Items tagged "Change Management":
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Interview with Barry Johnson: Polarities, Dilemmas, and How to Manage Them In OrganizationsBarry and I had been having breakfast at my favorite B & B in Cleveland, when we took a few moments to talk about Polarity Management. He has been working on the phenomenon of interdependency for over 30 years. In this interview he talks about what polarity management is and the new terminology of “infinity factor.”
Barry shares a story from an organization he worked with that had a high value for autonomy in their employees and programs. However, this was leading the isolation and competition between them. They had a new desire to move toward greater integration. But, they used a typical gap analysis and treated the move toward integration as a solution to their problem, rather than a polarity to manage (meaning the polarity between autonomy and integration). This resulted in failed attempts to move toward integration until they began using a polarity management approach. Find out more about Barry’s work at: Polarity Management Associates.
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- 23
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- Mar 4, 2012 (a Sunday)
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- 5:10:00 (2 months ago)
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Interview with Herb Stevenson on the Cycle of ExperienceThis interview was part of a series done on a cool Friday morning at Herb’s Ranch in Ohio. We were sitting in his library, enjoying some coffee when I asked him about Gestalt’s concept of the Cycle of Experience.
The cycle is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Understanding it can help in both individual change work and organizational. In many of the groups I work with they get a sensation then jumping straight to action…in the process they short-circuit awareness building anddon’t understand why they can’t mobilize their collective energy or get their intended results. Awareness building and mobilizing energy are not optional, they are required for effective action taking. Herb points out this is a “ready, fire, aim” approach that decreases the effectiveness of our efforts.
In community based work, like community organizing, effective campaign efforts spend considerable time and money in the stages of awareness building and mobilization of energy, before moving to action. We can enhance and improve our work by bringing this lesson into the inner workings of our organizations.
Think about the projects you might have been a part of that go from great idea to mediocre results. Was there a step in the cycle that was not properly attended to?
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- 20
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- Mar 4, 2012 (a Sunday)
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- 5:05:00 (2 months ago)
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Herb Stevenson talking about becoming more of who we are and the Paradoxical Theory of Change
On an absolutely beautiful morning, Herb and I were talking at his Pebble Ledge Ranch in Novelty, Ohio. I asked him about the Paradoxical Theory of Change. The concept is from Arnold Beisser, M.D. While the article Beisser wrote was short, just a couple of pages, it has become one of the most cited works in Gestalt Therapy. Simply put it states, “that change occurs when one becomes what she is, not when she tries to become what she is not.”What does this mean when we are trying to create change in organizations, individuals, or ourselves? It means that it is most effective to start with awareness building. Raising awareness of the current state creates the possibility for change to take place. When we deny parts of ourselves or our organizations, the change we seek is undermined by our own lack of perception. At an individual level, I’ve seen this approach support clients trying to make difficult changes in their lives. It can lift a real burden when we stop trying to be different, and start trying to be more of ourselves or the best us that we can be without denying any part of selves.
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- 30
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- Mar 4, 2012 (a Sunday)
- time:
- 4:55:00 (2 months ago)
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Interview with Herb Stevenson talking about resistance to changeI’ve gained a lot from my relationship with this man since first meeting him in Austin at the Organization Development Network conference in 2008. This is one of the first interviews of a series done at his Pebble Ledge Ranch in Ohio that he shares with his wife, Jackie Stevenson. We were sitting between rows and rows of books in his library and a window looking out over a pasture with grazing horses.
In this interview, I ask Herb how he thinks about resistance to change. He offers a historical view of how the concept of resistance has moved from understanding resistance as a defense mechanism to understanding resistance as contact styles. Herb believes that using the term and the frame of contact styles is more productive and expansive. For instance, it is not necessarily that I have “resistance” to an idea or a person, but rather this is my way of making contact with that idea or person.
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- 25
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- Mar 4, 2012 (a Sunday)
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- 12:00:00 (2 months ago)
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Groups and Leaders Under Stress
Organizations and leaders under stress tend to find fixes for the moment and focus on momentary survival. This 5-minute segment is the last of a four part series. Earl Braxton, Ph.D. shares his thinking on leadership and Kurt Lewin’s influence on our understanding of it. I’m here to tell you, I think this man knows what he’s talking about.
Common characteristics of groups under stress:
- An insistence on maintaining past comfortable positions and defending against new ideas or experiences.
- Becoming overly organized and rigidly defensive of their historical position. The rigidity will prevent new data from entering the system.
Common characteristics of managers (or leaders by other names) under stress:
- Selectively perceiving information and only seeing what confirms their earlier biases.
