Terms of Engagement • Change Without Pain • Bottom-line Organization Development • Consulting on the Inside • Process Consulting
A chief priority for line and staff managers and HR professionals alike centres on introducing and sustaining change. How can a new system, policy, program, technology, organization design or business process be implemented effectively, without causing unnecessary stress, problems and disruption to performance?
As an organizational change consultant, I find that clients want two kinds, or levels, of help. The first is for planning and implementing a specific change; the second is helping develop the organization’s leadership, facilitation and change management skills and capabilities for both the short and longer term.
Here are three books that offer in-depth treatment of the subject: what works, what doesn’t, and what is required for a serious and responsible change initiative. We conclude with a brief look at some additional titles that provide advice and guidance to those who are in the change consulting field.
Terms of Engagement
By Richard Axelrod.
222 pages, Berrett-Koehler (2002). ISBN 1-15675-239-9. Available from McGraw-Hill,
1-800-565-5758, www.mcgrawhill.ca.
The author is a consultant with long experience in organizations: “For more than 40 years, I have watched leaders use everything from command-and-control techniques to highly participative practices to effect change in their organization, and I have concluded that, without engagement, no lasting change is possible.”
The importance of change, and the need for a deliberate approach to dealing with it, have gained a lot of attention in today’s management circles. Nevertheless, Axelrod has reservations: “Unfortunately, the approach to organizational change employed by most organizations and consulting firms — what I am calling the change management paradigm — is inadequate for today’s world. When speed and agility are essential, it provides a sluggish bureaucratic response. When creativity is essential, it thwarts innovation, adaptation and learning. Worse yet, instead of creating true ownership, commitment and a critical mass of people who care about the outcomes, the change management paradigm actually increases bureaucracy and reinforces top-down management, while increasing cynicism and resistance in the workforce.”
The book traces the historical development of approaches to change, and categorizes them as follows:
•Leader-driven: Change is announced, leaders know best and use their knowledge and power to bring about change. Ineffective with a highly educated workforce, a high degree of available information, complex change situations and rapid implementation requiring people to be involved.
•Process-driven: Change is driven by experts such as planners, industrial engineers, consultants or IT professionals, often with input from selected employees. Ineffective because the leader, the experts and selected employees do not possess all the necessary knowledge and input.
•Team-driven: Groups such as quality circles or other teams drive change, sometimes through a “parallel organization” set up to bypass the normal hierarchy. Taps the knowledge of people closest to the work situation and motivates educated people, but fails to involve a sufficient number of the people who can contribute to, and will be affected by, the change.
•Change management model: Experts and teams produce change, using approaches like reengineering and supply chain improvement. Typically falls short of real, broad-based workforce engagement and relies on the expertise and influence of consultants and a select few employees.
The change management model allows the few to decide for the many, isolates leaders and organization members from each other, separates design from implementation and makes process improvements primary but cultural shifts secondary.
All four approaches fall short of the proposed broader “engaged organization” with its wider circle of involvement, interconnections, communities for action and democratic principles. Several chapters outline this approach, drawing on examples from companies in a variety of industries.
“I am not suggesting that we run our organizations as pure democracies,” writes Axelrod. “Yet certain democratic principles can make a huge difference in organizations, helping to build trust, create commitment, and increase creativity. These democratic principles include equity and fairness, sharing information, public decision-making and increased involvement in the decision-making process.”
Along the way, the author debunks common myths about the engagement paradigm:
•unless I keep a tight rein, I cannot control the outcomes;
•we must keep a firewall between the organization and its stakeholders;
•productivity will suffer if I involve a lot of people;
•the majority cannot be trusted to put the organization’s interests first; and
•changes designed by the best and the brightest are cost-effective.
The concluding chapters emphasize the risks and requirements to build the necessary level of trust and integrity, as well as the great power of engagement to enable real change to happen and to be sustained when leadership and strategy are sound.
Change Without Pain
By Eric Abrahamson.
218 pages, Harvard Business School Press (2004).
ISBN 1-57851-827-X.
Available from McGraw-Hill,
1-800-565-5758, www.mcgrawhill.ca.
In his July 2000 Harvard Business Review article, “Change without Pain,” Abrahamson concluded: “Change has been with us forever, and it always will be, but the idea of change itself is changing. Companies are increasingly aware of the need to combat chaos, cynicism and burnout by using change tools that are less disruptive. Oscillation between big changes and small changes helps ensure dynamic stability in organizations. More critically, it paves the way for change that succeeds.”
