Mainly a set of diagrams, the discussion asserts that enterprise change is an alignment of three independently viable dimensions of decision-making that must negotiate their influence on each other from a shared point of view. The “semantic” aspect of the assertion is in the naming convention that it presents; the use of the convention intends to convert the morass of apparent complexity in discussions about change into a small number of simple responsibilities that account for actions and effects.

Reminiscent of deep structure in linguistics, the approach excavates underpinnings that are fairly universal, can be tested logically and empirically, and systemically accounts for varying articulations and versions things without carve-outs necessary for misfit exceptions.

Readers familiar with Theory of Constraints, Lean, CoBIT, Agile, Design Thinking, ITSM, Disruptive Innovation, and many other views will recognize where those efforts fit on the map of the basic picture presented. The most basic familiar issues are also mapped.

See the full walkthrough here.

A Semantic Model of Enterprise Change was originally published in #FutureofChange on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• The organization is trying to conduct business change
• The workplaces needed for the changes are going through operational changes
• The individuals needed in operations are personally going through functional and possibly occupational changes.

The scenario is one of dizzying complexity, with three moving targets also being launchpads trying to hit each other.

Five points come to mind for serious clarification now:

1. What does the organization most need People for?

2. How are the needs best prioritized?

3. How do people see themselves in that context?

4. What do people need, so as to do what the organization needs?

5. Is it clear that in your organization people will get what they need?

Too many think the answers are obvious, yet don’t use them. And too many others think the issues are obscured or mired in minutia with no answers. In both cases, this is the right time to step back and see the whole anew.

In the following — “Organizing People-Driven Change” — we reconnect the organization’s idea of people to the People’s idea of people, setting the terms for designing the enablement and alignment of people in their work for change.

An assessment of the current state is the natural follow-up to having a new model of interpretation. With the current state interpretation, there emerges a logical effort to transition to a future state with the benefit of the model. Without a model-driven assessment of the current state, a transition to a different model of a future state is far more speculative, as the enablement of change is not environmentally prepared as a starting point. Most importantly, the assessment shows why people will see themselves as the determining agents of changing how the organization changes.

ChangeBridge works with companies to apply the assessment model transparently and consistently, laying the groundwork for clearly navigating the requirements for organizational transition in a strategic manner.

Organizing People and Change was originally published in #FutureofChange on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the recovery period of today’s pandemic, nearly every day (including weekends) features a discussion about where work is getting done.

This is typically framed as a debate about Work FROM Home — regarding how much of a staff can or should work that way, and how much of a given staffer’s workload can or should be done that way.

There is a consensus forming that Work FROM Home (“WFH”) is here to stay in some proportion. But the flip side of the coin is Work TO Where?

Work At… Work From… Work To Where?

The following takes the position that the “workplace” is just a localized operational implementation of an intention that extends from the organic center of the organization — its “executive function” capability.

The executive function creates intention from making decisions about why and what to do in given acknowledged conditions. The “doing” is work at a location.

Work status streams from the operational location back into the executive function, where processing regenerates, reiterates, or revises intention.

Environments of work

Management is an element of the executive function, focused on promoting and facilitating the realization of the intent.

Other elements of the organization create additional components of the environment for the operation of all functions, with the two most important components being structure and culture.

The management element also creates cultures that are part of the operating environment.

Executive function for “Purpose”

Organizations have, by definition, a purpose. The key to the definition is that a desired operation actually requires an organization, instead of just an assembly, as an enabler. The “purpose” is to be able to conduct an operation that is not sufficiently viable or sustainable without the structural functionality of an organization.

Corporations have, in reality, only a circumstantial need for an organization. There are corporations that have no organization aside from a single individual as an owner. But corporations solicit their circumstances and interpret them in terms of achieving asset value. That interpretation may then dictate the need (purpose) for having an organization, which the corporation then institutionalizes (“incorporates”).

A Confusion of Purpose

The conventional narrative about purpose in “corporate organizations” does not consistently say which is more dominant: the corporation or the organization.

Additionally, and with high frequency, no distinction is clarified between “corporate culture” and “organizational culture”.

Instead, the typical narrative readily conflates the two types by mis-attributing the key influences that differently shape them and are shaped by them.

Demystifying Purpose

Let us repeat the key facts: there are corporations with no organization, and there are organizations that are not incorporated. Now let’s add a few more…

• The dominant concern the corporation has about an organization is predictability. But the dominant concern the organization has about itself is coherence.
• In both cases, “management” is expected to have the primary daily role of successfully monitoring and influencing the dominant concerns.
• But, in effect, that means there are two different management cultures.

Demystifying Management

For the purpose of discussion, we will say that a “manager” is a person acting in a role that has the primary responsibility for monitoring and influencing the dominant concern of predictability or coherence.

All managers then have at least this one other thing in common: we ask of a manager, “what do you know about what’s going on, and what are you going to do about it?”

We pose the question in the pursuit of what is necessary and sufficient as “management”.

The question filters an enormous range of events and stimuli down to the set of factors that distinguish “managing” as awareness and influence - both intentional, and in a causal relationship with each other.

