Sharing and Change in the Corporate Plot
My post on Just-in-Time KM finished on a note that needed to be expanded. It was a post about knowledge asymmetries and secrecy in relation to the corporate plot. It’s focus was on sharing, but the same concept applies to change and outcomes based management.
It’s not enough to have a vision or a plan (The Corporate Plot). People and teams/departments have their own agendas, your message gets interpreted and acted upon according to how relevant or in tune it is to that persons job. The goal is not changing people to comply with your vision, as people are not robots. Instead the goal is to get involved at ground zero in conversations. The idea is to make the individuals job easier to do, and you can only find out by involving them in the decision making.
This is essentially leading down the road of what some people call management 2.0, leadership, complexity, etc…so I am being careful in this post as it could potentially touch on many aspects and go on forever…I do have to restrain myself with my usual long blog posts.
Organisational politics; power-play, resource/budget scarcity, information hoarding, rewards, motivations, agendas is inevitable…and they are the reason why we are not self-organising like ants, biological systems, etc…it’s a fact of human nature, and therefore organisations. All we have is to the capacity to influence the constraints…and think about a more inclusive and holistic model.
Patrick Lambe on the Corporate Plot
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"We assume, naïvely, that only the corporate plot and its aspiration towards triumph matters when it comes to knowledge asymmetries, and that everybody will share knowledge willingly once they understand what the corporate plot is. We forget that individuals and small groups also have smaller plots, smaller tragedies and triumphs, and their own unique aspirations. And they will also use knowledge asymmetries to drive themselves towards success, regardless of what the bigger, more impersonal plots of our superiors dictate." - Patrick Lambe |
Peter Anthony-Glick on the Corporate Plot
| "The ‘we only share knowledge within our team since everyone else is potential competition’ syndrome." - Peter Anthony-Glick |
Stephen Billing on the Corporate Plot
| "As the plans of the top managers are set in motion, they interweave with the plans of other individuals in the organisation, who reinterpret the change initiative in the light of their own issues, background and concerns. Power relations inevitably are a part of this, and an understanding of complexity, human beings and social interaction will assist those seeking to change their organisations. Here is something very important. ‘We need to move away from reifying change as something done to and placed on individuals, and instead acknowledge the role that change recipients play in creating and shaping change outcomes,’ as Balogun says in her interesting 2006 article" - Stephen Billing (quote link) |
| "Power is not an absolute. Even the most powerful and feared of managers cannot “decree” that all problems will be fixed. It is how people respond to these decrees (or intentions of the manager) that determines how effective these intentions (instructions) will be. This means managers have to take the time to negotiate with their people, what their intentions mean. I have seen a number of examples this year where managers have not spent time discussing genuinely with their people how the desired changes will impact on them. There is a tendency for the power of the position to lead the manager to say “here’s what needs to happen” and then expect their people to adapt. Doing this, the managers dissociate themselves from any potentially unsavoury consequences of these actions. For example, it is much easier to say to a team leader that they should change the schedules of their team than it is to listen carefully to the team manager and help them to work out how to change the schedules without upsetting everyone. After all, what if the manager cannot work out how to do it?" - Stephen Billing (quote link) |
| "…as a manager of change you need to be paying attention to the daily translations of meaning that are going on in your organisation on a moment by moment basis – your key messages are not being passed on from one person to another, they are being translated and revitalised. So you need to track what meaning they are taking on as this translation process takes place. Your organisational change is not a relay race where you can pass the baton on to others and watch them bring it on home to the finish line." - Stephen Billing (quote link) |
Nilofer Merchant on the Corporate Plot
| "Many management gurus claim “people matter,” but still relegate strategy to an elite set of executives who focus on frameworks, long presentations, and hierarchical approaches. Business strategy typically has been planned by corporate chiefs and then dictated to managers to carry out. The New How turns that notion on its head. “Too often business executives, managers and strategists talk down to or ignore the very people who can help achieve results and positively impact the bottom line,” Nilofer explains. “Yet, organizations collaborate best when rewards are based on organizational success and less on individual accomplishments." - Nilofer Merchant (quote link) |
Dave Snowden on the Corporate Plot
| "Habits in humans determine action, not mission statements, organisational values and outcome focused targets." - Dave Snowden (quote link) |
| "In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it. This is common not only to process-based theory but also to practice that follows the general heading of the ‘learning organization’. Naturalistic approaches, by contrast, seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted. The organization thus evolves to a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate when discovered." - Dave Snowden (quote link) |
Going off on a tangent…
John Bordeaux encapsulates this nicely, like Snowden he talks about anticipatory awareness, rather than prediction. The title of his post says it all, "Don’t connect the dots, watch the noise"
Ron Ashkenas has a great post on controls for future events based on past events.
Related Quotes
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"Transparency makes decisions and actions visible. By seeing what goes on in a business, we get a chance to discover and act on issues or problems before they get catastrophic proportions (we also get a chance to discover and act on opportunities!)” “Transparency builds trust and trust is essential for people to help each other, to join forces and to decide to collaborate towards a shared purpose or common goal. Transparency makes work visible, which is essential if you are to coordinate people and their actions and to make the right decisions and actions in time. By making work visible, you have much greater possibilities avoid sub-optimization, duplication of work, unnecessary waste of time and resources, over-administration, bad decisions due to lack of the right information, lost ideas and blocked creativity, failure to make use of internal skills and resources in an optimal way…the list can go on and on forever." - Oscar Berg (quote link) |
| "Having a chance to change or personalize a process to fit themselves seems to be a critical success factor for a team to adopt a process. It’s the act of creation that seems to bind teams to ‘their own’ process." - Alistair Cockburn (quote link) |
| "…people don’t resist change, they resist being changed" - Peter Bregman |
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"Resistance to change is situation specific, not an attribute of an individual or group" |
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