The new book by the same title is subtitled, “How managers can overcome initiative overload, organizational chaos and employee burnout.” The book offers a new approach to change, called “creative recombination.” The essence of the message is to avoid obliterating what is in place in order to introduce radical, sweeping change. Instead, smaller, well-paced changes can be done more cheaply, more quickly and less painfully.
CEOs, heads of operations and functional areas, and senior HR/OD professionals are prime readers for the book’s constructive themes:
•redeploy talent rather than downsize;
•leverage social networks rather than IT networks;
•revive, rather than invent, values;
•salvage good processes rather than re-engineer them; and
•reuse structures rather than reorganize.
The author praises change masters who know when to introduce change (when it is necessary) and when to keep things stable. They do not form audacious goals for far-reaching transformation. They find instead existing organizational strengths that can be put together in a new and winning form. “In the end, these recombiners have changed the world more rapidly, smoothly, cheaply and successfully than anyone who travelled the high road to change.”
Bottom-line Organization Development
By Merrill Anderson.
234 pages, Elsevier-Butterworth Heinemann (2003).
ISBN 0-7506-7581-0.
www.bh.com.
This book is aimed at practitioners and managers seeking a more quantifiable basis for organizational interventions for the purpose of business case development, evaluation and return on investment (ROI) analysis.
A comprehensive “strategic change valuation” process is outlined, with several steps:
•diagnosis of performance gaps to achieve business goals;
•design of solutions;
•development of a change plan with evaluation objectives;
•deployment of the initiative and the evaluation process; and
•evaluation of business impact.
Forecasting ROI, using surveys to collect ROI data and evaluating an initiative after it has been deployed are all addressed in the section on evaluation. Case studies look at executive coaching (the ROI of building leadership one executive at a time), organization capability (the ROI of aligning an organization to strategy) and knowledge management (the ROI of continuously leveraging knowledge).
The final chapter describes how leaders and change practitioners can work together to create strategic value, with advice to the latter on how to be heard at the decision-making table, how to gain credibility, and how to deal with perceptions and risks in order to deliver results.
Consulting on the Inside
By Beverly Scott.
264 pages, ASTD Press (2003).
ISBN 1-56286-131-X.
1-800-628-2783, www.astd.org.
For anyone working in organizational design, training, performance improvement or career consulting, this book covers the role and challenges facing internal consultants. It offers ways to avoid — and circumvent — roadblocks, as well as a step-by-step guide to the consulting process.
Topics include:
•contact, defining needs and building the relationship;
•finalizing an agreement;
•getting information, doing an assessment, giving feedback;
•setting change targets and transition strategies;
•implementing; and
•evaluating and learning.
Fifteen appendices provide aids for self-assessment, conflict management, role clarification, team-building, process improvement and sample organization development contracts.
Process Consulting
By Alan Weiss.
191 pages, Jossey Bass Pfeiffer (2002).
ISBN 0-7879-5512-4.
Available from Wiley Canada, 1-800-567-4797, www.wiley.com.
The focus here is on approach and methodology for both external and internal consultants: contracting, managing scope, data gathering, focus groups, interviewing, strategy and planning, training, change facilitation, leadership development.
Weiss , a prolific author on the topic of consulting, offers numerous insights:
•“Remember that you are not the change agent. The client personnel are the change agents. You are the catalyst, but they are accountable for enduring change. Don’t be a hero. Be a consultant.”
•“If you’ve consulted with major organizations on key projects for more than five years and never failed, then you’ve either never taken on a tough challenge or you have failed and just don’t realize it. With high-end, sophisticated consulting, occasional failure comes with the turf.”
•“If you can’t measure it, you can’t prove it’s happening, and even if it is happening, you can’t prove that you had anything to do with it or that it wouldn’t have happened anyway. Put your metrics in place in every implementation — especially training — on one level only: outright results for the business.”
Another title from Weiss, aimed primarily at external consultants, is Great Consulting Challenges (Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer, 2003, ISBN 0-7879-5510-8). It deals with the consultant’s industry experience and the question of generalist versus specialist, economic downturns, pricing, RFPs, differentiation, client unresponsiveness, scope creep, political agendas, cash flow, overhead, life goals and balance, as well as other marketing, delivery, implementation and project management challenges.