Demystifying Culture

That relationship of awareness and influence creates the de facto conditions we experience as the management culture.

One management culture is the corporate management culture, which prioritizes predictability.

The other management culture is the organizational management culture, which prioritizes coherence.

How do they co-exist?

Cultural Alignment

The corporate management culture aspires to assure that an organization at its service focuses itself (its coherence) on the corporate concern (predictability). This means that corporate interventions in organizational management may be neither unusual nor unexpected. The question behind their impact is, when are they necessary?

The organizational management culture, if the organization is incorporated, aspires to assure that reaching the threshold of corporate satisfaction is a problem solvable with the design (current or available) for sustainable functionality of the organization. An incoherent organization will be dysfunctional regardless of the corporate thresholds.

The above is, essentially, an engineering paradigm.

However, organizational management culture, on its own terms, is not “about” corporate concern.

It is about scales of sustainable co-operation.

Management culture in practice

Conventional management, in both corporate and organizational culture, is under pressure now (year 2021) from forced disruptions of at least two kinds: COVID aftermaths, and generational social shifts. Generic synonyms for those two issues are worksite distribution, and ethical practice, respectively.

Corporate management culture has relied heavily on the influence of personal presence.

• In current conditions, both the behaviors and opportunities for that influence have been seriously challenged by workforces being dispersed and by information flows being reinvented.
• Predictability is at stake.

Organizational management culture has relied heavily on tactics intended to generate agreement in behavior.

• In current conditions, terms of agreement have come into question where they are losing measurable reliability as formulae for productivity, especially due to newer inhibiting issues of participatory equity.
• Cohesion is at stake.

Below, we’ve envisioned how managerial influence generates the environment of operations identifiable as management’s culture.

Adaptive Management

The argument of the above is for what management must adapt in its creation of cultures, to address both the corporate concern and the organizational concern, by re-imagining modes of influence.

Corporate management influence relies on determining how to generate the demonstrable experiences of proximity having consequential impacts on predictability. We described this challenge as agency. The new requirement is to use it for organizational purpose.

Organizational management influence relies on determining how to generate the demonstrable experiences of contact having consequential impacts on cohesion. We described this challenge as commitment, with a requirement to use it for proactive engagement.

While the co-presence produced with new methods might be thought of as increasingly “virtual” in comparison with “physical”, it is crucial that the consequences be “actual” as opposed to “assumed”.

Consequences set or change culture.

© 2021 malcolm ryder / archestra research

Adapting Management Culture was originally published in #FutureofChange on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a HR professional, you’ve already worked through the necessary listing of requirements (responsibilities) and experience (skills).

Most likely, your resulting published job description blends items that are considered universally definitive of the role, with items that are locally distinctive about having the role in your organization.

But how has the decision been made to cast a worker in the role?

The goal is going to be to maximize timely effectiveness, and a generally available choice is between a full time employee (FTE) and a consultant.

Often the decision to use an FTE is an important tactical one that is part of completing or optimizing the design of organizational accountability. FTEs generally occupy “space” and use communications that are prescribed for predictability and therefore presume operational efficiency.

In comparison, a consultant is a tactical decision that often is primarily about immediately deploying expertise at higher levels and with more mobility. The working presumption is that strategic impact will be more likely increased.

Those differences aim more at responsibilities than they do at capabilities. We know that’s true because there are quite visibly, in recruiting, more than enough people available with the demonstrated experience to show up in either capacity.

But the wisdom of the path chosen is in whether it correctly identifies the more dominant business need.

• One path (FTEs) emphasizes execution and process compliance.
• The other path (consulting) emphasizes capability development and maturity.

Solving the Right Problem

Obviously, that distinction reflects the organization’s idea of its current state of readiness to successfully conduct managed change.

But there are two key issues coloring that assessment.

One: after decades of models and certifications and other prescriptive knowledge, why are failure rates for managed changes still at 67% or higher? Is the job description literally asking for the same things that historically account for 2/3 of efforts failing?

Two: what is the working idea of what actually gets managed in change? Does it describe the status quo organization more than it actually describes change? Does it acknowledge that “normal” now means ongoing change, with greater frequency and variety?

We’ve seen single job descriptions that contain as many as 25 different criteria. Somewhat differently, our comparison of many dozens of different published job descriptions gave a collective list of criteria in the same neighborhood: 20 to 30 different criteria. (Some criteria are not exclusive to managing change but are supportive or circumstantially necessary, according to the employer.)

Decision Support

Acknowledging that fact, our analysis of those criteria brings up the following things more specifically about change management.

HR — you already got approvals for the job description. But what about…

• Bang for the buck of each requirement? — no role succeeds alone; what other roles immediately become more valuable due to this one?
• What is not addressed in the Change Management lifecycle? — is the role’s scope of coverage solving a specific and explicit problem? And is the scope right-sized?
• How to prioritize change phases? — a change has multiple phases from definition to adoption. The new normal is multiple concurrent changes; are strategy and portfolio managers already in place to handle synchronization and interdependencies?
• Experience beyond certifications? — who knows how the organization’s culture helps or hurts the role? Who knows how to determine it?
• How to grow the role? — is the plan clearly about change management maturity rather than about status or career advancement?
• How to integrate the job among other permanent staff roles? — do staff members know how fundamentally collaborative managed change must be?