- Becoming very intolerant of ambiguity and demanding only “right” answers.
- Fixating on a single approach to a problem.
- Overestimating how fast time is passing. Hence they often feel rushed.
- Adopting short-term perspective or crisis mentality and ceasing to consider long-term implications.
- Decreasing ability to consult with and listen to others.
- Having less ability to make fine distinctions in problems so that complexity and nuances are missed.
Earl also shares what leaders or consultants need to provide in order to support those under stress:
- Provide conditions of safety.
- Be available psychologically, emotionally, and physically to the group.
- Be neither intrusive nor abandoning.
- Be able to take criticism and use it productively.
- Have good boundary management skills.
Thank you to Earl Braxton for his thoughtful analysis, to Joseph Lennox for hosting, Brenda Jones for facilitating and to the Lewin Center for Research and Social Justice that convened this forum and is doing important work in the world.
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- Mar 4, 2012 (a Sunday)
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- 12:00:00 (2 months ago)
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Lewin’s Influence on Leadership
This recorded talk is the first of a four part series from a great evening I had a few weeks ago at a forum pulled together by the Lewin Center for Research and Social Justice. About 25 individuals came together at the home of Lennox Joseph, Ph.D. to hear a talk given by Earl Braxton, Ph.D. and facilitated by Brenda Jones, Ph.D. The food, the company, and the conversation was just what I needed as I moved into the New Year.
Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, and was the first person to use the term group dynamics. His work has a wide ranging impact on everything from psychology to social justice movements. For instance, Michael Jacoby Brown, in his book points out that the field of community organizing draws heavily on Lewin’s work, “who revolutionized the theory and practices of building groups…and had a wide interest in racial and ethnic justice.”
In this first installment, you will hear Earl talking about Lewin’s interest in unions, understanding systems and systemic change approaches, and field theory. Earl then touches on organizations in trauma, an issue he has written about and says is sometimes kept “quiet.” Influenced by Lewin, Earl sees these broken systems not in terms of their fallacies and dysfunction, but rather as entities with a temporary wound.
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- posted by:
- patrickod-blog
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- 6
- date:
- Mar 4, 2012 (a Sunday)
- time:
- 12:00:00 (2 months ago)
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Never Enough Time
This is the second part of a four part series on Kurt Lewin’s (1890-1947) influence on our understanding of leadership. Many consider him to be the founder of social psychology, group dynamics, and organization development. As a professor at MIT, he was the first person to coin the term “action research.”
In this 4-minute piece Early Braxton, Ph.D. continues his talk on Lewin and about how the speed of complexity and change is increasing at a rate that outpaces the capacity of our brains. He states, “So, when you hear so many people talking about how stressed out they are, how tired they are, how fatigued, and how much they keep doing…if you listen to people in organizations saying there isn’t enough time, they aren’t lying. There isn’t, there just isn’t.”
He argues that to deny this is to decrease our effectiveness and our capacity to see. To accept this means then that we need to change how we do our work. This includes 1) slowing down the pace 2) creating spaces for reflection and 3) avoid trying to fix something before understanding it.
In one analogy he gives, Earl points out that if a car is going 90mph, what you see outside that window is different than when the car is going 40mph. It is too late to see and understand the landscape once you pass it. If you keep going at that speed you will accumulate the things you don’t know that much faster.
Earl is a psychologist specializing in transformational thinking and the management of change in high risk / high stress organizations. He briefly outlines a process for leaders to assist in this world of increased complexity and change. At the top of that list is that if you are to lead others, you must first know how to lead yourself.
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- posted by:
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- 6
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- Mar 4, 2012 (a Sunday)
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- 12:00:00 (2 months ago)
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Interview with Herb Stevenson: Gestalt Approaches to Leadership, Change, and New Development in the FieldThis is the first interview I did with Herb. We were in a breakout room, just outside of the library of the big ol’ Tudor home that houses the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland. Herb gives an introduction to Gestalt and it’s impact. Herb runs the Cleveland Consulting Group and is a lead faculty member at the Institute.
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- 19
- date:
- Mar 3, 2012 (a Saturday)
- time:
- 12:00:00 (2 months ago)
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Balancing Participatory and Directive Management In Community Based Organizations
One of the reasons I started studying organization structures, org psychology, and general organization development was to find more lenses that helped me explain my own experience in the groups I was a part of. Polarity Management is one of those gems that has help tremendously in that effort.This article takes up the question of whether community based organizations should use participatory or directive management practices. That has been one of the most prevailing issues in every organization I’ve belonged to from Universities to Community Organizing Groups. The article I’ve written here introduces the concept of polarity management to understand this common dilemma.
