Full AMED Members and O&P Subscribers can download individual articles
or the complete journal in pdf format. If you would like to
become a Full AMED Member or an O&P Subscriber please click
here to join or here for
contact details. You can also download the
ContentsTable.pdf

Editorial by Chris Rodgers
A couple of years ago, on route to the local railway station, I
happened to be listening to a radio 'phone-in programme on how best
to raise children. Concerns had resurfaced in the previous day's
news about the detrimental effects of youngsters' growing
attraction to fast food, computer games and activities that offer
instant gratification.
It was about forty minutes into the discussion when a woman named
Susan Strang called in to the programme. A one-time presenter on
children's TV, Ms Strang explained that she had been campaigning
for the past twenty years or so on children's issues. The essence
of her argument was that the lack of playing fields, the
marginalising of in-school sport and the dearth of extra-curricular
activities meant that many children had no sense of what they were
missing. In effect, they had little choice but to behave in the way
that they did. She advocated a much greater emphasis on re-creating
opportunities for social and sporting activities and meaningful
relationships.
One of the studio guests was quick to dismiss this line of argument
on the basis that the children of today
want to eat
junk food, spend hours playing computer games, and get instant
gratification from whatever they do. In a one-sentence response,
Susan Strang said something that immediately struck me as profound
in a wider context. Not only was it a brilliant retort to the
'that's life' comment of her challenger but it also seemed to me to
sum up what effective, value-creating consultancy and development
is all about. She said:
"It's not our job to give them what they want, it's our job to
give them what they didn't know they could have."
Giving clients what they don’t know they can have seems to me to be
a key role for developers, as the country moves falteringly out of
recession and managers once again turn to face the future.
According to official figures, the recession is over – even if
‘growth’ in January 2010 registered just 0.1 per cent on the
‘clutching at straws’ scale. But the challenges facing
organisations and those who advise them are far from over. Will
managers learn the harsh lessons of the past eighteen months or so
and look for new ways forward? Or will they brush them off as a
painful but passing ‘blip’ and continue largely as before? How will
we, as consultants and developers, rise to the challenge? Will we
be willing and able to offer them “what they didn’t know they could
have”? And, if so, what might some of these new perspectives,
processes and practices be?
In this edition of e-O&P, the editorial team of
Deb
Booth,
Gary Purser and myself have sought to rise to
that challenge by assembling a number of articles that offer some
different – and sometimes provocative - perspectives on leadership,
change and organisational dynamics. Our purpose in doing so is to
challenge managers, consultants and developers to reflect
critically upon the assumptions that shape their current
practice.
The series of articles begins with
Alastair Turner’s
reflections on how the focus of his coaching work has shifted
during the recession. Using feedback from his clients, he
identifies five behaviours that make coaches more effective in
responding to shifting client agendas and helping them to enhance
business performance. He argues that the emerging challenges will
require leaders “to be more reflective, ask new questions, seek new
answers and to behave differently.” He concludes that rebuilding
their personal credibility and regaining the trust of their staff
will be pivotal to leaders’ success in this.
Rebuilding trust is also at the heart of
Beth Duff’s
article, on the use of equine-assisted learning to develop
leadership capability. In a passionate plea for a return to what
she describes as “traditional values”, she tells the story of how
she has used horses to help leaders reconnect with these in a
powerful way. What struck me particularly was that she has now
taken the learning onto a new level; blending the physical and
emotional experience of working with horses, with in-depth
conversations about power, authenticity and relationships that
these in-the-moment encounters have stimulated.
Penny Mavor similarly emphasises the importance of leaders
paying attention to what’s going on in the here and now, when she
takes us into the field of mindfulness. Sub-titled “embracing the
future by understanding the present”, her paper draws together the
latest thinking on this age-old topic and shows how it is highly
relevant today; not only to individual leadership practice but also
to leaders’ efforts to develop high-performing organisations. “Were
we fully awake?” she asks about the pre-crisis state of affairs.
And, more particularly, will leaders “wake up to a better way” and
cultivate mindfulness as a route to greater awareness, insight and
success?