Solver Profiles

What to emphasize in the responsibilities (enablement, not execution):

1. Strategy and Executive alignment

2. Stakeholder communications — all levels & directions

3. Culture and Capability ecosystem

4. Risk and Opportunity Assessment

5. Change Management Education and Professional Development

What remaining responsibilities can grow with and from a CM consultant’s relationship with your staff:

• Performance improvement — clarifying what is causal and what is prerequisite
• Knowledge management — perspective that is broader than one organization’s experience
• Sales Support — leveraging communications consistently across the supply/demand spectrum

Recognizing the Solution

Is consulting an opportunity that is too good to pass up?

Good consulting increases enablement and readiness quickly, before executing, and stays focused on building the organization for continual change. Knowledge transfer is continual, and the role flexes with demand, at a minimum of administrative impact.

Highlights of the coverage:

• Including all stakeholders from the beginning — get visibility there very quickly
• Fully aligning people factors and business process factors as Change Production
• Correctly articulating the ROI of Change Management in the context of other existing competencies
• Focusing on strategic capability maturity for sustained agility versus continually oncoming changes.

And, of course, the role is itself part of transition and transformation, with its duration defined by current-state relevance.

© 2021 Malcolm Ryder / ChangeBridge LLC / www.changebridge.co

Photo: by Wim van ‘t Einde on Unsplash

Talent Engagement for Change: Hires was originally published in #FutureofChange on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Remaining Coherent

Continual is the term that describes the constant flow of variations in the environment surrounding what we think of as our organizational entity.

Continuous is the term that describes the overall effort we imagine conducting in order to create and sustain our organization’s ability to adapt to continual change.

Adaptation presumes that the entity in question is the same entity in some essential way, before and after the adaptation. That “sameness” must refer to the purpose for which the organization operates, otherwise the only basic characteristic of the organization’s “adapted” form is that it continues to be a recognizable “asset” to someone in some way.

Said differently, the goal of adaptivity is not only survival in the unqualified sense of avoiding termination or destruction. Instead, the goal presumes coherence — which here means inclusion of the continuity of ability to function per the intent of its form.

With that understanding about coherence, it is readily apparent that adaptation may in fact be a matter of any of the following:

a) re-purposing the form in order to preserve it as an asset: this is a change of approach to obtaining “value”

b) modifying the form in order to preserve functionality under new conditions: this is a change of structure (static) or configuration (dynamic) for “effectiveness”

c) replacing the form in order to enable new functionality for preserving the purpose: this is a change of approach to serving the same “intent”

We have to understand that an operational organization may or may not be dysfunctional (inherently) or ineffective (expressly) in the face of given environmental conditions, and that being functional, thus operational, thus effective is the hierarchy of dependency that is vulnerable to continual change. Each of the three terms is a variable, which can be by types, scopes, scales, and more.

Modes of Adaptation

Adaptation also presumes a necessity to do any of the following:

1. re-conform to the stable environment (recovery),
2. newly conform to the stable environment (growth)
3. conform to a modified environment, (transition)
4. re-conform to a new environment (translation) or
5. address whatever current environment with a new form (transformation)

All of the above approaches would be accompanied by a motivating expectation (intent) or cause (necessity).

That means only some of the approaches are appropriate (justified) at any given time of consideration.

The justification may directly link a necessity to an intent, as a requirement; or it may link an intent to a necessity as an opportunity.

Unmanaged Change

Change occurs whether we manage it or not.

On an ordinary day, most people recognize unmanaged change in three flavors: nature, accidents, and play. In each case, “stuff happens”.

There are those circumstances in which each of those three is elevated to a more specific level of appreciation. For example, nature is thought of as bounty; accidents are thought of as luck; and play is thought of as either creativity or learning.

There are also occasions where all three elevations are imagined (or pursued) as being intentionally blended — for example where making luck beneficial gets a nod as being either resourcefulness or innovation.

The interesting thing about those assessments is that they are characterizing the value of the intention, independently of whether any of the three parts of it was managed.

This leads to a view of intention as being the “driver” of the resulting value, with the events along the way being at minimum arranged for the effect.

Without the intention, and without the arrangement, there is no particular reason to anticipate or evaluate outcomes as being due to managing the changes.

Managed Change

Now it is evident why the core of the concept of “change management” is a simultaneous attention to intended value and arranged effect.

Organizations that pursue beneficial change are assigning themselves with the responsibility (hands on support) and accountability (rational attribution and explanation) for how the change is meaningful (value) and how the significant difference was arranged (built).

As a discipline, the assignment does not change along with the various forms of organization. Regardless of its structure, the organization is either good at the assignment, or not good at it, and being good at it requires covering both the value as assessed and the difference as built. There is no logical definition of change management that includes one and not the other.

One of the most persistent assertions about change efforts taken on by organizations is that somewhere between 65% and75% of the efforts fail. We can now understand that the figure will probably include any mix of competency evaluations and value judgements.