Ray Brillinger is a certified management consultant who works with clients on organizational change, HR strategy and performance improvement. He can be reached at (416) 766-9580 or [email protected].
As an organizational change consultant, I find that clients want two kinds, or levels, of help. The first is for planning and implementing a specific change; the second is helping develop the organization’s leadership, facilitation and change management skills and capabilities for both the short and longer term.
Here are three books that offer in-depth treatment of the subject: what works, what doesn’t, and what is required for a serious and responsible change initiative. We conclude with a brief look at some additional titles that provide advice and guidance to those who are in the change consulting field.
Terms of Engagement
By Richard Axelrod.
222 pages, Berrett-Koehler (2002). ISBN 1-15675-239-9. Available from McGraw-Hill,
1-800-565-5758, www.mcgrawhill.ca.
The author is a consultant with long experience in organizations: “For more than 40 years, I have watched leaders use everything from command-and-control techniques to highly participative practices to effect change in their organization, and I have concluded that, without engagement, no lasting change is possible.”
The importance of change, and the need for a deliberate approach to dealing with it, have gained a lot of attention in today’s management circles. Nevertheless, Axelrod has reservations: “Unfortunately, the approach to organizational change employed by most organizations and consulting firms — what I am calling the change management paradigm — is inadequate for today’s world. When speed and agility are essential, it provides a sluggish bureaucratic response. When creativity is essential, it thwarts innovation, adaptation and learning. Worse yet, instead of creating true ownership, commitment and a critical mass of people who care about the outcomes, the change management paradigm actually increases bureaucracy and reinforces top-down management, while increasing cynicism and resistance in the workforce.”
The book traces the historical development of approaches to change, and categorizes them as follows:
•Leader-driven: Change is announced, leaders know best and use their knowledge and power to bring about change. Ineffective with a highly educated workforce, a high degree of available information, complex change situations and rapid implementation requiring people to be involved.
•Process-driven: Change is driven by experts such as planners, industrial engineers, consultants or IT professionals, often with input from selected employees. Ineffective because the leader, the experts and selected employees do not possess all the necessary knowledge and input.
•Team-driven: Groups such as quality circles or other teams drive change, sometimes through a “parallel organization” set up to bypass the normal hierarchy. Taps the knowledge of people closest to the work situation and motivates educated people, but fails to involve a sufficient number of the people who can contribute to, and will be affected by, the change.
•Change management model: Experts and teams produce change, using approaches like reengineering and supply chain improvement. Typically falls short of real, broad-based workforce engagement and relies on the expertise and influence of consultants and a select few employees.
The change management model allows the few to decide for the many, isolates leaders and organization members from each other, separates design from implementation and makes process improvements primary but cultural shifts secondary.
All four approaches fall short of the proposed broader “engaged organization” with its wider circle of involvement, interconnections, communities for action and democratic principles. Several chapters outline this approach, drawing on examples from companies in a variety of industries.
“I am not suggesting that we run our organizations as pure democracies,” writes Axelrod. “Yet certain democratic principles can make a huge difference in organizations, helping to build trust, create commitment, and increase creativity. These democratic principles include equity and fairness, sharing information, public decision-making and increased involvement in the decision-making process.”
Along the way, the author debunks common myths about the engagement paradigm:
•unless I keep a tight rein, I cannot control the outcomes;
•we must keep a firewall between the organization and its stakeholders;
•productivity will suffer if I involve a lot of people;
•the majority cannot be trusted to put the organization’s interests first; and
•changes designed by the best and the brightest are cost-effective.
The concluding chapters emphasize the risks and requirements to build the necessary level of trust and integrity, as well as the great power of engagement to enable real change to happen and to be sustained when leadership and strategy are sound.
Change Without Pain
By Eric Abrahamson.
218 pages, Harvard Business School Press (2004).
ISBN 1-57851-827-X.
Available from McGraw-Hill,
1-800-565-5758, www.mcgrawhill.ca.
In his July 2000 Harvard Business Review article, “Change without Pain,” Abrahamson concluded: “Change has been with us forever, and it always will be, but the idea of change itself is changing. Companies are increasingly aware of the need to combat chaos, cynicism and burnout by using change tools that are less disruptive. Oscillation between big changes and small changes helps ensure dynamic stability in organizations. More critically, it paves the way for change that succeeds.”
