THE PROCESS VS THE CONTENT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
These summer months I’m taking the opportunity to reflect a little on the last year of work with organizations accompanying them in change processes.
Accompanying and facilitating change processes is an absolutely transversal discipline, this is because a change process can have multiple contents. It can be a cultural change, a change of processes, a methodological change, a strategic change, a merger or absorption of companies … .. and any of these and other changes in which an organization embarks, have something in common: all of them will activate the same dynamics or movements, the dynamics or systemic principles of change. And it’s precisely in this part, focused on the process, where people who call ourselves change facilitators accompany the organizations. Knowing how these dynamics and principles operate, and how to facilitate the best possible conditions for change, you can navigate in this change process with the less risk to storms and the least possible suffering for the crew and the ship, which is the organization .
And this is why we can accompany such diverse change processes, something that sometimes surprises. Because we don’t focus, as I said, on the content of change but on the process, on those dynamics that underlie and operate under each change process. Although it’s true that by training and / or experience, we can also have knowledge about the content: cultural, strategic, methodological aspects, etc, etc.
But in the case of not having it and being necessary, we surround ourselves with other professional people with whom we collaborate.
After this preamble and returning to my summer reflection, I was surprised to see how there seems to be professional periods in which work on common content converge as if magically ordered by theme.
In 2018, work has mainly prevailed with organizations that want to make a paradigm shift and get closer to the form of network organizations (or teal *) and agilism.
During 2017 it was to make strategic changes, cultural changes and digital transformation the major assignments I received.
In previous years, the largest component of the works was related to merger-absorption of companies, participatory processes, collaboration, start-ups and entrepreneurship.
This order, magical or casual, pleases me because it allows me to deepen in some contents and develop new theoretical models through the real experience of my clients.
I share here, for example, the leadership model that I created with one of my professional colleagues: Ana Manzanedo.
This model of leadership is built around two variables that perfectly differentiate organizational paradigms.
1.- CHOSEN: if the leader is chosen and accepted by the people who make up the rest of the team, of which she herself is a part.
2.- DISTRIBUTED: if the leadership role, like the rest of the team’s roles, changes people depending on the adaptive needs of the team or if it remains fixed in the same person.
Under our experience, only that leadership in which both variables converge (chosen + distributed) is the right one for an organization under the paradigm in network or teal.
We developed this model to support a company on its way to the teal organizational paradigm, a work that is being carried out by three consultants: Eva Miguelez, Ana Manzanedo and myself. In this work, for example, we aren’t only trained in relation to transformation and change processes but also in terms of content: network or teal organizations. A content that we’re passionate about and in which we’ve been experimenting since 2013 inside and outside the OuiShare network as consultants of Rethink & Remix.
About what 2019 will bring me … I still don’t know completely. We will see what the final photo is that all the works are configured although I start to have my intuitions :)
Happy end of summer for you all!
* Teal. If you do not know this term, I recommend reading the book “Reinventing Organizations” by Frédéric Laloux.
The terms “network organization” or “teal” are not for my taste exactly the same, but … maybe another day write more about it :)