You are not OK (REVENGE)

• Only sees errors, is critical, often in a bad mood.
• Often feels incapable and is not self-confident.
• Leadership through threats, orders; disallows flexibility.
• Can be loud but also calm.
• A persecutor does not accept ‘no’ for an answer.

2. Rescuer (prefers Fear)

I am OK – You are not OK (RESCUE)

• Always goes that extra mile to ‘help’ others.
• Is always very busy, tired, sometimes lonely, does not have 5 minutes to himself.
• Can be loud but also a silent martyr.
• Deals with feelings of guilt or shame in a very subtle manner.
• Often a hand of steel in a velvet glove.
• Helps unasked.
• A rescuer does not accept ‘no’ for an answer

3. Victim (prefers Sadness)

I am not OK – You are OK (REGRET)

• Doesn’t answer, doesn’t help, never holds a point of view.
• I don’t know / I can’t / it’s all the same to me.
• A master at using feelings of guilt.
• ‘Super-sensitive’.
• Pretends to be incompetent, but is not.
• Irresponsible regarding details that can be important to others.
• I give up! This provides me with the ultimate power.
• A victim does not accept ‘no’ for an answer.

As the drama plays out, people may suddenly switch roles, or change tactics, and others will often switch unconsciously to match this. In transactional analysis, the drama triangle is recognized in situations or ‘games’ such as:

• Why Don’t You;
• Yes But;
• If It Weren’t For You;
• Why does this Always Happen to Me?;
• See What You Made Me Do;
• You Got Me Into This;
• Look How Hard I’ve Tried; and:
• I’m Only Trying to Help You.

The purpose for each ‘player’ is to get their unspoken – and often: unconscious – needs met in a justified way, without having to acknowledge the real situation. As such, each player justifies their own position, rather than acting in a responsible way.

Getting Somewhere: A Definition of Maturity

The drama-triangle is one of the biggest dynamics causing people to behave very chameleon-like in certain situations. The waves of emotion can be so strong that one needs to be extremely strong to resist falling into one of these roles.

And that is unhealthy, because here is the thing: when we have a closer look at how drama plays out we see that drama is created and sustained though a constant exchange of ANTI-reciprocal “+1″ and “-1″! The persecutor asking “Why are you late again?” will be throwing out a status difference of one-upmanship, thereby lowering the other person in the relationship (like a parent to a child). This makes it very easy for the other person to just confirm that position in a passive-agressive way with absolute silence (childish and victim-like). The gap of status differences has widened even more with that response.

What we see here is that status differences resemble the difference between parents and children. Transactional Analysis makes it clear that there is a way out of this drama. They call it  the ‘adult’ position. In terms of social theatre and social economics this is BAD NEWS, because the adult position will equilibrate situations by:

• Redefining the roles from drama-roles to adult positions;
• Reciprocate with the correct – instead of negative – currency

So there you go: the most boring theatre you have ever seen. No fireworks anymore and no juicy details. The GOOD NEWS? You can still watch drama on TV – no need to play it out in your own relationships once you know how to decode the dynamics of it.

Finally – as a good old disclaimer – I add the warning that Daryl Conner once gave me: “Understanding human behavior does not make you immune to it.”

There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

In their book Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust Chris Brogan and Julien Smith hand out practical advice for social media etiquette. They make it all very tangible through the analogy of a cocktail party.

In this fifth article on human interaction we will be reviewing insights we gathered so far and put them through the digital test. The book of Brogan & Smith turns out to be a great source for this test. [Disclaimer: this article requires that you have read the previous 4 articles]

Social Theatre

When using the metaphor of social theatre, we discovered that the situation determines the roles we play and the rules we follow. This tends to be true in the digital world as well. Each digital platform determines the roles we play and the tone-of voice we use. For example when you are the author of a blog article versus the reader or commenter. Another example is your employment status: who are you representing when you are interacting on Linkedin versus your interactions on Facebook or Twitter?

Your avatar (profile picture) and your tagline are important elements to clarify the role you are playing in these types of situations. Every social media platform seems to be a different stage where we can play a different role.

