If Price

Active Personal Learning, Guildford UK and Facilities Management Graduate Centre, Sheffield Hallam University

Tel/fax +44-114 253-4032 : email ifprice@aol.com & I.price@shu.ac.uk

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It was the end of a typical one-day management conference in New York. I happened to be in town and dropped in to post conference ëcocktailsí to meet up with a friend who had been speaking. As the crowd thinned I fell into conversation with a guy who, at first sight, looked like another stereotyped, cautious executive but who began to speak with passion and enthusiasm of the new mood that was sweeping the company he worked for [a large food manufacturer]. They had, he said with pride, just completed their ninth record quarter in a row; results driven not by lay-offs but by people thinking and behaving differently.

ìHow?î I said, having just spent two years living through what was shaping up to be a similar, though not so painless transformation.

ìI guessî said my companion ìit started with our new CEO. Heís Australian. They are differentî.

ìToo right sportî said I - giving free rein to a long subdued Sydney drawl. ìWhat did he do?î

ìWell I guess it started when he blew up the headquartersî

ìWhat? You mean literallyî

ìThatís right. Ours was a company proud of our traditions. The Head Office was in the original building designed by ......[the founder] when he built the first plant. Bruce [Iíve forgotten the manís real name] had it dynamited. He videoed the occasion and sent everyone in the company a copy. They got the messageî

At the time I was working for the worldís third largest oil company leading what the CEO had called the Process Review project. Part of our role was to be one of the catalysts for a transformation that he had kicked off two years earlier. Part was to examine what practice and theory existed in other organisations and in the consulting firms and business schools from whom they were drawing inspiration. We were coming to see organisational change and learning as dynamic and individualised process. And we were beginning to find metaphors from biology and geology particularly appropriate to capture the essence of the change process. Perhaps it helped that I was once a geologist.

In a nutshell we had concluded that the process of organic evolution in a dynamic ecosystem provides the paradigm with which to understand organisational adaptation, both in general and in the specific case of our own experience. Contrary to popular misconception evolution is not a process of gradual steady state change but is instead the organic response to punctuation of a normal equilibrium. Similar dynamics exist in organisations. The process of lasting change, however it is achieved is one of interrupting whatever it is creates and sustains an organisationís equilibrium. Big bangs in the HQ are one way to do it, literally as in the case above, or metaphorically. They are not the only solution for, contrary to the ëone best recipeí schools of both managers and their advisers there is no one best way. There may however be one basic process.

OUR EXPERIENCE

The ëbig bangí in the company I then worked for, BP Exploration, was instigated by a series of management conferences and special projects designed quite specifically to raise the level of creative tension in the organisation and to weaken the influence [as well as reduce the size] of various central functions. After a year of raised tension each operating centre in the company was charged with making, over the ensuing three years, a breakthrough in its operating margin. The details do not matter. Suffice it to say that the figure demanded exceeded ëreasonable expectations from industry benchmarksí and was generally held to be impossible. Every operation achieved it in under two years, each in its own way, with the help of whatever advisers it choose to employ.

Our Process Review team lurked in the background as a stick which might be used by the CEO if he had to but without the formal power to influence how any change was achieved. In the event the stick remained unused, at least where the formal operations of the organisation were concerned Every local management team discovered its own solutions, each of which involved challenging the patterns of thinking and behaviour that had previously prevailed; its own assumptions about its business.

In this respect the company was like few others that we visited during the course of the project. In the others, in case after case, we saw equivalent head-office groups and their chosen advisors involved in designing and mandating, or facilitating, the process of change. In very few such cases were lasting results achieved even when the change processes gathered a momentum and life of their own.

For a year and a half the process was distinctly uncomfortable for those of us in the team. The lack of formal authority to act within a conventional structure was hard to take for a group whose managerial careers had, until then, been developed within conventional frames of reference concerning authority and conventional political structures to get things done and advance ones own career. Only gradually did we realise that a perceived source of weakness when we started was a source of strength which triggered our own innovations in learning from the experience of business units undergoing change and in discovering means to energise that process. As we did so our paradigms shifted from a primary focus on the formal business process of how things are done to an understanding of the need to integrate business and human dynamics if lasting differences are to be made. An organisation is an amalgam not only of hardware and software [physical resources and operating systems] but also of ëlivewareí; people and the thinking processes, belief systems, behavioural codes, and conversational habits that shape their day to day actions.

LIVING COMPANIES?

Since then of course our experience of the failure of many centralised ëchange initiativesí has been validated many times by research reported in business literature. Yet still the search for the one best way to tune the machine that is the organisation continues. Gradually however, with advances in theory and practice, with insights from the newer business gurus and with progress in applying the emergent science of complex adaptive systems to organisational settings, a new paradigm of organisations is indeed emerging. The world of management is coming to realise that organisations, quite literally, have a life of their own. Like organic species they evolve and adapt, or else go extinct. They exist in networks of interacting entities called economies or ecologies; systems in which individuals occupy particular niches and systems that have, on various time scales, the property of maintaining a quasi-stability for long periods of time between intervening short moments of change.

To the extent that evolution penetrated classical management thinking it was as a metaphor for gradual and even managed change. ìEvolution not revolutionî is the plea, not least, of managers seeking to control and perhaps limit the pace and impact of change in their particular company. Yet the evidence of geological history is that evolution does not work like that: its tempo, relative to the time available, is stasis or near stasis interspersed with crisis. Evolution is either revolution or it is nothing. The new view of geological evolution is itself only some 20 years old. It started with reappraisals of what geologists call the ëstratigraphic recordí, with the evidence from oil exploration wells and particularly with the seismic technology developed in the oil industry since the early 1970s. Without repeating here details that have been amply documented elsewhere suffice it to say that since then we have come to realise that the history of both physical and biological environments on the planet has been, as an early pioneer of the new thinking put it ëlike the life of a soldier; long periods of boredom and short moments of terrorî. Why? And more importantly why [on a different timescale] does organisational evolution show the same dynamic. What is the source of an organisationís equilibrium, its stability and even its tendency to seek to preserve that stability even as the world around it changes?

