Effective change at the RSC
by Mee-Yan, Thursday April 8th 2010
A few weeks ago, I attended the launch of Demos’s research on the change process in the RSC, during which I acted as consultant support. Demos have done a great job documenting the journey, for which I congratulate them. If you would like to download the full publication, the reference would be: Hewison, R., Holden, J., and Jones, S., All Together: A Creative Approach to Organisational Change, (London: Demos, 2010), available for download at http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/all-together.
This blog is to capture a few thoughts on OD and change to encourage practitioners that effective change is doable and there are results that demonstrate that.
I. Applying Organisational Development to the RSC
There are many OD principles affecting our change approach. For the RSC case, there are three which were particularly important.
1. Identifying the correct type of change and focusing on the ‘end game’
The ensemble-change at the RSC is an internally initiated change with the intention of spreading what works from the theatre to the rest of the organisation. The objective is to bed down the ensemble culture in people’s day-to-day behaviour. The change is hence primarily a cultural alignment and a behavioural exercise but with a clear strategic intention.
In OD methodology, once the nature of change has been worked out, the next job is to focus on the ‘end game’. At the RSC, the ‘end game’ was to align individual paradigms and behaviour with the organisation’s ensemble culture. This required at least three levels of system intervention: the individual level, the group (inter-group) level and the level of the total organisation. This entailed:
- providing specific, individual experiences (mainly through dialogue) so that people can examine their own paradigm and modify behaviour themselves;
- creating a ‘cultural island’ experience for groups so that in those change interventions, old norms can be challenged and new norms can be experimented with, without risk;
- and aligning the organisation’s systems and processes to reinforce and support the change paradigm and behaviour.
At the RSC, we involved people in identifying the collective desired outcomes of change. This gave people the opportunity to contribute to creating the conditions by which the RSC could achieve those outcomes.
2. Securing the engagement of key people
Successful change depends upon identifying and securing the engagement of key individuals and groups. I worked with Vikki Heywood and Michael Boyd to identify:
- the key individuals and groups on whom change would depend;
- those who held data that we, as the change team, did not have;
- those whose perspectives were needed to provide a more robust way of thinking about change.
We paid a lot of attention to human dynamics because the RSC is full of political complexity and staffed with individuals who have high aspirations for the organisation and their art. We knew most people in the RSC would like to take part in determining the change processes. The principle that governed our thinking was that ‘people will support what they help to create’ (Weisbord, 1987).
Our first step was to engage the Steering Committee, the Steering Group and middle management before making the change agenda public within the rest of the organisation. Without endorsement at this level, the project would have been vulnerable, so an intervention was designed to help people to personalise the reasons as to why taking an ensemble approach to change might be good, and to encourage people to discuss their doubts and hesitations openly. My job was to support Heywood and Boyd in considering what type of processes would help to acknowledge and work with any conflict and resistance encountered in these top groups. Interventions were designed to enroll the help of these key groups in supporting the implementation of solutions with the rest of the organisation in phase II.
3. Using ‘High Leverage’ change methodology
High Leverage methodologies ‘create high energy and yield extraordinary sustainable results’ (Holman and Devane 1999). Such methodologies have been proven to reduce implementation time over more directive methods by half (Bunker & Alban 1998, Wheatley 1999). There are a number of key elements to ‘High Leverage’ methods.
- They are dialogue based – Any change that challenges people’s personal ‘worldview’ or paradigm cannot rely on the ‘tell and sell’ approach: a structured dialogue and inquiry approach is much more effective. In any culture-change process, people need the freedom to have a voice, to be heard, to dream, to be passionate, to co-construct, to participate and to contribute. Positive psychological approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry work best. We used this at the RSC, especially in the intervention that took the form of a staff conference, where we started the process with a pair interview: using the themes of the interview, we invited people to co-construct how change should be approached and what conditions would support it.
- They are whole system based, surface-diverse perspectives – Change, particularly culture-change processes, must encourage the various parts of a system to connect with each other. People support change more if they have opportunities to share understanding of the need to change, analyse current reality, identify what needs to change, generate ideas on how to change and map out an implementation plan. It is important to engage multiple perspectives, and give different stakeholders the opportunity to influence each other. This strengthens debate and helps people find common ground. From my experience, common ground will only emerge after the diverse views held within an organisation have been properly debated. At the RSC, a number of conflicting perspectives did emerge, and Heywood and Boyd listened to those voices and adjusted the speed and content of the change programme accordingly, hence creating a safe atmosphere in which change could happen.
- Emotions matters and are crucial data – All changes arouse emotions, positive as well as negative. If these are not properly managed, the change outcome will be at risk. OD recognises people’s desire to shape their own destinies; if people understand why and where change is needed, they can work out the implementation and are more likely to support change than if they are simply told what will happen. All the change processes we designed at the RSC aimed to encourage people to share not just their view but also their emotions – this is especially important for a creative organisation where emotions are a core part of their creative resources. Heywood, Boyd and the change team did a great job in managing individuals’ emotions. Through their commitment to the change process, they provided what I call an ‘emotional anchor’ for the staff.
- Managing psychological transition – OD focuses on the transition process rather just the outcome to which it aspires. It is not the change outcome that trips people up – it is the transition journey that does the damage (Bridges 2003). OD must therefore manage people’s experiences of transition, delivering change in such a way as to ensure there is a ‘safe arrival’. By involving the RSC staff as early as possible, I relied on their ‘native instinct’ in identifying how best to manage the different concerns that emerged from the change journey.
