Month: April 2021

We’re all familiar with the form of rule as democracy, however fewer of us are familiar with the term oligocracy, how these two terms dance in organizations, and the implications for implementing changes.

Greek Roots

Both democracy and oligocracy derive from the Greek root-based suffix -cracy, which means power or rule.  Democracy begins with a form of demos – or populace.  Oligocracy begins with the prefix of oligo, which means “a few,” “chief,” or “principal.”  In short, rule by the few.  This is contrasted with dictatorships, where the power of rule is concentrated in a single person.

Transformation

Most organizations are in some stage of what Fredrick LeLoux describes as Reinventing Organizations.  They’re on the path from fear, power, and command-and-control approaches to collaborative approaches to working with one another.  However, the path isn’t as straight as it first appears.  On the one end, you have dictatorship, and on the other end, it appears that you have democracy – but many would appropriately argue that it becomes anarchy.

Organizations exist to coordinate the effort of individuals into a unified force.  That historically happened through the power and force of a single individual and has gradually been diffusing across the organizational leadership into a cord of multiple strands.  In short, our organizations are becoming more oligocratic.  This is particularly true of partnerships where there is no one partner with complete control regardless of the ownership percentages.

Democracy

Winston Churchill described democracy as the worst form of government – except for the other forms we’d tried.  In theory, democracy is a great idea, but it’s not without its practical limitations.  Getting everyone on the same page can take a long time – a prohibitively long time.  That’s why the Thomas-Kilmann Mode Instrument doesn’t recommend the middle ground of the assertive and cooperative dimensions – compromising.  Building true consensus can take an infinitely long time.

Imagine for a moment that the United States Congress had to reach consensus for everything they did.  Literally nothing would get done – except for recess.  This is the descent into anarchy.  It’s what happens when nothing can get done, because there’s no power for anyone to encourage others to do what they want.  Congress relies on many behind-closed-door agreements, where one member agrees to support another’s initiatives.  It’s the lubrication that makes the limited democracy of Congress work.

Primus Inter Pares

It’s Latin for “first among equals.”  It’s the way that partnerships navigate the difficult waters of who gets to make the decisions when everyone wants to lead in different directions.  One person is elected to do a role, and the others agree to subject themselves to the decisions of this role.  They thereby distribute decision-making authority between equals to prevent the deadlock and anarchy that can occur when democracy is allowed to run amok.

For your change initiative, the goal should not be to make everyone equal.  The goal should be to ensure that all are treated fairly, and that decision-making authority is appropriately distributed so that decisions can be made.

Like in partnerships, there’s an implicit understanding that if the person elected to the role doesn’t dispatch the role well, they’ll be replaced.  This pressure ensures that the person with the role considers the needs and desires of others while making their decisions.

The goal in your change should be neither democracy nor oligocracy but primus inter pares.

Some change professionals resist the inclusion of personal change approaches in the category of change management, feeling that these approaches are best left to self-help books and personal issues addressed outside of the organization.  However, all change is personal.  It may be that we can’t leave personal change expertise outside of our organizational change simply because, without personal change, there can be no organizational change.

All Change is Personal

When it comes down to it, an organization has no behavior on its own.  Organizational behavior is a result of all the individual behaviors of the people that make up the organization.  While an organization’s structure, rules, values, and processes create a culture that tends to bias behaviors into a consistent and acceptable way, it doesn’t ensure that individual behaviors are what is expected.

Because individuals are free to make their own choices about their behavior, and because organizational behavior is a function of those individual behaviors, we create change in an organization by changing the forces that are influencing behaviors and motivating individuals to make different choices than they made in the past.  It’s when we can get the individual behaviors to change and maintain those changes that we’re able to accomplish sustained organizational change.

Powerful Motivators

Kurt Lewin first spoke about the force fields that push people to and away from various behaviors.  He expected that behavior was a result of these competing forces that would hold people back from making changes or compel people towards them.  With advances in neurology, we know that some forces are created differently than others.  Some of the most powerful forces we are aware of are the result of a synthetic drug hijacking the brain’s own reward systems.  They create an unnatural and profound attraction to the addictions.  While there’s much more to addictions than pharmacology, there are powerful forces at play.