If the retrospective view of the effort is that it was not capable of generating the needed outcome, that’s a failure. Or if the outcome is not relevant to the need prevailing at the moment of “final” evaluation, then that’s a failure.

That not only explains why there can be so many efforts deemed insufficient; it also explains why alignment, of intention to effort to relevance, is the core purpose of change management.

Continual Production of Change for Sustainability

In a general way, we distinguish “outcomes” as the conditions created by “outputs”.

Ordinarily, we recognize a system as a form of organization that is continuously generating intended specific outputs from its function. (This is distinct from a form of activity, which we refer to as a “process”, not as a system.)

A system is a preferred form because it offers predictable reliability. Using a system is called operating the system.

But the system is valuable primarily because of why we care about the outcome.

Of course, in the real world there are undesirable outcomes that are also systematically produced.

If a system is unusually influenced by some force, whether internal or external, it may operate (with whatever degree of functionality) in a way that changes its outputs, thereby potentially affecting outcomes.

The adaptability of a system to changes is therefore seen positively in these two ways:

• the degree to which it can remain coherent when its constituent elements are varying independently
• the degree to which its coherence is relevant (necessary and sufficient) to current demand

Adaptation Processes

An adaptation’s outcome is a situation in which the conditions of the environment can both cause and react to the influence of the adaptive entity. But positive outcomes are not guaranteed for any period beyond when those conditions may be affected by other events or forces, such as other adaptations.

The benefit (positive) value of an adaptation’s outcome is at least ecological compatibility, or better, is symbiotic productivity.

•In nature, both may arrive through evolution; our disciplinary counterpart to that is governance.

•In manufactured co-operation with nature, cultivation is a principal mode of deliberately developing compatibility or symbiosis.

•An additional principal mode, with or without nature, for developing compatibility or symbiosis is architecture.

Whether causing or reacting, the environmental conditions on the influences of the entity’s adaptation may not be detectable, recognized, understood, leveraged, or subject to manipulation — except by continual exploration and examination.

Consequently, continuous adaptability as a competency (i.e., the ability to be continuously adaptive) means establishing resources, disciplines and practices of the above as “business as usual” always-on operations.

In an environment where multiple adaptations may be in process for differing reasons concurrently, the predictable rule of thumb is that di-Vers-ity requires Vers-atility in order to maintain sustainability.

Sustainability is observed as the organization’s deliberately maintained relevance to changing demand.

© 2019 malcolm ryder / archestra research

Preparing for Continuous Change was originally published in #FutureofChange on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A major observation to make is that respondents to the survey said that of completed projects, 13% were deemed failures, whereas 69% “met goals”. Additionally, for completed projects, over 55% were done using “traditional” methods, but less than 58% of that was done at a higher practice maturity level than “medium”.

The really big number — what percentage of projects were completed — is not readily featured in the report’s extensive Appendix of statistics. This complicates comparisons of 2020 versus what has become a default citation from the past, that “2/3 of projects fail”... but the given survey figures don’t add up to explain the high level of business confidence in project management to date. And for the umpteenth year in a row, failures are significantly and unacceptably high in terms of business outcomes, because the cost of failure is simply too high.

Interestingly, Mark A. Langley, President and Chief Executive Officer, Project Management Institute, uses this language: “…failing to bridge the gap between strategy design and its delivery.”

The report unambiguously equated “delivery” with “programs and projects”, and that’s not news. We are thereby encouraged to interpret all failures as “delivery” failures. In its additional language, we are encouraged to equate “success” with “implementation”, and implementation with “execution”.

It also breaks down the types of failed “delivery” that count among its overall findings. But here is where things get a bit nuanced. That is, regarding failure, we are dealing with the degrees to which implementation did or did not occur, whether types are aggregated or not.

So let’s look closer.

Before we go further, let’s have these understandings in common.

• Doing a beautiful job of building something that cannot work is not a building failure.
• But doing a bad job of building anything is a building failure.
• And, in the Who Cares Test*, building the wrong thing, whether beautifully or not, is going to be deemed a building failure if the builders had foreknowledge of what distinguishes the right thing from everything else.

Question: what makes the right thing “right”? In this worldview where design is logically distinct from delivery, it is at least fair, if not mandatory, that bad design be ruled in or out when accounting for failures. The next question here is, what design might be bad? The design of the strategy, or the design of the delivery?

Finally, in the evaluation results that declare success or failure, the PMI report shows reasons that are neither design nor delivery but instead are outcomes. Targeted (desired) outcomes that go unrealized are obviously going to be more likely to count as failures — but we are again obliged to wonder whether the targets were credible expectations in the first place.

Cutting to the chase, business outcomes are presumably the motivation for strategy, which in turn is the motivation for an implementation. That’s three different areas, with interdependencies, each one in which success or failure may be evaluated both for the quality of the planned (design) and the quality of the actual (delivery).

This is why the PMI article introducing the survey release has the call to attention that it does: “New survey reveals nearly 10% of every dollar spent by businesses lost through ineffective implementation of business strategy; Points to critical factors to drive business success.”