The new book by the same title is subtitled, “How managers can overcome initiative overload, organizational chaos and employee burnout.” The book offers a new approach to change, called “creative recombination.” The essence of the message is to avoid obliterating what is in place in order to introduce radical, sweeping change. Instead, smaller, well-paced changes can be done more cheaply, more quickly and less painfully.
CEOs, heads of operations and functional areas, and senior HR/OD professionals are prime readers for the book’s constructive themes:
•redeploy talent rather than downsize;
•leverage social networks rather than IT networks;
•revive, rather than invent, values;
•salvage good processes rather than re-engineer them; and
•reuse structures rather than reorganize.
The author praises change masters who know when to introduce change (when it is necessary) and when to keep things stable. They do not form audacious goals for far-reaching transformation. They find instead existing organizational strengths that can be put together in a new and winning form. “In the end, these recombiners have changed the world more rapidly, smoothly, cheaply and successfully than anyone who travelled the high road to change.”
Bottom-line Organization Development
By Merrill Anderson.
234 pages, Elsevier-Butterworth Heinemann (2003).
ISBN 0-7506-7581-0.
www.bh.com.
This book is aimed at practitioners and managers seeking a more quantifiable basis for organizational interventions for the purpose of business case development, evaluation and return on investment (ROI) analysis.
A comprehensive “strategic change valuation” process is outlined, with several steps:
•diagnosis of performance gaps to achieve business goals;
•design of solutions;
•development of a change plan with evaluation objectives;
•deployment of the initiative and the evaluation process; and
•evaluation of business impact.
Forecasting ROI, using surveys to collect ROI data and evaluating an initiative after it has been deployed are all addressed in the section on evaluation. Case studies look at executive coaching (the ROI of building leadership one executive at a time), organization capability (the ROI of aligning an organization to strategy) and knowledge management (the ROI of continuously leveraging knowledge).
The final chapter describes how leaders and change practitioners can work together to create strategic value, with advice to the latter on how to be heard at the decision-making table, how to gain credibility, and how to deal with perceptions and risks in order to deliver results.
Consulting on the Inside
By Beverly Scott.
264 pages, ASTD Press (2003).
ISBN 1-56286-131-X.
1-800-628-2783, www.astd.org.
For anyone working in organizational design, training, performance improvement or career consulting, this book covers the role and challenges facing internal consultants. It offers ways to avoid — and circumvent — roadblocks, as well as a step-by-step guide to the consulting process.
Topics include:
•contact, defining needs and building the relationship;
•finalizing an agreement;
•getting information, doing an assessment, giving feedback;
•setting change targets and transition strategies;
•implementing; and
•evaluating and learning.
Fifteen appendices provide aids for self-assessment, conflict management, role clarification, team-building, process improvement and sample organization development contracts.
Process Consulting
By Alan Weiss.
191 pages, Jossey Bass Pfeiffer (2002).
ISBN 0-7879-5512-4.
Available from Wiley Canada, 1-800-567-4797, www.wiley.com.
The focus here is on approach and methodology for both external and internal consultants: contracting, managing scope, data gathering, focus groups, interviewing, strategy and planning, training, change facilitation, leadership development.
Weiss , a prolific author on the topic of consulting, offers numerous insights:
•“Remember that you are not the change agent. The client personnel are the change agents. You are the catalyst, but they are accountable for enduring change. Don’t be a hero. Be a consultant.”
•“If you’ve consulted with major organizations on key projects for more than five years and never failed, then you’ve either never taken on a tough challenge or you have failed and just don’t realize it. With high-end, sophisticated consulting, occasional failure comes with the turf.”
•“If you can’t measure it, you can’t prove it’s happening, and even if it is happening, you can’t prove that you had anything to do with it or that it wouldn’t have happened anyway. Put your metrics in place in every implementation — especially training — on one level only: outright results for the business.”
Another title from Weiss, aimed primarily at external consultants, is Great Consulting Challenges (Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer, 2003, ISBN 0-7879-5510-8). It deals with the consultant’s industry experience and the question of generalist versus specialist, economic downturns, pricing, RFPs, differentiation, client unresponsiveness, scope creep, political agendas, cash flow, overhead, life goals and balance, as well as other marketing, delivery, implementation and project management challenges.
Ray Brillinger is a certified management consultant who works with clients on organizational change, HR strategy and performance improvement. He can be reached at (416) 766-9580 or [email protected].
