By adopting a complexity perspective we can look at social change in completely different ways. We start to realise that [complex systems] cannot be changed according to plan or desire; instead the best we can do is to try to build new connections and relationships so that a process of self-organisation can take place.
The following excerpt is from Culture and Complexity: New Insights on Organisational Change, by UK change consultant Richard Seel.
The Nature of Emergence
Emergence is one of the key attributes of complex systems. It is both mysterious and commonplace and very hard to define. Kevin Mihata does as well as any:
…the process by which patterns or global-level structures arise from interactive local-level processes. This “structure” or “pattern” cannot be understood or predicted from the behavior or properties of the component units alone. (The Persistence of Emergence 1997:31)
Most change in complex systems is emergent; that is to say it comes about as a result of the interactions between the ‘agents’ in the system. In an organisation the agents are people—themselves complex systems. Complexity theory suggests that when there is enough connectivity between the agents emergence is likely to occur spontaneously.
The concept of emergence is slippery when we try to examine it in detail but some things are becoming clearer. What emerges is a new pattern, at a higher level in the system from the agents which created it, and the new pattern can feed back down to influence the further development of the lower level (figure 2).
Figure 2—Emergent process: a system of diverse agents (A), richly connected (B), gives rise to an emergent pattern (C), which feeds back down into the system (D).
Figure 2 may be somewhat misleading since it shows a big new pattern emerging. In practice most emergences will be quite small, often appearing to be insignificant. However, appearances can be deceptive since complexity theory suggests that it may take no more ‘effort’ to create a large emergence than a small one.
The work of Per Bak and his colleagues (Bak 1997) shows that when a system is in a state of self-organised criticality it will be subject to changes of all sizes simply as a result of small outside influences. Their example is that of a sand pile, built up by the dropping of a steady stream of individual grains, a bit like the sand inside an egg timer. Once the pile has reached the critical state a single grain of sand dropping onto it may have no observable effect or it may cause a small slippage or even a major avalanche.
The size and frequency of changes follow a power law: that is, the are lots of small changes, fewer medium-sized changes and very few large changes. The point, however, is that the size of the response is not dependent on the size of the stimulus. Once the system is in the critical state even the smallest stimulus may cause major changes.
Human systems are a lot more complex than sand piles but there is some evidence to suggest that they, too, can get into this critical state (see Dooley & Van de Ven 1999). If so, this has profound implications for our attempts to change organisational culture. We should move away from trying to change organisations and instead look at how we might help them become ready for change—to move to a state of self-organised criticality.
Practical implications
The focus of organisational change interventions moves away from ‘planning change’ and onto ‘facilitating emergence’. If we are looking to help a new paradigm emerge we need a new way to think about the role of the change agent—whether external consultant or internal OD specialist. We need a new metaphor.
One possibility is change agent as ‘midwife’. It seems to work reasonably well: the good midwife develops a personal relationship with the pregnant woman; she recognises the uniqueness of each encounter, treating the woman as a living being not a machine; she knows that birth should not be forced but assisted; she understands the importance of working with the body’s natural processes.
Most change agents seem to have a much more mechanical view of themselves—how can you be a good consultant, how can you re-engineer or fix an organisation, if you don’t have a full ‘tool kit’? This is the complement of the prevailing metaphor of ‘organisation as machine’ which has been around since the time of Taylor and Fayol (Morgan 1997). It implies that the change agent can stand outside the system, diagnose and understand its working parts and then intervene to redesign it to operate in a more effective way. The midwife metaphor, on the other hand, has the merit of seeing the organisation as a complex self-organising entity to be worked with rather than worked on. But it does not go far enough; it still places the change agent outside the system. The complex systems approach invites us to work in the system, to give up the illusion that we can comprehend its complexity and to adopt more modest aims.
One approach is that adopted by Patricia Shaw and Bill Critchley (Shaw 1997). They choose to work both formally and informally in organisations helping people have conversations which they might otherwise not have had. There is no linear plan of campaign; instead they work towards helping the organisation become ready for its own transformation. In Bak’s terms they help to remove barriers and open up channels so that the system can self-organise to a critical configuration, where change becomes possible.
An epidemiological approach
Some organisations need more structure and reassurance. Recently, working with the IT division of a major public service organisation looking to change its culture, I developed a different, but equivalent, approach which was both radical enough to offer the prospect of significant change while being contained enough to keep their anxiety at manageable levels. The model I proposed was based on an epidemiological approach to culture change. This is not new; the French anthropologist Dan Sperber (1996) has been using the model for some years although not in the context of organisational development. In terms of this model an appropriate metaphor for the change agent may be something like a virus—except that this virus is benign and welcomed by the host body.
Together with my colleague, Rita McGee, I designed a workshop to be rolled out to everyone in the division. Its explicit aim was to sensitise people to the power of culture and paradigms and to encourage them to discover a compelling vision of a future culture which would motivate them to behave differently. Most importantly, we encouraged all participants to become change agents or ‘missionaries’, spreading the word and engaging in different kinds of conversation with their colleagues. Again, our aim was to help them self-organise.
Thus, by building greater connectivity between people and by encouraging them to make different meaning about their day-to-day working lives we aimed to help the organisation remove barriers and open up channels so that it could self-organise to the critical position and become much more able to change. Organisational change is sometimes characterised as either top-down or bottom-up. Our approach isn’t really either of these. Instead it could be characterised as middle-out: everyone is involved and there is no preferred starting place.
Things are never this simple, of course. Once any real degree of change seems likely the organisation’s ‘immune system’ will start to resist the infection from new ideas and practices. Some people will try to reassert the power they feel they are losing; some will be cynical and pour scorn on the process; some will feel afraid and withdraw from the changes. This is where the senior management have a significant role to play. They must act as an immuno-suppressant, trying to damp down resistance and to nurture and encourage the new behaviours. Until a critical mass is achieved the change is very frail and can be easily destroyed.