If
we want real change in our organisation, we need a change team
with power to suggest changes that the CEO and Board of Directors
will pay attention to and act upon. This means that the members
of the change team must not be appointed by normal means, but by
change facilitators who are employed for a time to interview people
who are encouraged to put themselves forward as potential change
agents.
No form of truly innovative and superpractical management practice exists
in isolation. There is always a subtle, resonating connection between
genuine positive change agents. This invisible connection is always there
in any organisation, even though its natural members often do not personally
know one another, but each experiences a peculiar day-to-day isolation
in the area of the organisation in which they work.
Amateurish attempts to bring these urgently significant people together
in a way that would overtly materialize their innate, hidden connectivity
often lead to failure. This is because the various potential members
of the change team have been suffering from various forms of attention
deprivation and frustration. Only a truly conscious change team facilitator
from outside the organisation can say when or where or with what composition
of people the subtle connection should be outwardly reinforced for greater
success of change practice in the organisation as a new emergent community
operating under special protocols designed and furthered by the facilitator.
Ordinary management and its way of doing things in the organisation is
a lesser activity. Real change management is a greater activity. If
the senior leaders of the company do not truly empower the new change
team and its unusual, lateral activities, but try to keep the team in
a state of conformity with the usual, lesser activities and protocols
within the organisation, no real change will take place because of this
preliminary dilution and squelching in the name of "change". For one thing, genuine change agents will sense that this is what is happening
and will avoid participation. Once the real talent is staying away, the
less innovative managers who might try to be accepted in the new change
team will only clog it up and render it ineffectual no matter which members
of the ruling board are stupidly excited about the idea and willing to
fund it in the form of something castrated right from the start. It is
after all a common fact that change programs and groups are often promoted
and funded in organisations to at least convince someone
that some sort of good change is being attempted. So, the wrong people
are brought together in the wrong way in the wrong places at the wrong
times while the organisation remains forever bogged down in patterns of
failure nobody can do anything about. It is human nature in all walks
of life to render any form of attempted improvement into some sort of
useless going through motions in rituals of imitation change.
A further barrier to the forming of a real change team in an organisation
is that people who fear change or are incapable of it (who are usually
the ruling majority at any given level of the organisation) will assert
that the truly thoughtful ideas being brought out by genuine change facilitators
and change agents will sound like unacceptably "superior" language. This
feeling however stems only from subjective reactions. Whether a savage
thinks that highly educated people are "giving themselves airs" or even
chooses to fall at the feet of an educated person to worship a "god from
beyond", it is in either case unproductive. Both attitudes conform to
a stage of crude evaluation that in no way perceives the reality of the
situation. However, it is a fact that someone can occasionally be gently
progressed beyond resentful reactions or immature hopefulness and achieve
some useful thinking about all this as to what needs to be newly organised
and why.
Finally, in summation, we can say with confidence that human beings in
any situation have a virtually unlimited potential for possible improvement
and development. Equally, human beings have a virtually unlimited proclivity
for destruction already well-established in the human nature. Because
of this second factor, we often have to observe individuals in organisations
who may be clinically, physiologically alive and yet, despite all appearances,
are spiritually and creatively dead. In such cases, correct observation
and assessment are the only meaningful action possible.
Gary Chicoine
Scotland, July
2003
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