6 images framework Flashcards
Key components of the framework
Controlling vs shaping
Intended vs unintended
Management as Controlling
Planning, organizing, supervising, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting activities are expected from the change manager, as well as the general manager, to carry out.
This reflects a top-down, hierarchical view of managing, associated with the image of organisation as a machine.
The manager’s job is to drive the machine in a particular direction. Staff members are given defined roles. Resources (inputs) are allocated to departments to produce efficiently the required products / services (outputs_.
Management roles in terms of deciding, focusing, scheduling, communicating, controlling, leading, networking, building coalitions, and getting things done. This is the “hard” dimension of management.
Management as Shaping
Enhancing both individual and organisational capabilities, based on human relations and OD.
This image associated with the participative management style that encourages involvement in decision making in general, and in deciding the content and process of change in particular.
Employee involvement in change is based on two assumptions:
1. Those who are closest to the action will have a better understanding of how things can be improved.
2. Staff are more likely to be committed to making changes work if they have contributed to the design of those changes.
Managing people is thus concerned with shaping (not directly controlling) behaviour in ways that benefit the organisation.
Intended Change Outcomes
- Believe that intended change outcomes can be achieved as planned.
- The intended outcomes of a change program are achieved by following the right steps, planning, allocating resources appropriately, and focusing on all of the components of an initiative that contribute to the final results.
- Managing change is a technical matter that involves following the correct sequence of actions. When things go wrong, it is because steps in the process or particular issue have been overlooked.
Partially Intended Change Outcomes
- Assumes that come not all planned change outcomes are achievable.
- Power, competing interests, organisational politics, embedded processes, and different skill level effect a manager’s ability to produce intended outcomes.
- The link between initial intent and final outcome is not necessarily a direct one.
- Externally imposed forces may modify what was originally intended.
- Change goals can be altered or ignored by everyday resistance to initiatives that are seen as undesirable or unworkable by those who are affected.
- Thus, change initiatives do not always deliver all the outcomes that were planned.
Unintended Change Outcomes
- Recognises that managers often have great difficulty in achieving the change outcomes that were intended.
- This difficulty stems from the variety of internal and external forces that can push change in unplanned directions.
- Internal forces can include interdepartmental politics, long-established working practices that are difficult to dislodge, and deep-seated perceptions and values that are inconsistent with desired changes.
- External forces can include confrontational industrial relations, legislative requirements (tax demands, regulatory procedures), or industry-wide sector trends (trade wars, stock market volatility).
- These forces typically override the influence of individual change managers.
- Intentions and outcomes may coincide, but as a result of change rather than the outcome of planned, intentional change management actions.
Change Manager as Director
- Controlling intended outcomes
- Role is to steer the organisation toward desired outcomes.
- Assumes that change involves a strategic management choice upon which the well-being and survival of the organisation depends.
Theoretical Support:
n-step models, guidelines, or recipes for change implementation that are based on the image of the change manager as a director.
The change manager is advised to follow the steps indicated, more or less in the same sequence regardless of the nature of the change, to ensure successful outcomes. These models are united by the optimistic view that the intended outcomes of change can be achieved, as long as change managers follow the model. This highlight’s Kotter’s 8 step model, but he even acknowledges that change is a messy iterative process.
Contingency approaches also fall here, where they provide with the “best practice” guides and suggest a range of factors such as the scale and urgency of the change, and the receptivity of those who will be affected, need to be considered when framing an implementation strategy.
I.e. the best way will depend on a combination of factors, but as long as the change manager takes those factors into account and follows the contingent model, then the intended outcomes should be delivered.
Change Manager as Navigator
- Controlling Some Intended Outcomes
- Although change managers may achieve some intended change outcomes, they may have little control over other results.
- Outcomes are at least partly emergent rather than completely planned and result from a variety of influences, competing interests, and processes.
“No amount of advance thinking, planning, and communication guarantees success. That’s because change is by nature unpredictable and unwieldly. Leaders need to recognise that the initial change platform they create is only valid for a short time. They need to conserve their energy to confront the problematic issues that will stem from passive resistance and from unpredictable side effects that change itself creates. “
Theoretical support:
Processual theories – argue that organisational changes unfold over time in a messy and iterative manner and thus rely on the image of a change manager as a navigator. Outcomes are shared by a combination of factors, including:
* The past, present, and future context in which the organisation functions, incl. internal and external factors.
* The substance of the change, which could be new tech, process redesign, a new payment system, or changes to organisational structure and culture.
* The implementation process – tasks, decisions, timing, political behaviour, inside and outside the org
* Interactions between the above factors.
The role of the manager is to identify options, accumulate resources, monitor progress, and navigate through this uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity.
Change managers must accept that there will be unanticipated disruptions and that options and resources need to be reviewed.
Change managers as navigators advised to encourage staff involvement.
Senior management: priority is to ensure receptivity to change and that those involved have the skills and motivations to contribute.
Given the untidy, nonlinear nature of change, navigators have room to manoeuvre in response to new information and developments.
Change Manager as Caretaker
Controlling Unintended Outcomes
The ideal management role is still one of control, although the ability to exercise that control is constrained by a range of internal and external forces that propel change relatively independent of management intentions.
At best, managers shepherd their organisations along to the best of their ability.
Theoretical support:
Life-cycle stages, population ecology, and institutional theory.
Life-cycle stages
Views organisations as passing through well-defined stages from birth, growth, maturity, then decline or death. These are part of the natural, developmental cycle. There is very little that managers can do to prevent this natural development, at best can caretake through the passing of these stages.
