In this post, I want to discuss two different notions of organizational change–episodic and continuous. The following discussion is based on an important publication by Karl Weick and Robert Quinn* in which they assess many recent ideas and theories of organizational change.

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Episodic change is discontinuous and intermittent, something to be carefully planned. It is a sporadic occurrence that hopefully brings the organization to a new and improved equilibrium, where it might remain, unchanging, for some period of time until the next perceived need for change launches another change episode.

Continuous change, by contrast, is emergent, cumulative and pretty much constant. Change is a way of life, not a burden. The organization is viewed, not as a static entity occasionally punctuated by periodic change, but as an inherently dynamic entity, ever-changing, ever-evolving and ever-unfolding.

Here are some further points marking the difference between these two:

A Final Comment

We will continue to explore these distinctions in future posts. However, I want to make one final comment before closing this post.

It can’t escape our attention in relation to continuous change that one of the things we often say about Agility is that it constitutes the capacity of groups and organizations to embrace change. Hence, continuous change may seem a perfect change intervention paradigm for Agile change and adoption. However, we want to be careful about what this implies, particularly in larger, more established, more complex organizations. In future posts, I will attempt to bring together a variety of research in order to orient our thinking and design approach to the adoption of agility in organizations.

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*Weick, K. E. & Quinn, R. E. , “Organizational change and development”, Annual Review of Psychology, 50, pp. 361-86. — You can get a pdf copy (694Kb) of the article here.

[NOTE: I wrote the following piece in 2003, and it appeared then on humansandcomputing.org]

The command-and-control approach to managing people infects many of our teaching, coaching, and managing situations. It all begins when we want to change or motivate another. By externalizing the other as separate from ourselves, and then endowing ourselves with the unique privilege of poking and prodding the other to do what we want them to do–or what we think they want to do, or what they should want to do–we employ what James Flaherty calls the Amoeba Theory of teaching and coaching.

I, as teacher or manager (or coach), can either prod you into doing or being a different way, or I can seduce you with sugar.

Or…

I can employ a different metaphor. Suppose that rather than resonating the subject/object paradigm, and the various notions of separation that paradigm generates, I were to view the world, and relations within it, as an ecosystem whose principle medium would be language. Through language, members of a given organization-be it a family, team, company, group of friends, etc.-create what Humberto Maturana calls consensual domains. Consensual domains are domains of agreements, foundational understandings, presuppositions, and shared perspectives.

Of constitutional significance to our experience within an ecosystem are the interpretive frames through which we come to understand the world and the events that transpire within it. Though for the most part we don’t notice them, interpretive frames play a major part in how we view ourselves, how we view others, our sense of what’s possible, our sense of what we want, and so on.

Interpretive frames are enacted either individually or collectively, since they are embodied in language.

Within the context of this ecosystem metaphor, we might begin to understand the role of a manager a little differently than is customary. Rather than one who effects change by manipulating others, a manager might be one who effects change by collaborating with others in the management of the interpretive frames that govern the ecosystem of concern (individual, group, team, department, entire company, conglomeration).

Managing interpretive frames means constructing situations in language such that the normal way of interpreting the world is momentarily disrupted. In disrupting the normal way of interpreting the world, we bring about, at least momentarily, an insight-an experience, that is, in which the usual presuppositions, emotions, and social constraints are suspended, allowing for the appearance of a fresh perspective.

When all who are affected by the occurrences within a social/cultural ecosystem participate in its management and its ontology, and when it is understood that our language and positions shape not only the ecosystem itself, but the occurrences within it, then the ecosystem can be said to have integrity.

Returning to the amoeba model: Rather than using needles and sugar to try to change the state of the amoeba (which usually doesn’t work for people), we change the nature of its environment so that it perceives itself, and its range of possibilities differently. In light of its differently perceiving, it can make choices that serve its own needs, while engendering an unfolding integrity in its environment.

Resources
Flaherty, Coaching: Evoking Excellence in Others
Maturana & Varela, The Tree of Knowledge

Art appreciation is a course of activity by which we take time to observe and understand our own relation to aesthetic artifacts such as paintings and sculpture.

Organizations, like paintings, are human expressions, with aesthetic import. In order to appreciate (as in art appreciation’) the processes by which organizing occurs, it is necessary that we move beyond the ratiocinative frameworks and ‘styles’ by which we habitually think about, talk about, and attempt to influence those processes. Essentially, this means that we develop a taste for expression (over explication), image (over sense), the particular (over the abstract), the proximate (over the distal), the lyrical (over narrative)—that is, an appreciation for the non-linear, the ludic, the parenthetical, and ultimately the inessential.