But what fails?

The six critical success factors — highly abbreviated here — are:

• Executive Sponsorship
• Alignment of (strategy) design and (implementation) delivery
• Proper prioritization of funding
• Using an “agile approach” in project management
• Create a culture that is receptive to change
• Design and track “success” measures

We don’t need to debate the importance of those things. The only thing that is questionable about them is the matter of how long they have been acknowledged without substantially improving success rates. Looking over previous surveys (by PMI and many other analysts), the answer seems to be more than 20 years…

Why?

One possibility is that those success factors are just too hard to pull off. And if that’s true, there is a clear logical possibility that if (a.) one of them cannot enjoy undivided attention and be the “silver bullet”, then (b.) there are combinations of them that are in fact counter-productive.

For example, how does executive sponsorship make sense if it is compromised by inadequate prioritization of funding?

And when does bilateral alignment of strategy and implementation make sense in a culture that is not receptive to change?

That view tells us that success factors are systemically influential. Although the PMI puts its report in the context of a continual business need for change (“agility”), it stresses “delivery against strategy” as the focus of program and project management concern.

Delivery against strategy sounds straightforward and linear. But to envision the systemics, we abstracted the two main concerns being addressed in the report’s vocabulary differently, as follows.

One of them, put simply, is the matter of what is being done versus where it is being done. The other, also simply defined, is the matter of what is permitted versus what is possible. Any idea of avoiding “failure” must consider that in each pair, the terms must not contradict each other but instead be compatible.

Using those two issues to graph the success factors provides a non-hierarchical distribution of those factors.

Understood as the components of a complex adaptive system, the interactions of the factors actually outweighs the specific iterations of each factor. Each factor comes in many forms, but a “successful” form enables the interactions. The principle at work is that the overall business outcome available at any time depends on whether the interactions allow it. To envision this, it is better to see what each factor, a managed component, primarily inhibits or supports through an interaction with another factor. Their interactions are also labelled below as the key matter being affected.

From that view, the list of success factors looks a bit different, as it identifies the key matters being affected and therefore needing management:

• purpose
• growth
• impact
• organization
• methodology
• competency

While other representations of interactions and influencers can be drawn from the same information in the PMI report, the point here is to ask whether omissions, defects or errors in the parts of this non-hierarchical layout could reasonably leave an expectation of overall success. Missing parts, damaged parts, or wrongly selected parts leave the “system” internally misaligned. (Note: yes, we knowingly did not depict interaction between strategy and architecture, nor between portfolio and performance, yet. But we, and you, can do it…)

As a final note on this more holistic view, let’s consider what “performance” and “development” mean.

Performance always means a degree of compliance to a predefined measured state, as obtained through intentional effort. In the view constructed here, visibility of the correspondence to measures is what is represented, as a practical capability. But the overall business outcome from PMI’s idea of “delivery” is an effect of the entire set of interactions.

Development does not only mean software or process automation. Development always means an intentionally progressive effort to reach a mature or completed actual version of a designated form that was initially only potential. (Things that have form certainly include ideas, relationships, activities, and artifacts.) This definition shows that all development is a type of “change”, even if all change is not a type of development. Projects, as a type of development, are one approach to some kinds of change. Now, if reducing “project failures” is urgent, then we must also come to understand multiple differing modes of projects as well.

The foregoing is not a final determination of anything, rather, it is an approach to thinking through the actual requirements for business improvement involving designed execution of support for strategy.

© 2021 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research for ChangeBridge LLC

* The Who Cares Test is an archestra research proprietary term of art for indicating stakeholder attention.

67% Failure, 100% of the time? was originally published in #FutureofChange on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After acknowledging unemployment, the most obvious problem created by COVID’s disruption of work-as-usual is the complexity of the sudden disarray in time and location commitments by individual workers.

We are already getting accustomed to managing this problem by attending to three “channels” of availability seen as the source of workers for co-operative functions. These same channels are also expected to have different characteristics as environments for working.

The onsite / hybrid / remote trio of channels presupposes that each has a compelling reason to be selected. The art and science of distributing the workload across these channels is no less organizational design.

However, the challenge of doing that design is not what is fundamentally causing the managerial anxiety levels with “disarray”.

The root cause of the anxiety is the problem of attaining a necessary level of assurance and confidence in the likelihood of continual effective co-operation between members of the workforce.

Without that assurance and confidence, the single dominant feature of management is insecurity about sufficient reliability in the reconfiguration of the organization’s real-time shape on the field.

Reconfiguring the Workload

To get a grip on this configuration, it is necessary to establish three things about each activity exerted in each channel:

•What is done

•When it is done

•Why it is done

The simplest way to do this is to see the entirety of the workload distribution as a constellation of types of events that each contain the probable readiness, interactivity, and influence of individual workers.

The biggest question to ask in identifying each case is this:

•is the worker’s involvement more mandatory or more discretionary? We think of this case as a presence…

•and is that presence motivated more by personal desire (a “carrot”) or by institutional requirement (the “stick”)? We think of this case as a driver…

To illustrate this distribution, we used the most obvious model of personal involvement in cooperative organization — a sports team.

