As we all continue to come to terms with ‘hybrid’ ways of working, it inevitably means that we should adapt the way we enable transformation and change in organisational life. Getting colleagues – who have become even more dispersed and time poor - to collaborate across role and departmental boundaries has become even more challenging. In our experience, it has profound implications too for the role of consultants.
It’s early May and I’m just back from working in Devon. For each of the last 7 years I've been running an annual workshop on ecological thinking and organisational change at Schumacher College, a few miles outside the town of Totnes.
Finding new possibilities for how to enable cultural change and transformation. In our last blog, we talked about applying “a liberal dose of science and an equal measure of art” when exploring organisational culture and change. As practitioners, one frame we find helpful comes from John Heron and Peter Reason (2008), who talk about there being 4 “ways of knowing”:
We have been working in and around organisations long enough to have noticed a cyclical obsession with changing culture as a panacea for transformation and renewal. But is it helpful to describe this kind of change as if it is something we can master by applying some kind of cause and effect approach?
During a recent meeting with a prospective client (let’s call him Paul), I was struck by how much he didn’t want us to sell what we did. He seemed to be much more fascinated in how we felt able to "just be ourselves"(his words). At one stage his challenge was “yeah, yeah I know when you are consulting you can do all that. I’m sure you will be good at partnering with us or anyone.
As January comes to a close, I was reflecting that I quite like this time of the year though that’s not a sentiment I hear very often. It’s not that I don’t carry my own guilt about over consumption or a vague existential angst about what I am doing with my one precious life.
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