We can learn the most from things that operate at the extremes – like addictions.  Many forget that the Indianapolis 500 race was initially designed as an endurance test – not a race in the same sense that it’s meant today.  What we learn from car racing is transferred back into the automobiles that we all drive.  Similarly, we can learn a great deal about how to motivate behavior change by focusing on those behaviors that are the hardest to change and looking for the successes.

Addictive Change

Helping people overcome addictions is big business – and tragedy when it fails.  People who are addicted are held prisoner by their addictions, unable to choose different behaviors.  While the success rates aren’t great overall, there are techniques and approaches that have been effective, and they’re remarkably similar to the kinds of recommendations that you’d make for organizational change.

For instance, one of the powerful recommendations for recovery is to change the environment around the person to encourage the desirable behaviors.  For the person who is addicted to alcohol, this may be to remove the alcohol from the house.  It may be to avoid the behaviors – like going to bars – that might lead them to want to drink.  In our organizations, we try to change policies and systems to make the old behaviors more difficult.  And similar to the situation with alcohol-addicted persons, we often find that people find creative ways to get around our blockages.

Another powerful environmental approach is to change the community that the person is a part of.  That means changing friends.  It means changing the activities that they enjoy with other people.  In organizations, we try to demonstrate the new behavior and create the appearance that everyone is doing the new behavior.  There’s solid research to show that people will change their behavior if they believe they’re one of the few people who are not showing the desirable behavior.

Personal Learning

The key to leveraging personal change techniques isn’t to replace time-honored organizational change approaches – it’s to augment them with a depth of understanding and new techniques that may lead to better outcomes.  It’s adding depth and character to what we know about change techniques, so we can learn to use them better.

There are some people who believe the way we approach change by looking at problems instead of opportunities is broken, and we can get to better change by focusing on opportunities rather than threats and strengths rather than weaknesses.  The idea has some merit – but it can also be taken too far.

SWOT

To provide some context for the conversation, it’s helpful to think about the classic SWOT analysis that breaks the process of analyzing the current situation into Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  Strengths and weaknesses are internally focused positive and negative factors.  Opportunities and threats exist in the environment outside of the person or organization.  The key question here is whether focusing on the strengths is more important, or should we focus our energies on addressing the weaknesses?

Positive Psychology

Martin Seligman is known as the father of positive psychology for his work, while APA president, to change the focus of mental health from restoring the broken to helping folks live more full and complete lives – to flourish (see Flourish, and The Hope Circuit for more on Seligman’s push for positive psychology).  His colleague, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, also contributed greatly to finding the best in people, rather than focusing on their worst.  (See Flow, Finding Flow, and Creativity for Csikszentmihalyi’s work.)  The positive psychology movement has been gaining support slowly but steadily in the decades since their initial work.

Our neural wiring supports a focus on the negative events in our life – but this works against our happiness.  By focusing on positive aspects, we can find greater happiness, and in doing so, we can become more successful.  What we’ve learned about the neurology of our brains is that the more we focus on something, the more anchored it becomes in our neural networks – and the more difficult it becomes to dislodge.

Many popular psychology approaches have taught us to visualize what we want so that we can achieve it.  Built on solid science with a very long and precarious extension ladder, this approach can leave us well short of the goal if we visualize something that we don’t ourselves do – like winning the lottery.  The solid science that it’s based on notices that the same neurons are firing when we think about throwing a ball as when we finally throw a ball.  From this, we can easily take that mental rehearsal of an action can improve our performance – and studies have been done that bear this out.  The problem is that there’s no research supporting this in non-kinesthetic scenarios.  We just don’t know.

Force Fields

The biggest challenge to the exclusive focus on the strengths and opportunities comes from the work of Kurt Lewin’s work on force fields.  He proposed that people are motivated to and away from behaviors based on a set of forces operating on them.  Some of those forces propel us forward, and some of them hold us back.  The problem is that when we neglect the forces that hold us back, they can get bigger.

