The Paradoxes of Change: A Significant Challenge for Leaders
By Irma Tyler-Wood

This article is addressed to leaders within organizations that are facing or engaged in major, in-depth change. The term leader does not necessarily refer to a role or title. A leader, for the purposes of this article, is anyone who can and does influence and shape the direction of an organization. This article will focus on the adaptive aspects of organizational change, the process of engaging and influencing perspectives, knowledge and behaviors of the people within the organization.

Recognizing the need for change, and leading and managing the change process have been the tasks of leaders since the dawn of history. However, organizational leaders in the first two thirds of the 20th century often had the luxury of a 10 to 20 year cycle of stability in between major changes. In the last third of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, many organizations are finding it necessary to re-invent themselves every three years.

The current pace, depth and range of change required of organizations is unprecedented. One result is a series of paradoxes that create significant challenges and opportunities for leaders. Without awareness of these paradoxes and a framework for addressing them within the organizational change process, most change efforts will fail.

As they seek to facilitate organizational change, leaders in the 21st century face the following paradoxes, seemingly contradictory statements that are nevertheless true:

These paradoxes of organizational change require leaders to do “adaptive work” as well as “technical work.” Ron Heifitz, in his book, Leadership, No Easy Answers, describes “technical work” as work in which the problem is very clear, the solution is clear and one can find the solution by going to a list or a text. Adaptive work, on the other hand, is work in which the problem is complex, the solution is not easily understood and those who have the problem must be engaged in the process of solving the problem.

Let’s examine three of these paradoxes and a framework ThoughtBridge has developed to help leaders address them.

TO RESPOND RAPIDLY, INITIALLY, YOU MUST SLOW DOWN
Leaders tend to be take-charge - action oriented people. Once they are persuaded that change is necessary, leaders tend to want to hit the ground running. They often forget how much time, experience, research and data it took to persuade them that change was needed; they are often impatient with those who seem slow to respond to the sense of urgency they now feel. These tendencies are exacerbated if the leader is new to the organization and has been brought in specifically to introduce change. Such leaders may feel their effectiveness, reputation, and even their tenure as a leader depends on quick action.

Change literature is replete with the stories of failed change initiatives that either never got off the ground, stalled or failed to produce the desired results, despite brilliant and expensive visions and strategies. In fact, studies done to date indicate most change initiatives fail. (Peter Senge, The Dance of Change.) ThoughtBridge’s experience is that leaders of successful change initiatives take the time to lay the critical groundwork for change. Slowing down initially to lay the critical groundwork often means the difference between a quick start which fails to take root and spread throughout the organization and a change initiative that is owned, and sustained and successfully implemented at all levels of the organization.

What if the very survival of the organization is at stake? Isn’t speed of action critical? We think leaders facing a crisis which requires a rapid response should be guided by the answer the astronaut gave the 5th grader who asked, “What would you do if you were up in space and an alarm went off that said you had only 10 seconds of oxygen left?” The astronaut thought for a moment and then replied, “I’d think for nine seconds and then act.” It is precisely when a lot is at stake and the risks are high that slowing down to lay the groundwork is critical.

We are not talking about a process that takes months or even years. An organization can effectively lay the critical groundwork and incorporate a framework for addressing these challenging paradoxes in a five day change workshop for change leaders within the organization. The change leadership team should be representative of every segment and level of the organization. They have two main functions, to lead and facilitate change within the organization and to cascade their learning and experiences throughout the organization.

TO GO FORWARD – YOU MUST LOOK BACK
“The single biggest reason organizational changes fail is that no one thought about endings or planned to manage their impact on people. Naturally concerned about the future, planners and implementers usually forget that people have to let go of the present first. They forget that while the first task of change management is to understand the destination and how to get there, the first task of transition is to convince people to leave home. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief if you remember that.”
William Bridges, Managing Transitions

Change always means endings and new beginnings. One piece of critical groundwork is planning endings and their impact on people. The goal in planning and managing the impact of endings is facilitating, “the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation.”

The task of managing endings and their impact is complex because individual employees, divisions and groups are likely to be at different stages with regard to their own personal transition and their understanding, knowledge and acceptance of the organization’s need to change. Many will see the proposed change as a denigration of the company’s past and their role in creating that past. Others will see and actually experience change as loss - loss of status, value, compensation and even jobs. Those who keep their jobs and status through the change may feel a loss of consistency, predictability, job mastery and control. Even those who have accepted the need for change are often confused and ambivalent about what needs to change and what their role and responsibility is in a yet to be defined future. Still others will be discouraged by the fact that it took the organization so long to realize that change was needed and will be impatient to begin the implementation process.

How does an organization effectively facilitate transition when its leaders, managers and employees are bringing such diverse perspectives and experiences to the process of change?

