Culture Change By Small Steps

This blog article has two accompanying articles:  one on positive culture, and another on positive deviance

The Challenge

‘How can we respond to the staff survey in away that helps to promote a culture change in this organization?’

The Need

This 800-1000 people strong engineering organization was previously part of a Government organization. Many attitudes and behaviours persisted from that time. The organization was a classic top-down command and control structure with a strong emphasis on structure and process. It was becoming apparent that to compete in the commercial world the organization needed to become much better at accessing the strengths of all its employees. It needed to become faster, more flexible and more responsive. As an organization, despite changes in ownership, little had really changed in many years. This was not a situation that could continue. While the employees were skilled workers, many of whom had been there all their working lives, the quality of leadership was variable. There was a much greater emphasis on efficient management than on effective leadership. The HR Director knew that the culture needed to change. She wanted to come at it from a complex adaptive system perspective: as she put it, lighting small fires where she could. During the couple of years she had already been with the organization she had built up good credibility with the senior leadership working on issues such as pensions and performance management and was trusted to act with some autonomy.

The parent organization was disappointed with the results of the first staff survey and wanted to see some improvements fast. The HRD spotted the opportunity to address this challenge differently. This was an opportunity to bring more participative, bottom-up development processes into the organization. It was an opportunity to help the organisation in its expressed, but not yet enacted, desire to become more flexible, responsive and innovative: in other words to move from one where change is a hierarchical, top-down, mechanistic process to one where change is more organic, bottom up and emergent. She engaged us to bring in our expertise in these modes of engagement and change and to work in partnership with her to create this shift in culture. 

In addition it was hoped that the activities and outcomes would have a positive effect on the scores on the employee survey when it was re-run in approximately 6 months. To ensure this connection, the process was to focus specifically on communication, coordination and productivity.

The Process

This idea evolved initially into 4 Appreciative Inquiry based days and 3 World Cafe based events. We would be working with groups of up to 30 people at any one time, both to avoid excessive disruption to production and also to keep the process within the permission and influence remit of the HRD. We aimed to touch 10% of the workforce in one location and 50% in the other.

From these events a number of ideas emerged that the front line staff involved were supported to develop into business case arguments. Once the business case was clear, the groups were supported to create short, impactful, presentations outlining their case to a decision-making panel. Three decision-making events were held,  they involved the project teams presenting their business cases for innovation and change to a senior management panel of three who had to hold their decision making discussions in public and give their answers there and then. These events were attended by all those involved in the project groups and were very successful, high-energy events.

We also ran one Simureal event and two celebration events over two locations over a period of a few months.

In designing this process and running these events we pulled on our understanding of: 

• Organizations as complex adaptive systems
• Organization as social systems
• Culture as patterns of interaction, relationship and communication
• Change through interactions
• Positivity, positive reinforcement, practical outcomes
• Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Psychology

The Outcome

 The employee survey was run six months later with good improvements in all the targeted areas. Other observable outcomes were:

1. 12 active improvement projects, all from the ground up and all focussed on improving work communication, coordination or productivity
2. A number of staff feeling empowered that they had been heard and had been able to put ideas into action. This experience was counter to the strong organizational story that they couldn’t influence things.
3. High quality communication between front line staff and the Managing Director and other members of the Senior Management Team, leading to positively changed perception both of managers of staff and vice versa.
4. An appreciation in the senior team of the value of working in these ways, and a commitment to doing more

By giving people in an organization a different experience of the organization one can begin to shift the perception of the organization. When perceptions shifts so behavior changes in line with the new understanding. Our interventions affected the established patterns of relationship, communication and behavior and so created change. In this way culture change can be encouraged as a system-wide experience of difference rather than as a top-down plan of change.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we can help with Engagement and Culture and how we use Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe and Simureal.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Making Strategy Real

The Challenge

‘We want to hold a strategy conference and we want to do it in a strengths based way. Can you help us?’

