Investing too much time and energy in talking about, analysing, and fighting against the causes of enduring problems or the status quo, creates an environment of defensiveness, blame, and despondency. Leading to battle-weary, demoralised, and disenfranchised employees, incapable of moving the organisation forward to a better future.
Humans versus Machines
Computers, robots, and self-driven cars, respond to different scenarios, based on the logic of their programming.
By comparison, human responses and decisions are predominantly based on emotions.
Organisational change and transformation strategies that focus primarily on logic, to change what people think and therefore do, are foolhardy.
Despite the wealth of evidence that humans, and therefore organisations, aren’t rational actors, rational approaches to change remain the most popular. Based on the appeal of believing by simply creating awareness, communication, knowledge, engagement, and repeating the ‘why’ of strategy and change, employees can be managed through change. Think ADKAR, Kotter’s 8 steps, and Lewin’s 3 steps, but as McKinsey’s The irrational side of change management highlights,
“in the same way that the field of economics has been transformed by an understanding of uniquely human social, cognitive, and emotional biases, so too is the practice of change management in need of a transformation through an improved understanding of how humans interpret their environment and choose to act.”
Deficiency versus Sufficiency
“Research has found that excessive focus within an organisation on dysfunctions or problems for example, can actually cause the situation to become worse or fail to become better.”
Change management reinforcing:
- what’s wrong, what’s lacking, and the consequences of inaction (burning platform),
- identifying and eliminating resistance (people are the problem), and
- what people will have to stop or lose, and do differently, to keep their jobs (impact),
attributes blame, and generates fear and insecurity.
Change that amplifies deficiency, diminishes our human capacity for cooperation, creativity, care, and optimism, the very conditions essential to creating change and innovation in organisations.
Culture of sufficiency and transformative cooperation
It’s the humans in organisations who create great outcomes for their organisation, and employees’ emotional experience of work, is what primarily determines the success or otherwise, of strategy and change.
Psychiatry and positive psychology provide evidence of ways to create great strategy and sticky change, positive psychology defined as the study of
“the conditions and processes that contribute to the flourishing or optimal functioning of people, groups, and institutions.
Strength-based methods aim to identify and enhance strengths or what is being done well, rather than trying to identify and fix what is ‘wrong’ in an individual, group or organisation.”
For organisations to achieve their strategic, change, transformation, and innovation ambitions, they must create the conditions where employees have confidence in their current capabilities. to move towards to a better future.
However, magnifying the existing self belief of an organisation, on its own isn’t enough for successful change and transformation in organisations.
An emotional culture that generates transformative cooperation, is the other essential ingredient, to building the new.
“an effort initiated by people working together to create a fundamental change in an organizational setting. People pool their knowledge, skills, and passion and collectively apply them toward the conceptualization and construction of a novel and dynamic vision for the future.”
Quoting Establishing a positive emotional climate to create 21st-century organizational change,
“positive emotions serve as a mechanism to achieve transformative cooperation, contributing to an organization’s process of dynamic change.”
Conclusion
Adaptive, agile, innovative and change capable individuals, teams and organisations, are built on recognising and celebrating existing strengths, founded on emotional cultures fostering feelings of security, safety, pride, joy, trust, and gratitude.
Boards, leaders, and managers lacking knowledge of the state of their organisation’s emotional culture, put at risk achieving the expected return on investment from their strategy, change and transformation efforts.