Does this mean that we must necessarily abandon the cognitive, the ratiocinative? Not at all. It’s just that analysis, measurement, planning, and structuring are all enhanced when approached with an appreciation for the aesthetic, the lyrical, the particular, and the proximate, and not just the explicative, abstract, general, and narrative aspects of such work.

Karl Weick, luminous organization theorist writes:

If an organization is narrow in the images that it directs toward its own actions, then when it examines what it has said, it will see only bland displays. This means in turn that the organization won’t be able to make much interesting sense of what’s going on or of its place in it. That’s not a trivial outcome, because the kind of sense that an organization makes of its thoughts and of itself has an effect on its ability to deal with change. An organization that continually sees itself in novel images, images that are permeated with diverse skills and sensitivities, thereby is equipped to deal with altered surroundings when they appear.*

The images and metaphors we use to describe our organizations is one of the ways in which we enact them–it is, that is, one of the ways in which we bring that organization into Being. And yet, it is common to think of our descriptions as merely…well, descriptive, not enactive.

This may be why “process improvement” so often fails to engender the kinds of transformation hoped for: it does little more than improve the conditions that are given by the descriptions that brought us to where we’re at to begin with.

Lots of change. Little transformation.

* (from http://www.onepine.info/pweick.htm, retrieved on Aug 16, 2007)

Within the context of the inquiry to which BeautifulSystems.org is dedicated, texture is a special term (it has its own category). So, here I want to say a few general things about texture.

Here are some things you’ll find on Wikipedia:

“Texture refers to the properties held and sensations caused by the external surface of objects received through the sense of touch”

In painting, texture is described as the “feel of the canvas based on the paint used and its method of application”

In music, it’s defined as “a way to vaguely describe the overall sound of a piece of music”

In computer graphics, texture is “a bitmap image applied to a surface in computer graphics”

Here are some points that we may glean more generally from these definitions:

Consider, for instance, the texture of a book. The book has a certain weight when you hold it. It has a particular smell to it. The pages have a certain feel as you run your fingers over their surfaces–a feel that comes about both from the texture of the paper itself and from the very minute protusions on the page that are formed by the ink. the cover has a certain texture.

In addition, the book has other kinds of textures. The font, the setting of the letters. The page layout. And, perhaps most generally, there are the things we do in order to facilitate our reading– the direction in which we turn pages, the scanning orientation (in English, for instance, we move our eyes from left-to-right, from top-to-bottom of the page). The location in the book of footnotes and citations.

All of these aspects of the book don’t just ‘frame’ our experience of reading–in fact, reading would not be reading without these things. (Amazon’s new Kindle attempts to recreate many aspects of book reading, acknowledging the loss of texture which current online reading experiences yield).

Organizations (companies, software source code, communication, etc.) have textures as well. Those textures describe the every-day-ness, the mundane qualities, of those organizations. They define what it’s like to dwell within those organizations (as an employee, as a programmer, as speaker or listener).

Subsequent writings on this topic will continue to flesh out this important aspect of organization, bringing attention to those aspects of organization that are often ignored, often relegated to the inessential. What if, as leaders and organizational change facilitators, we were to turn our attention to the transformation of texture? What would that look like? How might it be manifested, in practice?

Stay tuned.

Most of the things we deal with in organizational occurring are of the nature of relationships and processes, or aspects thereof. E.g. capital, revenue, P&L, stock, throughput, turnover, cost, waste, capacity, etc. The problem is that processes are elusive and hard to describe. It is this very difficulty of processes that prompts managers, out of frustration, to metrics “and other static pastimes” (Weick, 1979:43). By mistaking these snapshots for the realities, they often end up tinkering with the wrong things. In the process, delicate and subtle balances that may be in place are upset which may in turn cause problems for which measures or metrics don’t yet exist. Consequently, things can appear to be going swimmingly well, when in fact they’re not.

Use of lots of nouns in our descriptions of organizations (see, there’s another noun) imputes a spurious character of stability to organizations. Weick writes: “In the interest of better organizational understanding we should urge people to stamp out nouns” (Weick, 1979:44).

Weick, K. E. (1979). The Social Psychology or Organizing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.