The Need

Richard and his commissioning team from the local authority already knew that they wanted to involve myriad local senior decision-makers in the development of their strategy for implementing the government driven initiative ‘Family First’. A day and a venue were earmarked. Up to 200 people were invited. Key-note speakers had been arranged. An exhibition of local services was arranged to run as a trade fair alongside. The planning team knew that within these parameters they wanted to do something different. They didn’t want a conventional conference, they wanted something that was strengths based, something that would make strategy real from the start. Could we help?

The Process 

Working closely with the multi-functional planning team, Appreciating Change designed a day that would be participatory and engaging and would meet the strategic commissioner’s need to develop strategy. Calling on Appreciative Inquiry as a framework, the day was designed to identify existing strengths across the network, to create a variety of shared ideas of what the future could be like if this strategic objective was achieved, and to begin to identify ways to achieve it. The day was delivered by Appreciating Change working in partnership with the planning team.

The Outcome 

The day (attended by 150 people) delivered a number of identifiable strategic results:

•   We improved the social capital of the delivery system of Think Family, that is the quality of trust, knowledge, and information-sharing processes across the system, so increasing the system self-organization abilities and reducing time drag, saving time and energy.

•   We enhanced the relational strength of the delivery system of Think Family, increasing connectivity and the ability for good practice, knowledge and skill to flow to where it is needed to deliver the strategy. We increased the system’s responsiveness.

•   We identified the positive core of good practice that enables Think Family, so identifying the heart of the strategy and saving time and energy collecting and disseminating this information through other means.

•   We co-created a shared understanding, or vision of, and desire for, an integrated, joined up, responsive, flexible, family needs-led, strengthening, honouring, interconnected service for families in the borough, saving time and energy on ‘getting buy-in’ amongst stakeholders to the vision.

•   We helped the system understand itself much better, so enhancing the abilities of the component parts to utilise the strengths of the whole system, increasing overall effectiveness.

•   We created positive energy in the system that enhances its ability to create change reducing the need for driving and motivating as separate parts of the implementation process, saving energy.

•   We created a propensity within the system to act in a greater Think Family way, creating a united strategic intent, saving energy.

•   We created a series of resolutions for individual and joint action that will serve to move things forward, creating positive impact.

All these positive outcomes were achieved at a very difficult time of cutbacks and redundancies (and government change!).

Measured evaluation on the day showed outcomes included increased clarity about how the strategy would look in practice, increased sense that the vision was shared across all stakeholders, greater clarity about the key elements and increased energy and enthusiasm for making it happen. The modal average for all of these indicators moved 3 points on a 10 point scale in a positive direction.

In addition the planning team have now become the sustainability team and are embarking on a process of closely questioning the system to discover detailed stories about the changes in people’s practice and the impact of this on families in the borough. Once discovered, these can be amplified and broadcast to help grow the emerging awareness of system change and improvement.

The Feedback 

Many comments were made at the event about the value of the conversations being held, the stories being shared and the connections being made. One participant was moved to record her appreciation more formally:

‘May I pass on the congratulations of our Line Manager, Mary Taylor, and all members of the Transfer Team for the terrific organisation on this excellent recent conference. The Transfer Team found it to be of enormous benefit and we made some excellent colleague contacts with other teams. We wanted to thank you for the opportunity to learn about the work of other teams and to be able to discuss the work of the Transfer Team with colleagues who have greater direct contact with families who may benefit from our assistance.’

The Council Member was formally congratulated, in Chamber, on the success of the ‘innovative and creative’ event.

In addition the term ‘think family’ became part of the system lexicon, used to call people to good practice and as shorthand for the objective of the changes in practice. This is strategy come alive in hearts and minds.

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on the use of Appreciative Inquiry here and on Strategy here.

 

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we can help with Engagement and Culture and how we use Appreciative Inquiry.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Pulling It Out Of The Bag! The Minor Miracle Of Positive Co-creation

The Challenge

Five strangers have two hours to prepare for a three-hour consulting session with a client they have never met.

We are a British woman, a Greek woman, two Dutch men, and a Dutch woman.  All of us have volunteered to try to help this organisation as part of our two-day experience at the 11th meeting of the Begeistring Network, a European network of people interested in Appreciative and strengths-based ways of working, at Volendam in Holland April 27-29 2011.