Comments from readers:
“I just finished reading for the third time, BREATHE! I am totally using it in my presentation tomorrow at the Young Women of Color and Trans Leadership Symposium. Just what I needed.” - Adriann Barboa, Young Women United, Albquerque
“Yay polarity management! I can’t wait to put this to use!” - Radha Patel, United Nations Population Fund, New York City
“I think the article hits on a great issue CBO’s face on a regular basis. Damn, if only we would have known this earlier.” - Ray Padilla, High School Teacher, Las Cruces
Over the years there have been competing trends in community based organizations, and particularly in community organizing groups. One trend has called for participatory management. This approach is in response to legitimate concerns over the downsides of directive management, which include autocratic decision-making, the inability to tap the wisdom and leadership of members and staff, and abuse of power.
The other trend has called for a “strong hand” and directive management. This has been a response to equally legitimate arguments in organizations that have become unable to manage themselves and have become immobilized…
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- posted by:
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- date:
- Mar 3, 2012 (a Saturday)
- time:
- 12:00:00 (2 months ago)
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Culture Trumps Strategy, Every Time
The title says it all…
Whether you read Nilofer Merchant’s article or not, I think the title offers us a golden nugget of advice. What truly impacts your ability to execute a strategy with success?
Unfortunately, many strategic planning processes in the world today are more likely to be intellectual exercises to develop neat ideas on a piece of paper.
I’ve come to believe that strategic thinking and strategy development are vital to an organizations success. Strategic planning, in the traditional sense, is not so helpful.
What I’ve found is that strategic plans have the greatest impact if the process to develop it and the process to monitor it raise the ability of the group to question assumption; strengthens the groups ability to identify and manage unsolvable problems; and strengthens communication between members of the organization, while creating a coherent plan to guide the work.
I think Gary Hamel said it best, “The real leverage is not in creating the ‘right strategy’ but in increasing a [leader’s] capability to surface and test the assumptions behind the strategies they advocate.”
Here is a juicy tidbit from Merchant’s article that highlights the impact to this elusive and mysterious thing called “culture:”
Do We Trust Each Other?…A team I was recently working with reminded me of 6-year-olds playing soccer, where every team member simply surrounds the issue much like a team of kids surrounds the ball. They then travel en masse, afraid to move away from the proverbial “ball.” In this culture, no one owns a position on the field. This “we’re all in it together” cultural norm is certainly egalitarian, but it doesn’t support specialization, scale, or accountability. I worry that as this team grows, and when they’re not all in the same room, they will fail. When they are huddling, what they are signaling is that they don’t know how to trust one another to do their unique part. They — like many teams — simply don’t know how to “let go” to and with others, thus risking their ability to scale results.
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- patrickod-blog
- date:
- Mar 28, 2011 (a Monday)
- time:
- 3:23:00 (1 year ago)
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Mergers: Lessons From the Grassroots Institute for Fundriasing Training
Last week I posted a piece on mergers for community based organizations. Priscilla Hung, Executive Director of the Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training (GIFT), replied with a wonderful resource she wrote after GIFT went through their own merger. The article talks about the costs, difficult to measure staff hours, and impact to finances and fundraising.Priscilla dives into seven lessons learned through their experience and of two other organizations they interviewed:
1. It’s your work that’s important, not the organization
2. Be honest and up front about your reasons for merging
3. Merging won’t make a financially unstable organization more stable
4. Fundraising culture matters just as much as fundraising practice
5. Notify donors and funders in a timely way
6. Fundraise for your merger
7. The merger will take longer than you think
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- posted by:
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- date:
- Feb 8, 2010 (a Monday)
- time:
- 10:00:00 (2 years ago)
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Mergers for Community Based Orgs
There are very few merger resources that speak directly to the needs of small community-based organizations and nongovernmental groups. Through hands on work
with mission-driven clients Potomac Group has developed a merger model and checklist. Offered below is an article that will help readers understand and prepare for the mechanics of a merger.Some of the common myths or misconceptions talked about in the article include:
- Overestimating cost savings. So many groups already have administrative infrastructures that are below their needs. A merger actually increases costs.
- Merging two struggling or vulnerable organizations with an unexamined belief it will result in one stronger organization.
- Thinking the hard work is all done prior to the merger and “letting it ride” after the legal merger. There is a lot to be done pre-merger to be sure. The post-merger work, if not properly attended to, can drastically reduce the effectiveness of the organization and in some cases topple it.
- Using a merger to avoid answering the question, “should we close?”