For an organic species the answer is its genetic code; information chemically coded in molecules of DNA which effectively specifies the form of a species, enabling it, or more precisely individual organisms within the species to be better survivors than their rivals, but at the same time limiting the individual to be what is specified by the genes; no more and no less. From the ëgeneís eye viewí of the world this is a suitable state of affairs for the gene is a replicator, interested without conscious forethought in producing copies of itself. The inherent tendency of genes to replicate is the driving force of evolution. To do so they must build ësurvival machinesí, organic bodies, that will reproduce in a world populated by competing survival machines encoded by rival gene complexes. These complex systems of interacting genes and the bodies they specify seek the stability of an Evolutionary Stable System or ESS; one in which, within the limits of fluctuating populations, a stable genetic mix is preserved. Most variants are swamped in the larger gene pool and bursts of innovation [evolutionís moments of change] happen when either the biologic equilibrium is physically punctuated or when small populations evolve in genetically isolated communities. So do organisations have their equivalent of the genetic code?

We believe they do. Examine any organisation and you will find a series of unwritten but widely followed ërules of the gameí; rules that specify sensible behaviour for those who wish to remain in and prosper in the organisation. You will find ëmentalí models or paradigms, codes of behaviour and patterns of values and beliefs that govern who belongs and who does not. You will find particular assumptions and meanings conveyed and created in the nuances of language and jargon that an organisation employs. You will find traditions that are accepted as part of the way things are around here.

My colleagues and I have stopped trying to make precise distinctions between say a belief system, a set of shared values or theories in use, or paradigms or mental models. It is not clear where the unwritten rules of a particular company become its ëcultureí or the way things are round here. We prefer to say that every organisation has a pattern ë a mix of shared thinking and languageí which enables it to operate. Until some such shared pattern emerges, whether it is a strategy, sense of business purpose and objectives, a set of religious beliefs, a shared language, or a prevailing set of theories underpinning an academic discipline no organisation exists. There is a chaos of random interactions upon which some would be leaders seek to impose order by force of personality or rewards. The collective pattern defines the organisation. In the language of complexity theory it is the attractor around which the organisation stabilises.

Conventional views have it that we humans create organisations and perhaps that they in turn create patterns but consider the organisation from the patternís point of view. By enabling, and in effect specifying a certain form of organisation a pattern seeks, again without conscious forethought, its own replication in the world. It works in precisely the same way as the genotype of an individual organism or the genome of an organic species. It is in fact a replicator, enabling the appearance in the world of the ësurvival machineí that will ensure its own replication. In the language of biological ideas now finding their way into philosophy, psychology and organisational theory the pattern is the memetic code of the species.

Just as fundamental change in the organic systems, whether designed or evolved, requires a shift in the prevailing genetic codes so we argue in organisational systems a change requires a shift in the prevailing memetic or mental pattern; the collective ëmeaning setí that is transmitted by an organisations unwritten rules of behaviour, by its language and indeed by its cultural artefacts. Just as religious buildings, whatever their other functions, help preserve the belief set embodied in a particular religion so a corporate edifice, like the one destroyed in the example with which I started the article, helps preserve the underlying pattern of an organisation. To create a change that pattern must be shifted, whether by design or accident. Those who design change programmes that do not shift an existing pattern should not be surprised when the pattern strikes back; for when the chips are down the pattern is not there for the good of the organisation. It is, like The Selfish Gene, there for itself. It operates on the minds of people who carry it to ensure its own survival, as surely as a flu virus operates on their bodies, inducing behaviours selected to enhance a replicatorís chances of replicating. Change the pattern, either by changing the context in which it operates [dynamite can do the trick1] or by changing the conversation and rules by which it is transmitted and you change the organisation.

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In reaching the theories put forward here my colleagues and I have drawn upon emerging ideas from many fields of practice and theory. With a colleague Ray Shaw co-author of a forthcoming book ëShifting the Patterns: Transforming the codes of personal and organisational performanceí. I try to explore these ideas in more detail and acknowledge the many sources from whom we have drawn inspiration.

Readers wishing an academic summary may find it helpful to refer to my paper Organisational Memetics: Organisational Learning as a Selection Process: Management Learning 1995 Vol 26/3 pp299-318. A less academic approach, with updated references is Price. I and Shaw R. Parrots Patterns and Performance: Emergence of a New Management Replicator delivered in May 1996 to the annual meeting of ECLO; [The European Consortium for the Learning Organisation] and available from them, and over the www from September this year.

During the Process Review experience I had the unique opportunity of working with Peter Scott-Morgan whose approach to analysing The Unwritten Rules of the Game, was subsequently published by McGraw Hill in 1994. Shifting those rules remains for me one of the essences of pattern shifting.

Ilfryn [If] Priceis a consultant/ educator/ researcher and writer/speaker on ëchangeí. He originally trained and worked as a geologist in many parts of the world. Before creating the Process Review Team described here he was manager of BP's world-wide Exploration and Production Research Division. In April 1993 he left corporate life to co-found The Harrow Partnership Limited; a group devoted to helping people and organisations release the potential trapped in their limiting patterns. If is also a Visiting Fellow of Sheffield Hallam University where he teaches benchmarking and organisation transformation and facilitates several organisational learning forums. With his partner Hazel he also directs Active Personal Learning a company dedicated to helping individuals and smaller business grow through the use of accrediting acquired competencies.