Re-organizing Reliability

The six event types associated with the individual player’s involvement show that the player can do predictable types of things at certain times and places.

Most importantly, the player’s entire range of actions (the “workload”) is distributed, as events, in a rational and communicable way regarding probable (expected) availability.

This same generic model of distinguishing availability and participation can apply to any player without needing to impose the same specifics of all types of event on all players. For example, there can be multiple practices, differing tryouts, a variety of trainings, and numerous fitness facilities and regimens.

A given player is consistently “associated” with selected events in ways that other workers know and understand. In that way, inter-activity can be anticipated and appropriate support of that interactivity can be applied.

And the need for the player to interact with others is part of the rationale for where and when the player might be at differing events.

From here we translate the events model, from sports into corresponding ordinary business work terms.

In Person, Online, and Mixtures

From this generic model, we look at the three “channels” within which the worker and the activity can reside for the event.

We can expect that a given type of event can occur in more than one channel, but that the channel may impose certain conditions on the event that will affect how influence and interactivity can take place.

That means each type of event will be modeled particularly for each channel. A worker can then either shop for or comply with a model of the event that compares well with what the worker can offer.

For example: one worker may routinely use a remote-only model of a staff meeting. Another worker may use evening hours for solo training. Another may schedule some groupwork at one location in the mornings and at a different location in the afternoon. Some onsite events may also include online attendance.

The organization must provide or accept the support needed in the event, in its channel, for the type of interactivity, not just for the individual activity.

Expectations

Individuals can effectively appear and act in the chosen events in a chosen channel.

But the value of the configurations still depends on whether the individuals both offer and gain the impacts that make their presence a factor in generating value from the work effort.

Some events in a given channel become successful because the support mechanism there fosters trust between individuals. The channel event readily supports trust-building through communication, integrity and empathy.

The trust is cultivated as a result of the individual’s effort, characterized especially by the autonomy, skill and transparency of the effort (all of which can be highly discretionary).

The appreciation of the effort grows into respect, through the routine visibility, initiative and results of the worker.

And respect becomes a strong attractor to the channel event in which the individual can appear.

Defining support of Events

Expectations are a good basis on which to model a given channel for a given type of event. The organization’s commitment to sufficiently supporting the chosen channel event means that all parties have the same way of anticipating how to co-operate with and within that event. The following chart is simply an illustration of the range of things that should matter, in identifying what to support and how.

Any given employee should be able to outline their workload as events, and identify where those events will best suit them from the standpoint of their most likely availability.

That in turn helps to “blueprint” the distribution of the workforce in a way that exposes both the constraints and the opportunities maintained for wherever they perform in their roles.

© 2021 malcolm ryder / archestra research for ChangeBridge LLC

Reorganizing Work was originally published in #FutureofChange on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the following, we walk through these related aspects of control:

• Managing control itself
• Controlling Management
• Distribution of Control
• “Organization”, defined
• Risk versus Opportunity
• Prioritization
• Coordination
• Technique
• and finally, a logical model defining and distinguishing Control

The Who Cares Test

By definition, control is intentional manipulation.

That intentionality directs our attention and thinking to the matter of purpose, in order to hold any conversation about “value”.

Value itself is always by definition contextual, and the same set of conditions or impacts may not have the same value for all who experience it.

In that line of thought, we arrive at the first key consideration about controlling change: control will presume to be valuable for some explicit reason that is more important than not controlling.

The second key consideration is that there is an explicit reason why opportunity and responsibility for control is placed with one party instead of another.

The punchline here, however, is that control itself should be managed. Both of the explicit reasons just mentioned need to be acknowledged, and corrected if necessary, as the currently desired reasons — or control is inappropriate.

Managing Control

Things that could be undesirable and even flatly unacceptable about control are not hard to imagine.

Existing or imminent control could be of the wrong type, or the wrong placement, or the wrong strength.

Those mistakes could be a consequence of what control is facing, notably:

•complexity and scale

•tolerance and resistance

•competition and after-effects

Those issues are generally foreseen and proactively addressed in situations that are engineered for sustained presence.

To make control beneficial and prevent it from creating risk, management must think proactively about why to use it in given ways.

Controlling Management

Management is mostly influence, but control is clearly not the only type of influence utilized by management.

Decisions about when managers should use control among other alternatives are presently under intensive re-evaluation, and the precedents and norms of “good” management practice are facing challenges to their status as “best” advice.

The momentum of conventional management practice makes management itself something that can pose problems by being the wrong type, or the wrong placement, or the wrong strength.

In that way we can appreciate that while management may apply control, we also may need to control management.

Given that background, we also want to see clearly the current and emerging position of management relative to the organization that may or may not use it.

What is an Organization?

A strict but working definition of an organization is one that distinguishes it from other forms of groups.

An organization is a specified set of functions arranged and supported specifically to ensure the continual availability of the functions to each other for co-operation.

The specification can change, either to allow different operations or to allow different ways to do a given operation.

Either way the point is to design the organization for a given purpose.

Producing change calls for using a work approach conducted by an appropriately purposeful organization.

