Big Little Shifts: A Practitioner's Guide to Complexity for Organisational Change and Adaptation

By Josie McLean

Adaptation has never been so important as it is now, in the disruptive wake of the COVID-19 onset. We are undergoing a whole systems change. The far-reaching impacts on our complex, uncertain world pose questions that individual leaders are unable to answer on their own.

We need a different approach.

The term adaptation comes from th

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Partnership Pty Ltd
• Release date: Aug 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648865018

Josie McLean

Josie began her career as a financial analyst and corporate strategic planner in the automotive and finance industries. She has been fascinated by the intersection of strategy, people, process and change ever since. In 1999, she commenced her executive coaching practice that extended into organisational cultural evolution by 2009. During that year Josie also received the global International Coach Federation President's 2009 Award for her contribution as a cofounder of the professional coaching industry in Australasia. Josie's doctoral thesis involved her as an external change agent within a client organisation to understand how an organisation might transform itself to nurture people and planet- just like a person might - from the inside out. She continues to work in the ambiguous space of adaptive learning and change within organisations and communities. Increasingly her work is turning to teaching others what she has learned about complex challenges and how to move forward within them. Josie continues to research and publish as a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide's Yunus Social Business Centre and is also a co-founder on the global Climate Coaching Alliance initiative.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Why another book on change and leadership?

This book is for you if you are a change agent within an organisation and you want to be more confident and more effective at liberating changes that matter, in an ongoing manner. ‘Change agent’ includes those who are internal to the organisation and those who are external consultants or professional coaches working within the organisation. You may also be in a leadership position or role although I use the term exercising leadership as an action that a change agent undertakes in cultivating the environment for change.

The types of organisational challenges that you may be grappling with may include:

•innovating new ways of working in the post-pandemic crisis

•seeking more innovation – maybe delivering a digital transformation

•delivering more effective outcomes when working with complex challenges in the public service

•developing an organisation capable of being more adaptable.

In my experience, all of these outcomes are seen as a pathway to the most basic of all challenges: continued relevance and survival in a rapidly changing world.

Many change agents I speak with know that change is rarely as neat as the plan suggested it should be. Change is messy and difficult. As I talk with change agents, there are many stories about other people resisting change – but not us! Many change agents know that they have to bring people along on the journey but find it difficult in practice. Leading change can be stressful because our expectations of ourselves as change agents are not met by the delivery of the changes. It can become embarrassing to admit that often we don’t know how to lead or manage change, despite having attended the courses and employed all the step- by-step tools.

Most importantly of all, these changes are also being considered within the context of very busy work lives. So many people tell me that they just don’t have the head space or time to think about the required changes at all!

Understanding change differently

This book identifies and challenges the very assumptions that are generally made about change – what it is and how it occurs.

We can shift from understanding change as something that is decided at senior levels and communicated down the line, to understanding change as a process that we engage people in, enabling change to emerge all throughout the organisation.

Emergent change is the way experimentation, adaptation and change happen in nature or living systems. Emergent change is uncontrolled, but there is order and responsibility. It is not chaotic because it is aligned with an internal DNA which ensures that, for example, a tree remains a tree and does not spontaneously turn into a duck. An organisation’s DNA is its lived vision, values and purpose – it has the capacity to generate order and cohesion.

Challenging the traditional view of change itself and how it happens opens the doors to adaptative change and ongoing business survival and relevance. As we all learn more about engaging with emergent change, we understand that the associated leadership is one characterised by engaging people in developing solutions. That engagement liberates creativity, develops personal strengths, encourages collaboration and opens the possibility of increased productivity to previously unimagined levels. The people involved will feel valued, satisfied and supported in their personal and professional development.

The outcomes that are possible with a shift in the way we perceive the world may sound like nirvana in comparison with most traditional hierarchical organisations. Such is the degree of waste that goes un-noticed within the traditional worldview of planned change models and processes.

The value to be unleashed – generating real change

Business survival and moving beyond to a flourishing, sustainable future means that every enterprise needs to have a greater capacity to learn, adapt and change.

As Figure 1 illustrates, there is an opportunity for a quantum leap in the quantity and meaningful quality of changes emerging as the paradigm informing the assumptions about what the organisation is and how it changes is aligned with the paradigm of complexity.