There are plenty of leadership books that extols the benefits of having open dialogue and how being able to discuss difficult situations can improve teamwork and the perception of leadership.  The same applies to weaknesses and threats.  The more openly we can look at them – without dwelling on them – the more quickly we can neutralize their impact.

Irrelevant Weaknesses

Key to avoiding the tendency to dwell on the negative is to put the weakness or threat in its proper context.  Few humans have perfect eyesight.  We walk around with glasses or contacts.  We have surgeries to reshape and repair our eyes.  A lack of visual acuity is something that most of us face but that we don’t dwell on – because we’ve got the tools to address the weakness.  If you wear glasses or contacts, your weakness is irrelevant.  You’ll see as well as any human can.

So, while it’s important to focus on the positive to reap the benefits of new positive wiring, be cautious not to neglect the negative to the point that it becomes a big threat or hinderance.

Resources

If you want a refresher on what your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are to make it easier to practice positive psychology for your change, you can get our SWOT & PESTLE Resource Book now.  It will walk you through the process of figuring out those four aspects of your organization.  Just go to https://confidentchangemanagement.com/SWOTPESTLE-P.

It’s a set of questions I get asked all too often.  “What are the essential skills that someone needs to have to support change?”  This is almost always followed with, “Where can they go to get them?”  I’ll quickly acknowledge that I have an answer to this in the form of The Confident Change Management course and delve more broadly into why my answer may or may not be right, and why it is so difficult for anyone to answer.

Certification

Before I can explain the skills someone needs, I must also address the challenge that exists when there are certifications in the market.  A certification is supposed to simply say that someone has met a standard.  However, the question becomes what standard?  In the case of the CCMP, it’s “The Standard” as defined by ACMP; but in other markets, it is different things.

The next question is whether the standard is relevant to the job performance.  In the 1990s, Novell and Microsoft were criticized for having “paper” CNEs and MCSEs, respectively.  (I’ve intentionally not expanded the acronyms because they don’t matter.)  Bootcamps had formed, and people were walking in with no experience and walking out with a certification.  These bootcamps were teaching for the test but not for the knowledge that someone needed to be effective at their job.  The result was that the market decided you had to have the certification and experience.

Embedded into this is the problem that hiring managers must be able to use the certification as an indicator that you’ll be able to do the job, task, or role they want to hire you for.  When there’s no match between the skills and the job, the certification has no value.

Selecting the Skills

“The Standard” for change management isn’t about skills at all.  It’s about inputs, outputs, and processes.  So, any discussion of selecting skills isn’t informed by looking to ACMP’s “The Standard.”  Frustratingly, CMI’s Body of Knowledge has devolved into a single-vendor training program and a book that no longer holds the body of knowledge moniker.  (The book is The Effective Change Manager: The Change Management Body of Knowledge.)  The problem is that this book doesn’t define a set of essential skills for the new practitioner, it defines a semi-exhaustive list of things that might be useful to a change practitioner.

We’re left, then, on our own to identify what skills are essential for a beginning change manager to know to be successful.  They can’t know or learn everything all at once.  At the same time, they need to know enough to be successful with a moderately complex project or as a part of a larger project with a more experienced lead.

Candidate Skills

In the development of The Confident Change Management course, I found several broad skills that I felt were important.  Things like communications planning and execution, the fundamentals of project management, familiarity with a few change management models, and stakeholder management or engagement.

This was a good start but, without defining specific skills and techniques that could be used, there would be no value.  As a result, I pushed deeper to convert the broad skills like communication execution into specific things, like writing inverted pyramid, leveraging Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, and writing teasers as key things that I felt like everyone working in change should know.  By identifying specific, measurable techniques, I could teach people the basics of change management without having to worry about being exhaustive.

I don’t believe that I got the skills set exactly right for everything – but at the same time, I think it’s close.  Maybe you can let me know what you think the syllabus is missing, and we can work together to identify all the skills necessary for someone who is just starting as a change manager.