The support for the arrangement of functions may come from any mix of sources internal and external to the organization; generally the support is also intentionally arranged at any time.

Prioritization

Scenarios articulate strategically significant circumstances that associate with techniques.

Scenarios describe reasonably possible circumstances that make sense as the context for purpose-driven decisions.

All scenario-framed decisions should reflect intentionality towards purpose, while indicating a reasonable support of alignment in the form of co-operative organizational functions.

Scenarios can describe any mix of observable developing circumstances and circumstances plausibly produced. As part of what affects priorities, control should channel support both as diligent insight and as resourcing, making alignment more concerned about having options.

Coordination in Change

Sometimes Purpose provokes a need for modifying the current state of how the organization produces.

In that case, there are multiple dimensions to the impact that control may have on effecting the modification.

The way that the organization produces is a consequence of how the structure of the organization allows coordinated mobilization of its resources for action against prioritized requirements.

Control can channel the elements of that coordination within constraints of rules, capacities, and timing when they are not significantly negotiable.

Given that kind of benefit and value, our view is that the evolution of control for change should be away from authority and instead towards technique.

Technique versus Authority

The conceptual orientation of technique is towards (internal) capability maturity, instead of from (external) command.

Technique shapes events from within their dynamics.

The objective of technique is to exploit opportunity created by strategy.

In that way it is clear that technique is specifically about supporting purpose.

In preference for agility and sustainability regarding change, that trajectory of decision-making will invest control in technique rather than in predictive restraint.

Change and Organization under Control was originally published in #FutureofChange on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What can Change?

In the context of organizations, the default circumstance is that included persons see their individual presence as both a cause and an effect of the character of the organization.

From one person to another, the main kind of variation in that lies in how the two influences are felt (perceived), on balance. Some people need the cause/effect balance to be weighed differently than what other people need. (More cause? More effect? Equal?)

Yet in all cases, the individual arrives at their felt position in the following way.

From case to case, a proposed change affects different parts of the equation differently — for better, or for worse, or not at all.

Change to What?

A proposed change, no less than a sudden change, provokes an aware person’s decision-making about accepting or resisting the change.

That decision-making need not be fully explicit or “conscious” in order to be decisive. Much of what occurs can take place by habit, instinct, or other predisposition.

More importantly, the “net” decision to accept or resist is not entirely one way or the other.

Additionally, the decision is a negotiated composition of many possible mental and emotional reactions both pro and con.

Normally, pros and cons co-exist but somehow must relate to each other in an understood way.

People typically avoid loss, damage, conflict, and confusion that degrades current or future “pros”.

A proposal can perpetuate, add to, ignore, or amplify current or future “cons”.

Understanding the Stakes

Trade-offs occur in terms of the difference between current actualities and future probabilities.

The trade-offs presented by the PROS are different from the trade-offs presented by the CONS.

But in both cases, a preference for the future probabilities comes from confidence that the apparent next normal is a better set of terms for personal autonomy, authority, and ambition.

What’s specifically “better” for one person may not be better for another. But each person uses those terms to establish a sense of how they can retain their own personal grasp of their opportunities, options and objectives.

Confidence comes from identifying how the proposed change will probably benefit their autonomy, authority and ambition — three key messages to be clearly communicated, both to and by the person, in the campaign for the managed change.

For this probability to be credible, a stakeholder will especially look for the means and modes that are going to enable their preferred future position.

The campaign, therefore, is not one-way messaging. It is a guided dialogue among stakeholders. Within the communications that host the dialogue, people decide if and how they will change.

© 2021 malcolm ryder / archestra research for ChangeBridge LLC

The Change Side of People was originally published in #FutureofChange on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We currently caution against taking a default position that managed change is done with projects.

This caution is important because it is necessary to acquire and exercise management versatility in producing solutions to the problem of change.

Companies must understand the difference between the success factors of a change and the success factors of a project. And they must be able to determine if and why a project would be the best use of time and resources to pursue a needed solution.

In that light, it is also necessary to be able to determine whether a project that has failed is the reason why a managed change has failed. Reports continue, routinely, to say that 65% or more of managed change efforts “fail”… Clearly the post-mortems should account for whether projects are responsible when they were involved.

From that point of view, the following revisits the idea of projects with regards to managed change and the potential pros and cons of a project approach.

Included Ideas and Terms:

• Managed Change
• Production Options
• What is an Organization?
• A Project is/is not…
• Producing Solutions
• Projects are production tools
• Graphic: a structural model of Projects
• Clarity: what we already know about projects
• Recap: “Project”
• Recap: Managing Change

Managed Change

Change happens whether it is managed or not.

Most management of change is focused on how a future state that is deemed an improvement versus the current state will be attained with two objectives:

•Prevention of unnecessary risks to interim stakeholders

•Adoption, by a predominance of stakeholders, of the new state created

Accordingly, any approach chosen by management to support and secure those objectives can be considered a “management” tactic.

Per “management”, the future state that is recognized as the desired change is deliberately produced. Intentionally attaining the future state in a deliberate way is a production effort.