The typical top-down directive approach to change is a reflection of Newtonian paradigm assumptions that we will identify and investigate further. The engagement approach, on the other hand, is a consequence of perceiving the organisation as a living system or complex adaptive system. The area under the graph is the space that we are seeking to liberate. The paradigm shift that we will explore produces an exponential increase in the volume of change, and a significant qualitative adjustment in the human environment in which you and your people work.

Throughout this book I will use the terms complexity and living systems interchangeably. Complexity is a shorthand term for complex adaptive systems, which are mathematical models that intend to describe the behaviour of living systems. I prefer the term living systems. Humans are living systems, and because of this fact we already know something of how living systems function. We are more than objectified computer models. We each have our own complexity of experiences, personality and emotions that influence the complexity of the challenges we face and our responses. We are a part of the complexity.

Moving from understanding the world through the lens of the Newtonian paradigm to understanding complexity is a paradigm shift. Each of these paradigms can be viewed as almost the opposite of the other. It is a big shift in that sense. And in another sense, it is just a change in the lens through which we view the world. It’s like wearing new glasses. It’s a little shift in that sense – a little shift with big consequences. It’s a big little shift.

Past paradigmatic shifts have enabled step changes

Humans have made such paradigm shifts before, from which great benefits have flowed. We have experienced paradigmatic shifts that have changed the way we view the world, and we also changed ourselves as a result.

For example, in 1539 Copernicus overturned a thousand years of doctrine that the sun revolves around the earth. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, touting natural selection as a process of evolution. This view was considered heresy because it challenged the accepted view of creationism. In 1865, Gregor Mendel showed that genetics were passed on from parent to child, not in an average fashion but over multiple generations with hybrid, dominant and recessive genes. And as recently as 1965, there was acceptance that plate tectonics is an explanation for large-scale geologic change. In 2000, a new term for a new geologic era was popularised by scientists: the Anthropocene.

We should take heart, therefore, that we are capable of transitioning through old paradigms and into new paradigms. Paradigms are, after all, just different ways we think about reality in our heads.

I believe we are capable of a lot more than just transitioning; I believe we are capable of discovering and liberating a great deal of lost human creativity and joy in the process. This is a transition that should be cherished and enjoyed because we have been so blissfully unaware of the costs of the old paradigm! Now, as we recognise these costs, we are able to evolve into reaping the rewards of human ingenuity in a different way – not merely technologically, but in the fullness of our human complexity. We will not leave technology behind, but rather integrate it as we transcend further into what it means to be humans collaborating in organisations.

This book identifies specific how to’s

If the narrative I have offered about the need for a review of what change is and how it occurs is true, then some questions emerge.

1.What is the true nature and dynamic of change?

2.What do we need to do differently?

3.How might we do that differently?

4.How do we develop a culture of adaptability within our organisations?

I have been researching the answers to these four questions, theoretically and in practice, for 15 years. That research has included a doctorate in organisational transformation, complexity, leadership and sustainability. All these words come with loaded meaning, so just accept them at face value for now, but know that they will take on new meanings as we proceed through this book.

Human development

In the background of this ‘how to’ book is a field of study called human adult development as researched by people including Robert Kegan (1982), Suzanne Cook-Greuter and Jeffrey Soulen (2007), and Terri O’Fallon (2010). The study of human development can also be thought of as studying how humans make sense of our world and how we change the way we make sense of our reality over time. This is important because how we make sense of the world impacts what we perceive as being do-able or worth doing.

Increasing complexity is the evolutionary path of life – not only in regard to the biology of species and the natural ecologies of our planet, but also the ways in which we humans make sense of the world around us.

This book is not directly about adult development, but the research suggests that coming into contact with the ideas I present here may fuel your development and your capacity to liberate change in new ways. The paradigm of complexity is itself a way of making sense that is sometimes pointed to as being a specific stage of human development.

The complexity of human cognition has developed over time. You may recall the over-used quotation attributed to Einstein summarised as we can’t solve our current problems with the same kind of thinking that created them. This idea captures, in a nutshell, why we need new ways of thinking about the challenges that we are confronted by. It also reflects the dynamic of how human cognitive capacity develops over time. The human brain adapts as it makes new sense of new