Looking back is one of the most effective tools for facilitating transition. Leaders should begin by utilizing the change workshop to focus the change leadership team on the past, not the future or the present. On day one of the workshop, ThoughtBridge utilizes the Trustee Leadership Development History Timeline Exercise to help participants look back at the history of the organization, and their role in that history. By the end of the exercise, participants will have created a common understanding of the organization’s history to date and the role each person has played in that history. They will also have honored and celebrated what was good about the, history of that organization. In addition the team will have learned the history of change in that organization, i.e., how change has been initiated, managed and implemented in the past.

The Change Leadership Team will use this information to have an explicit discussion about the values and culture that shaped and guided the organization’s history. Participants end the day by asking what values and cultural norms the organization will want to carry into it’s future and which they may need to let go of.

On day two of the change workshop, participants are ready to create History Timeline II which, by laying out the current environment and circumstances the organization is facing, makes the case for change. This is the point where data, research and information can best be heard and received. The data shared must not only be hard data provided by internal experts and external, non-partisan experts, but soft data (anecdotal stories and experiences) provided by change team leaders in response to the question, “Is there a need to change”?

After creating a common picture of the reality the organization currently faces or is likely to face in the future, the team then begins a facilitated discussion of the implications of this data with respect to the organization’s future and the future of the employees of the organization. They will explore, for example, the implications the data has for changes to vision, mission and strategy of the organization. What, if any, implications are there for the skills and competencies of the organization’s staff, the structure, systems and policies of the future, etc. These discussions are likely to raise the level of tension and conflict in ways the first day and a half of the workshop did not.

LEADERS MUST FACILITATE A CULTURE OF CHANGE, YET CHANGE EXACERBATES INTERNAL ANXIETY, CONFUSION AND CONFLICT.
During the change process a leader needs teams that work well together, are united, focused, productive and who consistently produce high quality work. Yet, by introducing and facilitating change, leaders actually insure an increase in the frequency, and level of internal conflict, uncertainty, confusion and anxiety. At the very moment people are most likely to search for certainty about the future, honest leaders must not only acknowledge they don’t have a blueprint, they must invite people to join them in what William Bridges calls the neutral zone and what Trustee Leadership Development and ThougtBridge has renamed, “the Gap”. The Gap is the space between “the real” where you are now and “the ideal” the future you hope to realize through change.

Any organization seeking to change itself must equip its leaders and managers to lead and manage “in the gap.”

The Gap: The space and time between “the real”, where you are now, and “the ideal”, the future you hope to realize through your change initiative.

Day three of the change workshop should focus on giving participants state of art thinking and research on the dynamics of organizational change and transferring an organizational change framework the leadership team can use to lead and manage change in “the gap.” The framework ThoughtBridge has developed came from the integration of what we learned from our research and our practice with clients. We then integrated that with state of the art thinking by leading scholars from the fields of psychology, education, business, leadership development, conflict management and organizational behavior. see our framework below.

The framework integrates the individual’s transition process (above the line) with the organizational response (below the line) that facilitates both organizational change and employee transition. It allows leaders to accomplish both adaptive and technical work simultaneously.

CONFLICT IS ESSENTIAL TO CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION, YET CONFLICT CAN DERAIL OR DESTROY CHANGE EFFORTS.
The research is clear, a complete absence of conflict corresponds with low creativity and low productivity. All organizations experience conflict. The question is whether the conflict is handled in a constructive or destructive way.

Examples of destructive ways of handling conflict are burying it or denying its existence, attacking people rather than problems when differences occur, resolving differences solely on the basis of power and creating factions which lead to an “us versus them,” dynamic and creates winners and losers. Because change, by its very nature, increases the frequency, and severity of conflict within an organization, organizations that do not learn to resolve conflict in constructive ways will see the change process derailed or deadlocked.

On days four and five of the change workshop participants actually begin negotiating change. As a prerequisite to those negotiations, change team leaders are taught conflict management and consensus building tools and processes. They are then asked to utilize these tools to develop consensus on the vision and strategy for the future and the strategic plan for implementing the new vision.

On day five the change team leaders anticipate and plan how to take the work and experience they’ve begun as a small team in the change workshop, to the larger organization. They will develop a timeline for utilizing an iterative process that builds ownership, buy-in and commitment to the goals, and outcomes to be achieved by implementing change.

Change is not implemented in five days. The change process is a long-term ongoing commitment. What the five day change workshop to launch or accelerate change does is create a common picture of reality, communicate and develop consensus on the need for change and equip a critical team with the skills and tools they need to develop ownership, commitment, and implementation of change.

Reprinted from  Link & Learn newsletter, Linkage, Inc.