It is necessary to understand that the range of “production” in managed change includes cultivated evolution, training/teaching/learning, acquisition, collaboration, controlled experimentation, policy, and numerous other approaches — used alone or in combinations, over a span of time.

A project is/is not

A project is one kind of approach for producing an intentional change.

My favorite definition of a project is this:

• a project is an intentionally temporary micro-organization, designed and operated to produce one defined thing, under a high accountability plan, within a predefined resource allocation.

If that sounds just like a workforce using a method, that’s because it is a workforce using a method, but not only.

I use the definition to call out all of the key points that distinguish a project from a process, from an experiment, from a “case”, and from other forms of categorized groups of goal-oriented activity.

In a project, the organization, the method, and the plan are the key points, and those are elements related to each other for particular reasons (necessities) that further characterize and distinguish a project.

What is an Organization?

An organization is a specified set of functions arranged and supported specifically to ensure the continual availability of the functions to each other for co-operation.

The specification can change, either to allow different operations or to allow different ways to do a given operation.

Either way the point is to design the organization for a given purpose.

Producing change calls for using a work approach conducted by an appropriately purposeful organization.

The support for the arrangement of functions may come from any mix of sources internal and external to the organization; generally the support is also intentionally arranged at any time.

Producing Solutions

If there were NOT “projects” things would still get done but of course get done differently.

At minimum, the casual sense of what gets “done” is a “solution” to something — whether the solution is to a concept, a puzzle, or a “problem” (an unresolved negatively impactful condition).

A project is only one way among many to produce a solution.

That means there is a logical difference between a “solution requirement” and a “project requirement”.

What is it about an effort’s outcome that is required to make it a “solution”?

The characteristics that define an outcome as a solution should be True independently of characteristics that are required to make an effort unambiguously a “project”.

When something is solved, there is a new current state that does not have the important omissions or deficiencies of the prior state.

Projects are Production Tools

A project is only one way to produce a solution. And, a solution may include a project for producing only one aspect of the solution.

(Now, assume that outside of learning and training assignments, the problem is not “we have to do a project”.)

Projects get done when someone thinks that getting something done a certain way is necessary.

What is the certain way of “projects”? And why would it be necessary?

The necessity served by a project has to do with limitations on the effort — primarily on scope, on resources, and on how the two are related.

Typically, the application and enforcement of those limitations is done with the management of and by an organization.

And there are specific issues that hold highest priority in the relationships of the organization, the plan, and the method used in the effort. Among those three things, each one is variable, but no one of them can be removed and still have the remainder be a project.

The above is true regardless of whether the project’s eventual outcome turns out to be a solution or not.

Clarity: what we already know about projects

For starters, a project mode of effort requires multiple tasks, and is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.

But it is still different from a “process”.

It is not the same as a process because of one of its criteria for completeness: it is intended to terminate.

• A process does not by definition need to terminate. By definition, a process needs to be coherent-by-design to achieve an expected output, and terminating is not a defining property of that ability. Additionally, time does not define a process; time is instead a performance attribute of a process. The same process can go very fast or very slow. And a process can be continuous, operating with no requirement to stop.

Furthermore, as part of what defines a project instead of a process, task planning is mainly about organizing the availability of task resources for a scope of commitment.

Because the targeted solution is the reason for the project to exist, the goal of the project is to have a sufficient impact. The sufficiency will have a calculated scope; and all commitment is calibrated to that scope, including adjustments as needed over time.

The critical awareness of what finally defines the effort as a project is even more specific: the commitment to the scope sees time itself as a limited resource committed to that scope.

And the primary reason for that is the presumption that the other resources are limited by their commitment to the project: the commitment excludes them from being used otherwise in the designated time.

Recap: “Project” is a discretionary mode of production committed to an outcome

A project mode is a strategic decision about how to pursue a level of impact that an output has on an outcome.

In that way, the decision declares a commitment to the scope of impact.

However — That scope of commitment is not the same thing as the scope of resources.

In project mode, managing the commitment means organizing resources, and enforcing accountability of resources, targeting the outcome not the output.

In project mode, managing the commitment applies authority, accounting, and capacity as needed and in combination, to create and maintain alignment to the intended outcome.

Resources are varied and variable, in type and amount, through applying management. Applying management is for controlling progress towards the impact, changing the output as necessary along the way.

In the context of the target solution, failure of impact is a failure of the project.

Recap: Managed Change

Per “management”, the future state that is recognized as the desired change is deliberately produced. Intentionally attaining the future state in a deliberate way is a production effort.

Most management of change is focused on prevention of unnecessary risks to interim stakeholders, and adoption, by a predominance of stakeholders, of the new state created. In managed change, adoption of a future state is success. Failure to adopt is a failure of the managed change.

Risks and stakeholders, and therefore reasons for adoption, respectively come in a wide range of varieties.

Change can therefore be managed with a variety of approaches, used individually or together. Selecting approaches to managing change is essentially a strategic decision — not a default decision to do a project.

© 2021 malcolm ryder / archestra research for ChangeBridge LLC

Rethinking Projects in Change was originally published in #FutureofChange on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.