Social Economics

Social economics is about the reciprocity of social interaction: the give-and-take that constantly equilibrates everything in a relationship. In online interaction we completely lack the non-verbal cues that are used to acknowledge or respond to a request (for example: nodding in agreement). However, this doesn’t mean that there is no need for acknowledgement by means of a ‘thank you’ or simply responding to an email. Brogan & Smith state in this respect that you would equally respond to someone asking you a question at a cocktail party.

Not responding to an email that contains a question is like staring with a blank face when someone asks you something at that cocktail party. A request creates the expectation of a response or an excuse – this is no different in digital communication. Reciprocation means that we exchange a social currency of +1 and -1 in order to equilibrate the face value that is claimed.

Conflicts of Context

So what happens when contexts mix? For offline people this is something relatively new that happens very often in online contexts: the blurring of boundaries between different contexts. For example: in real life it may be very easy to separate professional relationships from personal and family bonds, simply because they happen in a different time and place.

However on online platforms it requires a serious balancing act if you want to make sure that none of the contexts interfere. Applications like Facebook and Google+ help their users to create categories or ‘circles’. You may even have developed a rigid policy for yourself in order to balance out the role and face-value you claim on a certain platform.

But when you try to categorize people you will always end up with a handful of persons who belong to all of the categories and to none at the same time. Strange enough, for this handful of people we never experience a problem of face-value in any of the contexts we interact with them. That is because we are human and authentic in their presence. Connecting contexts does not create an inflation or devaluation of face-value in these relationships.

Conflicts of Generation?

What do we learn when generations mix? The difficulties we encounter with blurring boundaries between different contexts are caused by the differences in face-value we claim in one context versus another. A water-tight separation between these  contexts makes us feel more comfortable.

On the other hand, when contexts mix, it may cause a devaluation or an inflation of our face value. This increases uncertainty and whenever the uncertainty in a relationship goes up the level of trust goes down. In face-to-face human interaction we can fall back on formality or uniform language as it is the case for aviation communication. What is granted and claimed gets calibrated through formality.

However, on the web we see that the opposite is true – or so it seems… At first sight there seems to be less formality in digital conversations because in succesful conversations another dynamic applies: that of public disclosure and honest interaction.

The Emotional Bank Account of Trust

We tend to look for indicators of trust in every human interaction and we build relationships through cycles of testing and response. The same is true for online conversations. In their book Brogan & Smith report that we tend to use the following signals of trust for bloggers online:

• design of a site,
• longevity (for how long am I following this blogger?),
• volume of productivity  (How long has someone been around?),
• number and quality of comments,
• number and quality of links,
• the domain name and the background of a blogger.

Still, these are only formal criteria on which we base ourselves in order to estimate the online deference we grant to a person and subsequently the face-value and role we claim for ourselves.  Therefore they also refer to the “trust equation” of David Meister:

T = C + R + I / S
(where T = Trust, C = Credibility, R = Reliability, I = Intimacy, S = Self-orientation)

It turns out that self-orientation (giving yourself a “+1″) works out very negatively on the web. It’s a sign of uncertainty.

Digital Formality

On the web formality gets replaced with etiquette. Let’s be honest here: in the digital world there may be no procedural guide or dictionary telling you how to behave, but nothing is more regulated than digital conversations.  Brogan & Smith underscore the use of etiquette at the digital level is because all of the interactions on social media are human by definition.

They recommend lurking as a starting strategy, instead of rushing in and stumbling over all the social norms. One thing is true: even though they are invisible, the dynamics of politeness and honesty are far more important in the binary world than in the real world.

Honesty As the Best Strategy

If all of the above is true, then what is the best way to approach digital communication? I would suggest to place all bets on honesty. Honesty on the web characterizes maturity in a relationship: maturity in this sense would mean that one is relaxed with the mixing of contexts because one can rely on human and authentic interaction to equilibrate any level of inflation or devaluation that a mixing of contexts may cause.

One relies on connection instead of control in order to equilibrate relationships. By the way, this is why I am convinced that the categorizing of people in different groups or circles will only be a temporary solution. Its use will be restricted to the categorizing of mailing lists etc. for communication purposes in the long run. Not for separation purposes.

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Samuel Beckett