Population ecology theory
Focuses on how the environment selects organisations for survival or extinction – Neo-Darwinism. Populations of organisations can thus change as a result of ongoing cycles of variation, selection and retention. Overall, implies that managers have little influence over change where whole populations are affected by external forces.
* Some say that there are limited actions that change managers can take to influence these forces:
* Interacting with other organisations to lessen the impact of environmental factors
* Repositioning the organisation in a new market or other environment
Institutional theory:
Change managers take broadly similar decisions and actions across whole populations of organisations. These similarities can be explained by the pressures associated with the interconnectedness of organisations that operate in the same sector environment.
Three pressures which in practice interact:
* Coercive – including social and cultural expectations, and gov-mandated changes
* Mimetic – Orgs model themselves on the structures and practices of other orgs in the field
* Normative – Managers across different sectors adopt similar values and working methods
Individual managers have limited ability to implement change outcomes that are not consistent with these forces, thus have little influence over long-term direction of change.
Change Manager as Coach
- Shaping Intended Outcomes
- Change managers can intentionally shape the organisation’s capabilities in particular ways.
- The coach relies on establishing the right values, skills, and “drills” so that the orgs members can achieve desired outcomes.
Theoretical support:
OD theory reinforces the shaping image of the coach by stressing the importance of values such as humanism, democracy, and individual development. OD interventions are designed to develop skills, reduce interpersonal and inter-divisional conflict, and structure activities in ways that help organisations members to better understand, define, and solve their own problems.
Change Manager as Interpreter
- Shaping Some Intended Outcomes
- Change manager has the task of creating meaning for others, helping them to make sense of events and developments, which in themselves, constitute a changed organisation. Up to change managers to present what these changes mean.
- However, there are often competing interpretations of the same issues, especially where there are different groups who do not necessarily share common interests and perceptions. This suggests that only some meanings and thus change intentions are likely to be realised.
Theoretical support:
Processual perspectives on organisational change, and sensemaking theory
Processual perspectives on organisational change
* Management of meaning: a process of symbol construction and value use designed to create legitimacy for ones own ideas, actions, and demands, and to delegitimize the demands of one’s opponents.
* The change manager seeking to introduce significant, strategic change may thus be faced with the prospect with trying to create a story that will dislodge a well-established ideology, culture, and system of meaning. Change managers, of course, do not have a monopoly on story-telling skills; sometimes the stories of others are better, and they win.
Sensemaking theory
What we do when we face a problem. For sensemaking to work, four factors have to be present:
- It has to be possible to take some action to address a problem, as long as exploration and experiment is allowed.
- That action must be directed toward a purpose or goal.
- The context must allow people to be attentive to what is happening and to update their understanding accordingly.
- People need to be allowed to share their views openly, in a climate of mutual trust and respect.
- These four components of sensemaking called: animation, direction, attention, and respectful interaction – necessary for leaning, adaptation, and change.
- Emergent, continuous, cumulative change is the norm in most orgs. Planned, transformational, revolutionary, disruptive change is partial and misleading. Emergent change involves the development of new ways of working that were not previously planned, driven by continuous sensemaking.
- Thus, management must become interpreters, recognising that organisational change is emergent change laid down by choices made on the front line. The job of management is to author interpretations and labels that capture the patterns in those adaptive choices, management doesn’t create change – it certifies change.
When interpreter image is necessary
During economic downturn and recession, when commitment and loyalty to employers are likely to deteriorate. To build support for change, management needs to try and change the mindset and associated behaviours by offering a positive interpretation of events.
Interpreters can legitimise actions in contested environments.
Good stories with interpreters Can be more inspiring and motivating than detailed business case. These are devices to make the content of new strategies easier to understand, enhancing individuals’ ability to translate change into meaningful narratives concerning strategy and vision contribute to organisational stability and change by making sense of circumstances and events.
Four conditions for changing mindsets to make fundamental changes in org culture
- Employees will alter their mindsets only if they see the point of the change and agree with it. The structures must be in tune with the new behaviour.
- Employees must have the skills to do what it requires.
- Employees must see people they respect modelling it actively.
Each must be realised independently. Together, they add up to a way of changing the behaviour of people in organisations by changing attitudes about what can and should happen at work.
Change Manager as Nurturer
Shaping Unintended Outcomes
Small changes can have a major impact on the organisations that managers may be unable to control fully the outcomes of these changes. However, they can nurture the organisation and its staff, developing qualities that enable positive-organising. Future directions and outcomes can be nurtured or shaped, but the ability to produce specific intended outcomes is limited by wider, and sometimes chaotic, forces and influences.
Theoretical support:
* Chaos theory and Confucian / Taoist theory
Chaos Theory
* Organisational change is nonlinear, it is fundamental rather than incremental, and does not necessarily entail growth.
* Explores how organisations continuously regenerate themselves through adaptive learning and interactive structural change. These efforts periodically result in the spontaneous emergence of a whole new dynamic order, through “self-organisation”.
* Self-organisation is driven by the chaotic nature of organisations, which is a consequence of having to grapple simultaneously with both change and stability. In this context, the change manager has to nurture the capacity for self-organisation, with limited ability to influence the direction and nature of the spontaneous new orders that may emerge.
Confucian / Taoism theory
Adopts the assumptions with regard to organisational change that are fundamentally different from Western views. Change is regarded as:
* Cyclical, involving constant ebb and flow
* Processual, involving harmonious movement from one state to another
* Journey-orientated, involving cyclical change with no end state
* Based on maintaining equilibrium, or achieving natural harmony
* Observed and followed by those who are involved, who seek harmony with their universe
* Normal rather than exceptional
