Critical Elements of the Change Management Process: Organizational Mythologies and Systems

Speaker A Part of doing that was really having to understand in detail the importance of not just saying what the systems are are, but of how to design those systems and what are the key criteria for systems. And if you're going to have competent and capable leaders, what is it they're meant to do and how do you skill people to do that? So from our point of view, we were really introducing some skills training, leadership training, team membership training, systems design work which is complementary to wholly complementary to the original theories with regard to structure and capability, which is it's called requisite organization stratified systems theory which had gone on before. And one of the problems I see in organizations is that they use different models for different aspects. So team leadership, leadership training and outdoor activities has got a bit of a bad name. Well, I don't know if why it should have a bad name anyone would be if it's disconnected from other things that are going on. And for me, what we were doing by articulating what it is, what is good leadership behavior, what is good team membership behavior, what are actually the authorities of the team member visa vis the team leader? That way round then we were able to introduce a model, complementary ideas that really drove change throughout the organization, at every level in the organization. I think that's one of the things that people also don't realize, that it's very easy to read the modeling and misunderstand the nature of authority. To me, there's authority in every working relationship. It's not just the distribution of authority from the top down. They don't just look at the authority of the manager visa vis his or her team member, what is the authority of the team member? And that was one of the things that we introduced of saying the team member has the authority to require the team leader to assign tasks properly using the modeling.

Speaker B So very much a balance of authority. Absolutely. An authority exchange.

Speaker A Yes. And the team member is saying if you don't explain to me the context and the purpose of my work then you're not doing your job properly.

Speaker B Right?

Speaker A So there's a shared model of team leadership and membership that both can call on. Now, if you go back to what we articulated in terms of our core values model saying if you want to understand an organization, you really have to understand how people assign value to behavior. So what we're essentially saying here is that unless you understand what somebody else means by love, trust, honesty, dignity, fairness and courage, what behaviors demonstrate those positively and what behaviors demonstrate those negatively? It's going to be very difficult. For you to lead them. Very difficult for you to influence their behavior and very difficult to design systems that will be seen positively in the organization. Which is why we developed the notion of the values continuum not as a sort of separate theory, but as a way of better understanding the workforce and what people saw to be positive or negative behavior and consequently how cultures were forming within the organization. So our description of the linkage between behaviors and values we call mythologies that's the stories, the underlying stories or explanations of why that behavior is courageous or that behavior is cowardly. And the point about it was we took the position of saying there is no absolute statement about that. So take a small example. If you say take a mining community, a fellow goes into a bar and walks up to the bar and somebody insults him, what's the courageous thing to do? Is the courageous thing to do for him to square up to the person who's insulting him and clocking one? Or is it courageous for him just to turn around and walk out? Depending on what we would say mythological lens you looked through, you might have a very different conclusion. And unless you understand that, then you can make decisions as a leader that are completely misunderstood. So classically in all organizations and I think probably the extreme version of that is the army or armies where the leadership doesn't understand how the soldiers see the world. Eventually the soldiers may take drastic action by removing their officers, particularly if their lives are threatened and they're demonstrating they don't. So we were developing a set of concepts and ideas which we believe allowed for a much more effective implementation of the entire model so that we could now talk about leadership not only in terms of a general term capability or an intellectual capability, but be very specific about what we meant by social process skills. The ability to understand the mythologies of the group and intervene in that to produce a positive outcome. So you don't necessarily attack the old mythologies or you don't barge in and say they're wrong. It's the work of the leader to now create new mythologies or create new stories, create new norms, new ways of demonstrating what I've seen to be positive or negative values. And all of those tools in our experience were a found to be very helpful people in actually understanding what is it you want me to do, what am I meant to do? What do you mean by a good leader? What do you mean by a good team member? What do you mean by a good system? So it actually became very much easier to implement to put these ideas into practice. And the other thing that it did from my point of view was that by being transparent, by sharing all of that modeling with people, it made it a very open process.

Speaker B There wasn't any secret code.

Speaker A No. So although some of the words people had a bit of a problem with mythologies but you talk about those as stories and explanations of meanings, all of that the values continue, the team leadership, membership, sets of behaviors and authorities all of those were open and available to everybody. This is not a manipulative process. The system design process itself was open and available to people so that it allows for the organization to audit itself. And that's the feedback mechanism.

Speaker B So it's self referencing.

Speaker A Yes, in a sense, potentially.

Speaker B So therefore you can build an autonomous system you're not building.

Speaker A Right? That's right. I mean, you have to look at who's doing what and when and what periods. But essentially well, Carl Stewart described that rather colorfully, and as is his won't, as making all of this available to people is just arming the peasants as far as he was concerned. Or as they had a nice phrase they have in Australia, which said it was Democrats, was keeping the bastards honest. So just make all of this available so that people themselves and other organizations that we've worked with, once you share all this information and the processes are open, then team members can interrogate their team leader. Using that model, the organization can look at systems and say, the purpose of this is not clear. I don't know who the ownership is, who has the authority to change part of that system? Where's the feedback mechanism, where's the control on that system, and so on.

Speaker B So they got the language and they've got the tools and they got the.

Speaker A Knowledge to be potentially yeah, that's right. And so the whole process becomes potentially a lot more open and a lot more applicable.