- Leverage the covert processes to deliver results – Most people tend to use the rational and logical ‘business cases’ to mobilise people in change. However, out of the six dimensions of change, five are covert. Bob Marshak has shown that change needs to work beyond the level of reason (rationality, analysis and logic) and extend to addressing organisational politics (individual and group interests), inspirations (values-based and visionary aspirations), emotions (affective and reactive feelings), mindsets (guiding beliefs and assumptions); psychodynamics (anxiety-based and unconscious defences) (Marshak 2006). For an arts organisation, leveraging the key covert processes are critical in securing change outcomes, particularly as the staff will likely hold great visionary aspirations for the art form and impact of the organisation. By leveraging these aspirations, it is possible to mobilise change faster than by just relying on logic and analysis.
II. Lessons from the RSC experience
As I look back over the three years that I have spent with the RSC, I know that the various participatory processes led by key stakeholders (Heywood and Boyd) have mobilised the change journey and have unleashed energy within the organisation. By focusing on the principles of distributed leadership, multiplying imagination, engagement and participation, we employed a methodology more suitable to the RSC than an expert-led, formula-led methodology.
The experience also confirmed once again that when a change process puts people’s engagement at the heart of it, using High Leverage change methodologies, connecting different parts of the organisation together, working through multiple perspectives, and keeping the whole system together, the change effort sticks. What is more, the process we used enabled most people to voice their doubts and scepticism, which the change leaders could then use as part of the data to adjust the pace and the approach to change.
Finally, by using concrete and defined roles to include more individuals within the organisation into the change project early on, we encouraged people to share their passion and dreams about the organisation. This helped to make the transformation more sustainable. The direct involvement of both top management and some key middle managers and senior leaders in the major interventions provided visible support.
To close, I want to highlight the prime reflections from my work with the RSC.
Three conditions that help to make culture-change easier
My work with the RSC has reminded me that, while culture-change can be complex, it can also be made easier if three conditions exist:
- visible and active role-modelling by key leaders;
- an appropriate amount of group reconfiguration, and
- systemic alignment to bed down the behavioural changes in the cultural fabric of the organisation.
Visible Leadership – Leaders, especially if they are liked and respected (which Heywood and Boyd are), are critical role models in the change journey. People will want to move in the direction their leader signposts for them, especially when there is a psychological bond between those leaders and the staff. However, personal liking will not alone suffice to make a culture-change stick, there have to be processes that help turn initial compliance into commitment. The example of the RSC shows one way in which this can be achieved: through respected leaders demonstrating personally how, in this case by embracing ensemble behaviour, they achieve successful outcomes. By associating successful outcomes with ensemble behaviour, staff were helped to see that the new behaviour was a ‘good’ way to work and how, through practice, the behaviour gradually became part of the new cultural DNA.
Both Boyd and Heywood held the culture-change process together by living it, talking about it, using it and demonstrating it. There is no doubt that their visible leadership has helped to shift the culture during the past three years.
Reconfiguration of groups – Culture is a dynamic phenomenon that, as well as being shaped by leadership behaviour, is constantly enacted and created by interactions between individuals and groups. In this sense, culture constantly evolves and is shaped through interaction between people. One way to shift culture is therefore by reconfiguring groups within the organisation, mixing up different communities and helping them to interact with each other, creating opportunities for paradigm and reality be reshaped as different groups influence each other’s approach to work. As Edgar Schein of MIT Sloan School of Management puts it, culture happens not so much ‘in’ people but ‘in between’ people (Schein 1999). Therefore by modifying the interaction, we modified the texture of group thinking.
System (Organisational) alignment to reinforce the behavioural change – At the RSC, the great work that the HR and Communications Departments did helped to embed the behavioural changes. Adele Cope (HR) and Liz Thompson (Communications) aligned many RSC systems and processes to ensure there was a ‘systemic’ platform to support the ensemble culture. Many of their impressive efforts have started to pay dividends; I am sure there will be more to come if the RSC continues to work in an ensemble way.
III. Last word
Working across borders with ease and elegance – an ‘ensemble’ way of working – is what most organisations should be aiming for. The exchange of perspectives enables organisations to adapt with greater ease. Leaders instinctively know that paradigm agility and seamless collaboration will lead to agile products (productions in the case of RSC) as well as customer service agility. In the tough economic environment currently prevailing, people need to learn how to behave as entrepreneurs by going across borders to secure resources to deliver results that matter to the organisation.
Initially, the process of becoming an ‘ensemble organisation’ was a value alignment exercise for the RSC. However, I hope the rest of the RSC’s leaders will soon come to see the ensemble approach as a way of becoming agile and flexible, to help the RSC thrive in a turbulent environment with diminishing resources. I hope the RSC case encourages many other organisations to take a bold and innovative approach to preparing their organisation for the future.
Bibliography
Bridges, W. (2003) Managing transitions: making the most of change. New York: Da Capo Press
Bunker, B.B. & Alban, B.T. (1996) Large group interventions: engaging the whole system for rapid change. San Francisco: Jossey Bass
- Economist Intelligence Unit (2008) Securing the value of business process change. A study commissioned by Logica Management Consulting
- Holman, P. & Devane, T. (1999) The change handbook: group methods for shaping the future. San Francisco: Berrett Koehler
- Marshak, R.J. (2006) Covert processes at work. San Francisco, Berrett Koehle
- Schein, E.H. (1999) The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, Jossey-Bass
- Weisbord, M. (1978) Organisational diagnosis: a workbook of theory and practice. Reading, Massachusetts, Basic Books