We will be working in English throughout. On our first evening we had about an hour to start planning how we might usefully use this opportunity.

Background

Foundation180, we are told, is an organisation that supports youth work by providing proven programmes to help young people in trouble to turn their lives around. The organisation is about 3 months old, being the product of two previous organisations, now joined together. We will meet the project leader and 8-9 of her staff. They have expressed an interest in how to do an appreciative audit of the organisations that use their programmes.

Working Together

As we discussed how to engage with this idea of appreciative auditing, we began to explore why this was an important topic for the organisation. We hypothesised that as an activity it was probably related to a core value of helping young people. This seemed a good topic to explore as part of ‘discovering what gives the system life’. It seemed likely to help create common ground in the group.

It was noticed that one of the challenges to our conversation was the lack of the voice of ‘those being audited’ in our conversation. It was also clear they wouldn’t be present at the meeting tomorrow. We had a challenge of how to bring their voices into the room in a positive way.

We learnt that the project leader was going to do an introductory talk, introducing the organisation to us. We considered how we could relate to this in a valuable and appreciative way and decided to listen for the strengths, abilities, passions, dreams, and resources present in her talk. 

Appreciative Inquiry is oriented to positive change; we knew we wanted to give our participants a chance to share some of their best dreams for the new organisation. Someone remembered some picture postcards available as a resource. We thought we might use them by asking people to select one that somehow expressed their dreams for the future of Foundation180.

In the car the next day these thoughts resolved themselves into a programme, complete with timelines and leads for each section (see below).

How was this possible?

Five people, working with minimum previous connection between themselves or the organisation they would be visiting, were able in a very short space of time, to co-create something they were highly committed to and that had real, real time impact. How was this possible?

I have been reflecting on this minor miracle, and this is my hypothesis.

1.  We had a shared understanding of organisations as social systems and a shared belief in the power of appreciation, inquiry and strengths to achieve positive change.

2.  We were all volunteers, thrown together by chance. There was no ‘leader’. There was no one of whom responsibility for success rested on more than anyone else.

3.  We all had a stake in the success of our afternoon, for our own reputations, for the reputation of the Network, and the reputation of our Dutch hosts who had negotiated these opportunities with organisations they knew personally. They were displaying extraordinary trust in people they had never met. We didn’t want to let them down.

4.  We all understood how to build on either other’s suggestions in a creative and generative way. This is a not a skill that can be taken for granted in groups. Was it because we were all consultants/facilitators? Or because of our general appreciative bent?

5.  We were able to combine our different strengths very well; for example allowing those who were interested in ideas and methods to explore those while those with a stronger inclination to plan and organise detail to do that. Expertise was respected as a resource not privileged as power.

So what happened at the client?

Fortunately the first round of expectation sharing suggested that our plan for the afternoon was a suitable way to proceed and we ran through our plans as outlined. During that, some remarkable things happened:

•   The pride conversations, conducted first as a fishbowl conversation by them and then reflected on by us produced very strong emotions and was experienced as highly affirming.

•   Optimism about the future of the organisation noticeably increased. This was clear by the comments that accompanied the postcards picked to represent the future. While one contribution was still tentatively hopeful, it was identified by the speaker as a shift from a previous position. In other words some hope was generated by our afternoon.

•   An understanding developed about possible good reasons why people might deviate from the established, tried and tested, programmes. Allowing these deviations to become connected to the central value of helping young people started to pave the way for more appreciative audits.

•   The shared values of the two organisations came more to the fore and started to create common ground. This will be a valuable resource and touch-point as the many points of difference between the two organisations will undoubtedly continue to be debated.

•   We hadn’t realised before we arrived the level of tension within the organisation, stemming from the experience of the recent merger. It became clear that our afternoon had created a shared, positive experience. It was the first time they had been able to have such conversations about success, value and pride. We know that shared positive emotions help to create social bonds. This was apparent here.

So five strangers came together with another 8 strangers and together we co-created a positive, valuable, organisation-building afternoon. I continue to find the power of Appreciative Inquiry a minor miracle.

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we work with Appreciative Inquiry.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715