Paul Z Jackson and
Graeme Summers combine their
experience of a range of coaching interventions, to show how
leaders can face up to the complex challenges of an uncertain
future by fostering a culture of improvisation. They use the
metaphor of game playing to describe the ways in which people act
and relate in organisations; recognising that these games, and the
outcomes they generate, can be either positive or negative. Drawing
on a number of brief case studies, they demonstrate how
Transactional Analysis, the Solutions Focus approach and Applied
Improvisation can be combined to help leaders to ‘change the game’
– making them potentially more constructive and performance
enhancing.
Culture is also on the minds of
Emma Langman and
Fiona
Cozens, as they tell their story of change in South
Staffordshire Council. Looking at the project from their different
perspectives, as external consultant and in-house manager, they
describe how the centre of gravity of change leadership was shifted
from the authority’s Senior Management Team (SMT) to those closest
to the work. This move towards what they call “learner-led change”
was facilitated by initial coaching of the SMT in the important art
of ‘letting go’ and the introduction of a range of systems-thinking
concepts and practices. “Prepare to be surprised by the scale of
your people’s ambition for change” is a potent conclusion that they
draw from their experience.
Bob MacKenzie shifts our attention towards the crafting of
organisational strategy, and how we might do this more effectively
through the more thoughtful - and essentially improvisational - use
of writing. Consistent with a number of the articles, he advocates
a shift in focus from the macro level (here spoken of in terms of
“grand strategy”) to what’s going on in the everyday exchanges of
local interaction. He characterises this as a move from seeing
strategy as writing (a finished product) to focusing on the act of
writing itself - as an ongoing and emergent process of strategy in
the making.
Each of the above articles explores a different aspect of
organisational practice, and how this might be enhanced by new
approaches to individual and organisational development. The two
remaining contributions focus instead on the underlying dynamics of
organisations. In their different ways, these both offer a
fundamental challenge to the way that we understand organisations
and explore the implications of this thinking for leadership
practice.
Although
Irwin Turbitt’s paper might be seen as a treatise
on problem-solving in organisations – which it certainly offers – I
believe that his analysis of organisational dynamics goes deeper
than this. In particular, he highlights the tendency for managers
to see the challenges they face primarily in terms either of
problems to be solved or crises to be commanded. Instead, he points
to the inherent complexity of organisations; and the intractable
nature of many of the issues that managers face. He therefore sees
a critical task of leadership as being one of mobilising people to
take responsibility for tackling tough problems themselves, ahead
of the usual focus on setting out a vision for others to
follow.
And so to my own article. Commissioning Editor Deb Booth asked me
if I would share my ‘post-crisis’ thoughts on OD and change as
viewed from an “informal coalitions” standpoint. The result is
therefore best thought of as a personal ‘opinion piece’. If this
challenge to established thinking leads readers to shift their
perspectives – or even to reflect on and reaffirm their own views –
it will have served its purpose. If it provokes new thinking on
leadership, change and organisational dynamics, so much the
better.
Finally, the challenge to management orthodoxy that is offered by
these last two articles is also echoed in my review of Ralph
Stacey’s latest book, Complexity and Organizational Reality. Using
the economic downturn to illustrate his argument, Stacey presents a
radical challenge to what he sees as the failure of investment
capitalism, and of the managerialist assumptions that have been
imported into the public sector. Instead, he argues that management
and leadership are essentially social phenomena, which call for a
fundamentally different approach to that offered by conventional
management wisdom.
As developers weave their way through an uncertain and emerging
future, the Stacey review and the Turbitt and Rodgers articles
provide the metaphorical ‘warp’, through which they can interlace
the ‘weft’ of the specific concepts, tools and techniques discussed
in the earlier articles. With skill - and a little luck - the
result might not be something that clients want but, more valuably
perhaps, something that they didn’t know they could have!
Acknowledgements
This e-journal would not have materialised without the persistence
of Deb Booth and the support of her fellow Commissioning Editor,
Gary Purser. Thanks are also due to Gary’s son, Matthew, for his
excellent work on the cover design and the formatting of the final
text.
About the Author
Chris Rodgers works as a consultant, facilitator and coach,
across a wide range of organisations in both the UK and
internationally. He is also Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at Cass
Business School, City University, London. His book, Informal
Coalitions, was published globally by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007.
He can be contacted by email at chris@chrisrodgers.com .