Potomac Group is intending on releasing a series of articles over time that touch on the hidden or less covered aspects of mergers. These include: preparing change leaders, group dynamics, managing emotions, and the process of letting go. Rather than being at the margins, these issues are at the heart of a successful merger process. Until then, enjoy this article and please do comment with your own experience and thoughts on the issue…
First, groups considering a merger are often looking to reap savings from combining administrative overhead (office space, bookkeeping, training, copier service, tech support, contract / consulting support, etc.). Although this is a benefit that most groups seek, small community-based groups run a particular risk of putting themselves in harm’s way by overestimating potential savings. That’s because small groups engaged in service, advocacy and organizing efforts typically operate with limited budgets to address unlimited needs, and routinely under resource their infrastructure…Click here for Full Article
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- posted by:
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- Jan 29, 2010 (a Friday)
- time:
- 10:00:00 (2 years ago)
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Barbara Ehrenreich: The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America | Health and Wellness | AlterNet
The author talks about how a plague of positive thinking is permeating our society, from medicine to business, and is even contributing to our financial crisis.
A friend sent this article to me over the holidays (click on link above or read the first few paragraphs below). I haven’t read Barbara’s latest book. Have others? Is this a trend that you’ve seen?
Barbara’s critique of “positive thinking” seems similar to those around Appreciative Inquiry (AI). The AI approach departs from deficit based change models and takes an approach that seeks to create change by mobilizing around the strengths of a community or an organization.
A number of trainers are delivering a brand of AI that encourages “positive” thinking and discourages or frowns upon “negative” thoughts. I believe this is a misapplication of AI and one that can lead to a number of bad outcomes, from blaming the victim to an organization being disconnected from its own reality.
At its core, AI asks individuals and organizations to focus on “generative” ideas. That is different than “positive” ideas. In generative thinking, the people in an organization are encouraged to look at what is going “right” and move toward it. In their book Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the Speed of Imagination, Jane Watkins and Bernard Mohr, state that “…the greatest value comes from embracing what works.” In application, that may mean “what works” is collecting data on and reviewing the negative feedback that an organization gets from its constituency, customers, employees, or citizens (in the case of government).
Another way to understand generative thinking as opposed to other approaches is that generative thinking looks at both the problem and solution as a whole, composed of desired outcomes and a roadmap on how to achieve them. All of us can get stuck in complaining, without making any forward movement. By framing our problems with the solutions that are already working, we create movement that builds on those things that are working right.
As Watkins and Mohr point out, “AI suggests that by focusing on that image of health and wholeness, the organization’s energy moves to make the image real.” The change effort is bound to fail If this is done without the acknowledgment or the inclusion of data on the challenges or unhealthy issues within the system. Simple positive thinking alone is not a solution.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s interview on her new book begins…
“When Barbara Ehrenreich went to be treated for breast cancer, she was exhorted to think positively; and when she expressed feelings of fear and anger, she was chided for being negative.
Ehrenreich, the author of 16 books, including Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, which examine the blue- and white-collar job markets, took on what she sees as an epidemic of positive thinking in her new book: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.”Tags
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- posted by:
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- Nov 30, 2009 (a Monday)
- time:
- 1:58:00 (2 years ago)
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New Trend: “Infinity Factor” used to describe the energy system within interdependencies and Polarity Management
Listen to my interview with Dana Wilcox on the story of and genesis of “infinity factor.”I was sitting with Dana at the end of a week in Chicago where we had been participating in a learning community that has been meeting for over 15 years around issues of Realtime Strategic Change and Polarity Management. I asked her about the term infinity factor and where it started. The interview was in front of a large window looking out on a busy Chicago street and happened to be just a few feet way from where she had been the moment the phrase came into existence.
The term, “Infinity Factor” in part, highlights that there is a natural dynamic or energy system that is present in human systems. This energy system is represented by the infinity loop wrapped around interdependent pairs. This new language emphasizes the energy system is a naturally occurring phenomenon that is there to tap. The infinity factor can help to illuminate and help us more effectively use other models in OD like Appreciative Inquiry, Real Time Strategic Change, Gap Analysis, or even Bion and Basic Assumption groups. On the other hand, the “Polarity Map” is a useful way to help systems and groups tap the enegery system and manage the tension in dilemmas we face.
The management or tapping of the underlying energy system can be a purposeful and choiceful one - meaning that awareness of the polarities and infinity factor theory expand the choices available to us. If we are unaware of the energy system, it is still going on, we just have fewer choices that could otherwise ease our conflicts and support our individual or group development.Tags
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- posted by:
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- 20
- date:
- Nov 6, 2009 (a Friday)
- time:
- 3:00:00 (2 years ago)
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