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Successful culture change helps people become who they already are
It’s no exaggeration to claim that behaviourist-informed approaches to culture change still dominate the field. The problem is that they don’t work: phrases such as “managing people”, “shaping behaviours” and “driving change” share assumptions that people are passive...
Culture change and communication: two inseparable partners
Business academic David Needle describes organisational culture as the collective beliefs, values and principles of its members, a dynamic and evolving habitat that arises out of the continually bubbling brew of history, product, market, management style, type of...
Decision-making, behaviour change and thinking about thinking (Part 2)
Let’s look at the third step of Professors Beshears’ and Gino’s change management model: understanding the underlying causes of the defined problem. Two questions are critical here: is the problem mainly due to people failing to act (i.e. insufficient motivation), or...
Generativity: Appreciative Inquiry’s new method of transformation, Part 2
In a seminal paper of 1978, the social psychologist Kenneth J. Gergen argued that normal scientific assumptions couldn’t be applied to the study of human relationships; they simply couldn’t achieve the prediction and control they’d accomplished in the so-called “hard”...
Decision-making, behaviour change and thinking about thinking (Part 1)
There’s a curious fact about decision-making: most of us often make the wrong ones. If you’re trying to decide what to order at a restaurant, the consequences probably won’t be that severe. However, if you’re in a leadership role and you’re trying to enhance employee...
Organisational development: working with complexity and the unexpected, Part 2
In complex open systems such as organisations, the classical logic of linear causality (in which a cause leads to a proportional effect) just doesn’t work. Organisational development and change are shaped by little interactions that have unexpectedly big effects. Tiny...
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