Iturn chage4/24/2023 ![]() Employees didn’t react to the decisions taken when my client was up on his soapbox trying his best to convince them – they reacted later, in the smoking area outside the building. Or at night, when mulling over it in bed. Decisions weren’t made during meetings, but during golfing. And time after time, things happened that put a spanner in the works. Time after time, I found myself standing there with a beautiful set of slides presenting goals, phases, milestones and deliverables. It’s never reason, always emotion that determines how change happens. When I think about all the change processes I have guided or supervised, and I ask myself what it was like, the answer is always: tough, capricious and unpredictable. Organisations never change in a static, linear way. Sorry for being repetitive, but I just really want to make a point here. Our addiction to the rational, explicable, linear, and our obsession with project phases, organisation types, management styles – it has blinded us to what is real. So that is why I don’t get along with you.”), Belbin Team Roles (“We have só many Implementers on our team.”). Just take a look at all these personality tests: Management Drives, MBTI (“Oh! You are an ENTJ. Or Kotter’s phases of change: First, one must create awareness of urgency then, develop one’s vision of the desired change then communicate it then take away the barriers for change then celebrate one’s successes then create more change and finally anchor all of this into the organisation culture.īut also our tendency to rationalise non-rational matters is something we have inherited from the last century. Or, take Hersey and Blanchard’s leadership model: to practice effective leadership, task-immature employees should be managed at task-level, while task-mature people should be managed at the human level. Self-fulfillment and personality development happens only once those other boxes are ticked. Maslow’s pyramid of needs (criticised by social scientists but embraced by leaders) proposes that people are first and foremost motivated to survive: money, security. There are numerous examples of statistical, linear models (“first this, then that”). Nowadays, however, in more ways than one, this model is considered traditional and no longer useful. And all these schemes and representations of reality helped us to think and act. ![]() We used questionnaires and tests to predict behaviour. That was a time when we liked to order our world into manageable parts, processes and structures, into categories of customers, suppliers and employees, and into leadership styles and competences. Although founded on years of empirical research, these theories were based on a reality that existed in the 20th century. This may be counterintuitive to many modern leaders that have been educated with the theories from the eighties and nineties. ![]() Theory U assumes that you – as a person, team or organisation – will only change when you learn how to look differently, openly reflect on each other’s behaviour and thinking, and see the bigger picture. Also, how Theory U can help you: as a leader, as a professional and as a person. In these blogs I explain why I find Theory U so fascinating and important, and how it connects with our favourite psychological theories. It does not represent reality in a simplified and thereby superficial way. Their book justifies the complexity of change processes in individuals and groups. The theory was developed by a number of change theorists, including Otto Scharmer and Peter Senge. Theory U is the coolest and most truthful change theory of the moment.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |