E083: A Critique of Org Change

This is the world of work podcast with James and Jane. Hi

everyone. Just before we get cracking into this week's episode, I wanted to jump on and mention our new sport page. So as some of you may know, we're on a bit of a mission to increase accessibility to good quality management and career training. And if you'd like to support us in this, you can go to www.worldwork.io forward, slash support to learn more. Hello. This is James, and this is Jane,

and here we are again with another episode of a world work podcast. It's another Friday. We're recording. We've been doing some good stuff. What's our episode about today? Jay, well,

today is one of our interview episodes, and we're going to be talking about organizational change, and we're going to be talking about that with Dr Mark Hughes,

Oh, nice. That's pretty interesting. What kind of stuff do we drill into? Do you think? Well,

I think we're going to try and look at the understanding the value of having a critical approach to considering managing organizational change. And we're also going to talk about the divide between or the divide, or the difference between managing and leading change. Well, that sounds exciting. Let's get into that conversation.

Okay, so here we are in the main body of this conversation today, and we're actually speaking to Dr Mark Hughes, and we're going to be speaking about organizational change and some sort of critical thinking and theories around organizational change and some of the models that are most associated with it. Before we do that, though, Mark, would you be able to come in and say a little bit about yourself and your background, and I guess just introduce yourself to the listeners.

Yes, thank you, James, and thank you for inviting me to participate in this podcast. I'm an academic author. I specialize in organizational change, particularly managing and leading change. I've published textbooks, a monograph on the leadership of organizational change, and academic journal papers I worked at Brighton business school from 1987 to 2019, which is long time for a change specialist. I already there. Somehow,

there is what's called a reader in organizational change when I wasn't doing my academic writing, though, I worked with external clients in public and private sector organizations. So that's a little bit about me.

Yeah, that's good. And it sounds like you're a good person to speak to about change. Um, before we get too much into some of a theory and thinking about it, I think it'd be good to start off kind of right at the beginning and just ask a question, what is organizational change? What do you mean by organizational change?

Well, it's an odd question to ask a textbook or author, because we take three or four chapters. But equally, I'm a great believer, both for practitioners and postgraduate students, in knowing what they're talking about. So I can see where the question's coming from. One of my textbooks, I had the joy of defining my concept, which I loved, because to some extent, I needed a definition that caught it. And so for anyone listening, I would say my interest is around attending to organizational transition processes at the level of individuals, groups and teams and organizations. So I like that notion that there's a sort of a register of approaches from the individual up to the organization and even up to sector and society. A couple of other thoughts that spring to mind. Sometimes, when I'm doing workshops, there'll be people in the room and they'll identify as project managers. And I think for practitioners, they don't have any qualms about crossing over these boundaries? I think for academics we do traditionally tend to be quite siloed, so there'll be some we specialize on project management, some on change management, equally, innovation management and organizational development. Each of those approaches has something to say.

Does that answer your question?

Yeah, I think it does. I think I like the call out of individual, team, organization, and I'm fascinated. And I don't know that today's the time for it about the link through sectoral or societal change as well. I think that there's some really good stuff in there. And presumably, when we're talking about transitions within these areas, at these different levels we're looking at changing something from one current state into a future state. Is that fair in terms of either the way that we do things or way that things feel? Is that a fair analysis of a transition piece? It

very much is. I love my change literature, and one of the quotes that was a eureka moment for me was by somebody called Patrick Dawson, a professor up at Aberdeen University, and he talked about managing changes, moving from a known state to an unknown state. And even as I say it now, it's like wow, managing change moving from a known state to an unknown state. So what excites me is. As you say, James, it is about that transition to some somewhere else, different from where you were, but equally, there's an element of uncertainty about that transition. And I think that's quite exciting. I think for people actually managing and leading it, it can be quite challenging, but I think we need to acknowledge that.

Yeah, I love that description. Actually, I hadn't heard that before. But the move from the known to unknown is, it is exciting, and it brings with it some sort of romance in terms of a change that you're you're trying to do. And that's, that's pretty powerful. Do you think when people are looking to lead change within this state, what sort of, what sort of connection do you think they have with that unknown future state that they're aiming to move towards? Do you think they envisage it in a specific way? Is it? Is it shaped? Is it fully pre imagined? Where do you think they are in terms of that pre creation of that unknown state?

It's difficult to say what. What I might touch upon as we talk is the distinction between managers and leaders, I think that can be problematic. I also think, though the distinction between leaders and followers can be problematic in that to some extent that that unknown state it needs to be shared in terms of asking about definitions, I came across a paper by somebody called speaker, and he talked about leadership as a perniciously vague concept. And I thought, yeah, you've got something there, mate. And this whole paper was just on that definitional issue, but I was doing a lot of writing around leadership, and it is a best practice to define your key term. And I came up with a definition I think might be worth sharing because it speaks to what you just asked. Yeah. It'd be great to hear it if you could. Yeah. This is from somebody called

JC Ross, who isn't often cited, but he did a big review of the leadership literature, and he defines leadership as an influence relationship among leaders and collaborators who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes. So once more, because this is key, leadership is an influence relationship among leaders and collaborators who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes. So that was another remarks, Eureka moment, the idea of you were asking about that, that vision and where they're going to take the organization, I think it needs to be mutual. It needs to be shared, and there needs to be a collaborative element. And one of my frustrations with a lot of what's been happening around leadership, it isn't always that way. It's there's a lot of that JDI just do it out there. And that frustrates me.

Yes, the the organization that, or an organization that I used to work for, had a leadership framework, which was J, E, D, I with each thing standing for a separate thing. And of course, it was adopted internally, colloquially as J, F, D, I was for leadership approach. You know, that was, yeah, so, so, so, I think there's some interesting stuff there in terms of leadership, around the sort of mutuality and the blurring between leaders and followers and CO definition of purpose and protection, what you're getting into, what, what attracted you to the overall field? So, so, you know, there's some nuance and leadership definition, nuance and change, some excitement about the opportunities within the stuff. What was it that brought all of that together in your life, or something that you wanted to focus

Yes, obviously, honesty is always the best policy. And two reasons. Remember I introduced myself saying I started out in 87 and worked at Brighton through to 2019 Yeah, I actually lived through the era of managing change and then moving to leading change, and that was part of the backdrop of my life. So back in the late 80s, we were working with managers who were increasingly becoming interested in managing change, and a friend and colleague, Tom borner, developed an MA in change management, which ran from 95 to let's see, 2010, and it ran very successfully, so perversely for myself, normally, an academic has an expertise, and then they try and offer it as a course. I was working peripherally on that course, and I got more and more interested through working with practitioners that interested them, and I slowly, over the decades, began to get more and more into it. I think the other candid disclosure I would make is as an individual, and this might sound very first to anyone listening to this, I sometimes struggled with organizational change myself, so I envied my colleagues, who sometimes seem to embrace it and really thrive on change. For me, it didn't come as easy as them, but all I would say is a little bit like sometimes, a counselor draws on their own counsel, their own experience, and in their counseling to be more empathetic. I. Feeling that perverse incentive which drove me to write so many things, was why I got attracted to the field. To come back to your question, yeah, that makes perfect sense. It does. I wonder if I'm going bad. No, no,

that's good. And that sort of heal or heal thyself type of stuff is something that we see with a lot of people. Get interested in this kind of I've got, I've got a bit of a side question for you, and then I think I'm going to hand over to Jane for some and I'm kind of jumping around a bit here when, when we're looking at the sort of blurring of leadership and of change and things like that, one of the one of the narratives that I've heard or been reading over the last years is that change is increasing, the pace of change is increasing, volume of change is increasing, the complexity of the world's increasing. And I guess, I guess two questions. One, do you think that's kind of true? And then two, what is the difference then, between leadership and change? If that makes sense, is all leadership to some extent, about change management? Or what do you think I know? That's a model of questions for you. It would be great if you could use your skills to decipher what I'm trying to ask and answer it. Yes. I'm holding back. I don't want to do a lecture.

So the first one is intriguing in that most of us would perceive being far more change than there was. And I was saying I had this 30 year window to look at change as I began to learn and grow around change. And on one level, there does seem to be more change. But ironically, and I haven't got references to hand, but I've seen this done. Some academics like to go back. And they go back 50, even 100 years, and they show literature which says the pace of change is increasing. It's getting more and more. And so that sense we have a more and more changes. It certainly seems to be repeated. Drucker, one of the famous management theorists. There was a beautiful paper where some scholars went back and looked at his work, and every few years, he would say, pace of change is increasing. We must be Bullis, in a way, it's a good starting point, whether or not it really is, some academics would actually question that. Coming back to your second question, that's where my head and heart have been for the last five years. In a succinct way, what happened was we had management. Management became discredited by certain influential academics, and leadership became favored. And the argument used, and it was, came mainly out of Harvard Business School, was the idea that managers manage the status quo and leaders lead change. That's taught in many business schools. Oddly, I would question that, and we might get a bit of time later to talk about that. But,

yeah, okay, I like that sort of I like the walkthrough of some of the history leading to to where we are now, and some other thinking about it. And it gives me a bit of assurance around my perception of a narrative that we see out there.

It pretty much ticks every box that we talk about on a regular basis. So we quite often talk about the history that shapes some of the ideas that are influential now, so we get all excited about that. And also, I think very specifically, I act like, as you know, as some of you know, I'm on Twitter, and I managed to get into a bit of an argument with total stranger about management and leadership, because they were defining management as this terrible. You know, managers are all terrible, controlling people, and leaders are all inspirational, amazing. I was like, yeah, not sure that's helpful for anyone. We will definitely get to that conversation. I hope just before we do, it'd be really helpful to understand, I know a lot of the material that you've helpfully produced to students like me is around taking a critical perspective, or a critical approach to considering managing change, leading change. Could you explain a little bit about what that is for those that haven't come across it before, and why it's really important that we take a critical eye to the field of organizational change?

Yes, I'd be happy to. And I think Jane, we've met in person, and I should say sometimes people think Mark calls himself critical. He's sort of obnoxiously critical, but it's certainly not in that sense. It's more in a scholarly sense, that critique excites me and other scholars. The way I explain it in workshops is universities are involved in three major activities, teaching, research and scholarship. If we look at teaching, it's about disseminating existing knowledge. If we look at research, it's about gathering new knowledge. Scholarship is what really floats my boat. And scholarship is all about critically interpreting knowledge so critical. Particularly interpreting knowledge. So universities, their main income streams come either from teaching and the fees that students pay or from research and the research funding that they bring in. And they are very big income streams. Most academics would tell you that a good teacher, a good researcher, does scholarship as part of those two activities, I would argue we need more scholarship. We really do. I made a decision to spend my career as a scholar, not as a researcher. And although I taught in my early years, I didn't do a lot of teaching subsequently. So coming back to your question, Jane, going on a bit,

I'm driven by the idea of critically interpreting existing knowledge. So a lot of the stuff that's taught in business schools and delivered by consultants, we just need to ask some awkward questions around that. And in my new textbook, I've dropped the word critical, and I've moved towards questioning. And I think for people listening, they might find that more user friendly. It's this idea that, a bit like the young child, sometimes asks us the awkward why question. I think we in our organizational lives, need to ask sometimes the awkward questions which take a good organization forward. It's been an interesting journey. I would have loved if some universities could have majored on scholarship. I think they could make a huge contribution to the world of work. If we could have people just saying, Well, does that really stack up? Does that theory? Does that that that sort of sacred mantra? Does it really merit it, or is it just a sort of word of mouth thing, certain assertive academics are pushed and everyone's believed. So it's been an interesting journey, but I see critique as crucial in terms of how organizations change and how they evolve more generally,

I think that's it. Certainly when, and you're right, we have met, met in person, and it was that point that I think resonated with the group we were talking to. Particularly, how can we make sure that somehow we're questioning the theories and the research enough that then they become refined and revisited such that they can then, you know, potentially be used with more confidence and effectively. Do you? Do you think it is also important for practitioners and organizations to take a more critical approach? And do you have any ideas about how practitioners can take a more critical approach? Yes,

very much. So. So a lot of my work, it was working inside organizations with groups of practitioners and questioning certain things, and then encouraging them to be critical and questioning. And as I say, I think that's really important. I can share with you now, or at some point, I challenge some of the most respected ideas about the idea of Cotter, of leading change using eight steps, and also the idea that 70% of all change initiatives fail, that's the sort of thinking I like to feed into organizations, with the big caveat that you have to be careful, because sometimes it's the most senior people in an organization who Are espousing these beliefs. So use the knowledge wisely, but I really think it has a healthy role to play in a good organization. Yes,

you mentioned, you mentioned, there sort of a couple of the what would be considered quite, I guess, at certain, certain points of history, very mainstream concepts and models in organizational change, like cottage theory of CO eight steps to managing change. And you mentioned questioning that, is that something you, is that something you feel, has come out of taking a critical perspective? And could you tell, maybe share to the audience a little bit more about

that? Yeah, yes, it did, yeah, where the Cotter Creek came from was I was writing these textbooks, and they would have a dozen chapters in them, and each time I got to the leading change chapter, I would go into this emotional state I got quite worked up, and I could feel my blood pressure going Something didn't feel right. So one of the luxuries academics have, which practitioners don't, is I have, I have the time just to sit at my desk and pour over the literature and then write up my critical overview of. For what somebody said. So with Cotter his he did a paper for Harvard Business Review that some listeners will certainly have encountered leading change. Why transformation efforts fail. He did that way back in 95 and then in 96 he did a book. And many may have seen the book leading change. And if you go to any university that the book is still very much on the university library shelves and the paper is still referenced on MBAs and various postgraduate courses. But I wasn't convinced by it, so I began to look and trace back over all Cotters earlier works, what evidence informed the eight steps, and I was shocked. There was no evidence. There really wasn't. So that that was, I should add no empirical evidence. He doesn't include references at the end of his book, which is quite weird for a book that academics reference. But there were no there was no way of knowing that if you followed those eight steps, your change would be successful. As I got deeper into it, though some of it began to trouble me. He talks, and some will know of this about creating a sense of urgency and manufacturing visible crises. And his thinking is, I made a note of this.

So if I give you a bit of cotton to give people a flavor of it visible, crises can be enormously helpful in catching people's attention and pushing up urgency levels. Conducting business as usual is very difficult if the building seems to be on fire, but in an increasingly fast moving world, waiting for a fire to break out is a dubious strategy, and in addition to catching people's attention, a sudden fire can cause a lot of damage. I was profoundly troubled by that quote in this book that's referenced by many academics, and it informs much practice. It is, in fact, I get the idea of the urgency, but the idea of manufacturing it to get people to do the things you want to do. What troubles me? I'm 57 so I'm in like the third stage of my life, but there are young managers and leaders of tomorrow who are being taught from that book to do that sort of thing. And I just thought, I need to shout. So I did, and I had a paper published with a sexy title, leading changes, why? Transformation explanations fail, a lovely play on words. And I loaded many, many 1000s of times, which, if nothing else, is good for my ego. But more importantly, I put out a message that this isn't right. We have a responsibility to challenge what is being taught and in some cases, what has been practiced in organizations. Many of my screams don't get heard, but thankfully that one did, and then the other one that I mentioned was I was working with practitioners going back a decade and a half, and they would ask me, Hey, Mark, I'm enjoying this workshop, but I, as I understand it, 70% of all change initiatives fail. And I'd look to Frida or Fred, and I'd say, Yeah, unfortunately, Harvard Business School tell us that, and it was always a downer for practitioners, and it was a downer for me. And so again, over time, I had the luxury to go over the literature and have a look at this, this popularly cited notion that 7% world change initiatives fail, and I found, when I went through the literature, there wasn't any evidence to support that, although many practitioners to this day would cite it, many academics would cite it, there was no evidence, so I had a paper published in the Journal of change management, do 70% of all organizational change initiatives really fail? I knew the answer to the question, but that was by hook in, and again, that paper has been has been referenced many, many times and downloaded many, many times, which has been gratifying in a small way, has influenced the field. The thing that you don't get from the paper was academics get excited by papers because they're reviewed by their peers, and one of the reviewers was one of the people involved in the paper, let's say. And so I had this suspicion that perhaps there was this body of evidence, but there wasn't, let's, let's just leave it at that.

Yeah, how interesting. That's, that's, that's really interesting. And I echo your, your sort of what seems like a bit of a visceral reaction to that call to create a crisis, to spur change. I mean, from a non academic perspective, I hadn't been aware of that section of that book specifically, but it strikes me, in my own words, as ethically dubious or morally doubtful. Is my immediate response to it?

James, if I could just chip in, there will be some perhaps listening, who've got a copy of Cotters leading change. And it doesn't take a long time to read, but if you read it critically, there are all sorts of little clues in there, and it's worth doing it and then seeing how that shifted a lot of thinking in organizations in a profound way. And that influence still lives on my other campus for writing the paper was though that Professor Cotter did a follow up to the 96 book in 2012 and some people slap me down and say, Ah Yes, Mark, but he's updated it. But if people look at the 2012 version, he didn't change a word in the body of the text he just added in. And what he said was himself, I can't quite verbatim, but he says, whilst a lot's changed in the world between 96 and 2012 the body of this book still remains as relevant as it did back then and again. Wait, you can't do that. Yeah, yeah, that's marketing over substance, or something around

gender, around ethics, the world has changed in quite profound ways. You can't say it still like it was in 96 it

How fascinating. Yeah, that's good. I've got, um, I've got a follow a follow up question, which is kind of going somewhere slightly different with this. Um, so we spoke at the beginning of that piece, before we jumped into Kotter in a bit more detail about critical thinking in itself. And I guess one of the things you said was that sometimes it's leaders who hold these views of organizations that are potentially slightly intractable, and things like that. If you were speaking to change practitioner, which you do in organizations or people in change functions in organizations, how could you, how could you help them explain the advantages of critical thinking and using critical thinking in designing change processes to their leadership? If that makes sense, what are the simple messages about the importance of this and the benefits of having adopted a critical approach prior to shaping your approach to change. If that makes sense. Yes, it does.

I've shared two Eureka. I'll share one more Eureka, and it would ride the distinction between leadership, management and command and organizations don't talk a lot about command unless they're emergency services or the military, but it's out there anyway. The reason I come to your question with that in mind is I was influenced by Keith grin did a lovely overview where he differentiated management leadership and command. And he said that manage management was really about managing processes. Leadership was about asking questions, and command was about offering answers. Have you got that? So an interesting thinking around leadership, management and command. My fear is a lot of what is we're being told in organizations is leadership is actually command. It's that JDI we touched on a few minutes ago, whereas what would benefit organizations if you believe in what Keith Green was writing about, and what I write about at length, is we need leaders who ask questions. So rather than Frida or Fred saying, Just do it, it'd be great if they could say, Jane James, give me your input. So yeah, what I'm trying to get to is I really think the organizations would benefit from that. I appreciate you can't always have a debate and what's going on in the world at the moment, we're in a command era where command is very much around us. And I don't think it is necessary the time to have the debate. But my fear in organizations is, for years, they just kept telling people to do it, and sometimes good people were being railroaded into doing things that they didn't believe were in the best interests of the goals of their organization. Yeah,

yeah, that's interesting. Okay, thank you for that. And I love that distinction between leadership and command and and the role of questioning in leadership. It feels almost in that context, of leadership is almost a sort of a sifting exercise, where you need to fill up with as much insight as you can and sift through it and empower people to put into that sort of process.

Well, that is where it's at, but it's also, as they tell you, it sounds heretical, the idea of the leader asking questions, you know, yeah, why don't try to take different we're having a conversation today around change, aren't we?

Yes, indeed, and, of course, into all about, I mean, we, it's not a subject for today, but, but that leads into all the sort of individual emotional response to change and ego and the difficulty in not being right, and the difficulty in not being a commander. And we see that at a global level, yes, a minute, yeah. Um, yeah, and so, so with that. Do you think things like the concept of humble inquiry sit within that? Is that a phrase you're aware of, and some of your giants work, and the power of listening and things like that? Do you think that's a core leadership skill at

the minute? Yeah, as I think we touched upon, leadership is highly context dependent. So I think it does depend a bit on the context. I'm personally interested in humility and ego. And just an aside, I remember turning to one of my friends, a professor at my institution, and saying, I'm trying to practice a program of humility. And he was a lovely friend, and he turned around to me and he said, I don't think that has a place in the university. That's great fun. As

I say, I'm in like, the Third Age, the first stage of my life, and I'm doing a lot of reflecting at the moment. And when I reflect that, I'd have to admit there's a lot of ego in academia.

Of course, yeah. Well, in so many aspects of life, if we then go back and think, I guess, a bit more broadly, about organizational change as a bit of a field, what do you think the biggest issues are, or the challenges are at the minute? Does it come down to this command thing? Is it due to sort of a global context that we're in, what are some of the big challenges people facing change or looking to implement change or

up against in 20 words? Yeah, or 10, maybe

it's a pertinent question. Again, one of my learnings around change is it is very processual. It's very dynamic. It's very contextual. So one of the joys of working with organizations over two decades was the big issues vary from organization to organization. So there were some overlaps between organizations. There were a unique set of challenges I would be mindful about it if you said, well, well that given, what would you say? I think we've touched on one of them already. I think the disparaging of management and the privileging of leadership has been problematic for organizations. The students in business schools today. In the past, they would have hoped to get jobs as managers. Now, they would hope to get jobs as leaders. But I still think we need the managing of processes on any effective organizational change. We need, let's say, the stocks and the stores to be in place to support the people who are doing the stuff. We need the systems to work. We need the payrolls, etc, etc. So that would be one big issue. A second one I've hinted at, and it's it's stuck with me over the decades. I don't like the word resistance in the context of change. It's such a loaded word, it depicts anybody who isn't following the leader as some sort of agitator, and I'm sure many listening will have had experiences of where they felt a change wasn't going to benefit their organization. We need to find ways of tapping into that. And I think a better word is responses. It's not so loaded. Equally, I got interested. There's a literature around change readiness, and I think the so called resistance needs to be seen in the context of how ready a particular organization is for change. Universities are going through major change at the moment, and whether or not they're ready for it, I don't know. Whereas some sort of, say, financial sector organizations have a very much a culture of change. So there's issues there, I think power and politics. I wish, when I reflect back, there'd be more coverage of that in organizations. I did many workshops in residential centers, and what was great was looking at the doors, what the other tutors were delivering on to their clients. And I never once or a workshop on power of politics at the workplace. And yet, anyone who's worked in organization knows it's rice there, and then 1/4 one, I think we fudged the evaluation of organizational change. It's been difficult for academics to research because it is a dynamic and process your process. But when I've talked candidly with practitioners, and I've sort of asked them, can you tell me how change has been evaluated in your organization, they've often said it hasn't been thoroughly evaluated. We know about the program, the project reviews at the end of a change program, but a lot of organizational change, it's like it happens. There's a lot of industry there, and then the world moves on. So they're four issues, but there are many more out there, James,

that's a lovely introduction to just some of the many things that frustrate me about when I'm certainly when I'm in the workplace. But also. So when reading material. So thank you. I think that's an excellent list. I and also has literally lit every button of frustration at the same time. So now, of all times I've been frustrated, I want to pick up on the bit that we've mentioned a couple times now about the shift from change management, to change leadership, and a little bit what I perceive as the fetish, almost the fetishization of leadership that I see in the workplace at the moment. That's a it's a very it's what everyone seems to aspire to be, irrespective of their role level and leadership skills seem to be coming to the fore at the same time that you interestingly, you've you raised a question about that, and I think you've published some notebook series, and you raise that question about the shift on the focus, what? What's going on there? And do you, do you see that shift from focus on change management to change leadership continuing? Do you think that will carry on in the future?

That's very much where my head and heart is at the moment. So again, I have this luxury of like a 30 year overview of how the debates moved. And I started off as somebody writing books on managing change and running workshops on managing change, and then it shifted to leading change, and I reflected that in my writing. And I began to think, did I miss the memo? We get so many emails these days, but did I miss the memo telling me we're going to shift? And I thought, No, I don't think I did. And then I thought, Well, did I miss the big study where it was empirically proven that this idea of leading change would be more beneficial to the interests of organizations and managing change. And I was able to do something, again, as sort of academic luxury. I wrote a monograph which was published by Routledge in 2016 called the leadership of organizational change. I'm keen to sell my works here today, but if anybody reads it, it's probably one of the driest things I ever wrote. But anyway, monographs are often academics talking to each other, and I remember my office buddy, a lovely woman, Catherine. I popped into the office and she said, Hello, Mark, how's your monolog coming along? She called it so. Well I did this monolog would be more honest on organizational change, but I looked at 35 years of writing about the leadership of change and transformation, and went over all of the literature I could find. It's it is quite an epic piece of work, and this is deeply troubling. There isn't the body of strong evidence to support the shift that most organizations have gone for. One of the scary things I found is there was a handbook for leaders of universities leading change published in, I think it was 2015 or 2016 and they were citing the evidence as COVID leading change. I thought, wow, so it's gone wrong, yeah.

And yet politics and power aren't an important aspect of what we do, right? I mean, all of that stuff,

a lot of these debates sort of loop back into each other. So on this lovely little journey, and I'm still on it, to be honest, I I couldn't find the evidence some of my later papers, when I went to seek publication through review process into journals, the reviewers would say the must be evidence is such a big shift that the evidence must be there. Go back and look harder. And it was, it was like I wasn't going to find it. I was confident that there wasn't a body of evidence to support this. James, at the beginning of this conversation, used the word narrative. What happened was a narrative switch. And Jane, you mentioned the notebooks, they're slightly weird in that they were self published, which I just needed to get some of this out in the head on paper. So I pushed them out at a very low price. And I just wanted to say, Well, look, if anybody asks me, well, I'm dawdling about in my care. I did try to tell people that something's wrong here, so I sort of squared it with myself, but to give people the essence of what I learned or what I believe, to be honest, there was a shift from change management to change leadership. And it was, I can't prove this, I believe it was orchestrated. So if you go back to the late 70s, early 80s, America had been very much pro management, and then Japan came along and stole a lot of their markets. They were in dire straits, and managers, management went out of fashion. There were. Newspaper articles saying, let's get rid of let's get rid of management. What we need is leadership. And I have a suspicion that that narrative gripped the imagination. Then when I look back at the 70% failure of paper, I think that was trying to play into that narrative. And all of this implied that management and managing change might be failing, that leadership and leading change will succeed. And I think that narrative switch that has had such a profound effect on not just private sector organizations, but public services. This has been big for the health service. It's been big for education. It hasn't just been one country. It's been across the world, and it's a debate I tried to provoke. The notebooks were my very crude attempt just to put down a marker, and then I stepped away from it for a year, and I thought we, sometimes particularly academics, are good at deluding ourselves. And all I would share with the two of you and anyone else listening, is a year on, I still feel I want to provoke this debate, and I'll find other ways to do it. There were offers of monographs I could have gone, but I didn't want to go down that road for a couple of reasons. One was I didn't want to constrain myself. I wanted to write very, very freely and just get it out of my head and my system, because I've been living with it too intimately. So that was one of the reasons. The other reason was I thought I might have gone bad, and so I didn't want to tarnish a monograph series, which is highly respected in my world, with my mad musings. But a year on, I think there's a debate that would be so useful. And so it was one of the reasons I was delighted to have a chance to talk with the two of you today. And

I think it's, I mean, it's interesting, because both James and I have transitioned in our careers recently, and certainly the driver for me, and I think some of it, we've talked about James and I on the podcast before. So my driver was that I felt I couldn't speak openly about some of the challenges in my sector because I had a loyalty to the organization I worked for, and I didn't want that, you know, to reflect badly on them. And I understand your comment about, you know, publishing a notebook and being self published, but at the same time, there is this need. I felt a very visceral need to be able to say, I'm not sure this process is working for the sector at the moment, that to be on my head and in my name rather than anywhere else, and exactly like you described, I would like to be doddering around somewhere at some point, and feel like at least I tried. So I massively recognize that. And I also think, I think there's, I think, you know, if you ever need any help raising this question and having this discussion, we will continue to help you, because I think really strongly that leadership, there's a couple of really odd things that feels like it's going on around the way that it's used in business, education and business sector at the moment, for me, one is around organizations are using it as an excuse to grow the training group of people they can train, because they're basically now doing sort of, you know, leadership development for seven year olds, 10 year olds, 14 year olds, so forth, and they and they're taking it directly from the leadership and nothing. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but it is, it is about this idea that leadership is important at the expense of appropriate management, control, pace, organization. That's always what the implication is. The implication is always, as long as you're inspirational and can guide the future and can ask the good questions, no one actually needs to manage the process and and I think that's a really dangerous idea, particularly when there's no real evidence around it. And I think the other thing that you raise, which I think is a great point, just a great point, is this, this odd sort of meta, sort of societal, or certainly business wide approach to it that feels somehow, if not, orchestrated, exploited by an opportunity to both hang all the responsibility on the individual leaders, which feels somehow wrong, because that's not how success is. A success for an organization is not just their leader. That is not, you know, that's not where it sits. And I think there's something about also the way CEOs get hung out to dry when organizations fail and board somewhat excuse themselves by saying, well, it was CEOs. We'll just get rid of him, get him to step aside, and then the organization is effectively clean. And I think that works in tandem with the leadership narrative as well, which is frustrating at best, because I don't think it's necessarily what the truth is. Do you do? Do you think, I mean, if I was, if you were talking to practitioners right now, whose bosses are saying to them, Look, we really want to do more leadership. We want you to work only with the leadership team. We want you to get them to be doing more leader like development. What advice would. You have for sort of change management practitioners, sort of trying to change challenge that narrative a little bit and saying, you know, we need to also focus on the

other skills. It's a really tricky one. And thank you for your comments. I I think it's such a dominant narrative, I've actually struggled in my challenging of it. I've been quite surprised I am a critical scholar, but I've been surprised how this what we need here is leadership. Narrative has gripped imagination. The reason I've gone all hesitant on you is, I think it's that politics thing. It is very dangerous for a decent employee to challenge the dominant narrative. So it's a lovely, sunny day here at the moment, and I'm in a sunny place, and I'm enjoying talking to you, but I don't want to say, go out and challenge the dominant narrative. All like all I would offer is if and the two of you said you've had some suspicions, and I have if people have suspicions, think about them. Talk about them with others, because it might not be serving the best interests of the organization. As you say, there's only so much one woman one man can do in terms of leading an organization. My learning has been, if an organizational change is successful, it will largely be down to the people who make up that organization and what they do. So I don't discount the input of the leaders, but it is about the organizational members, and I think that's the best I can do. I don't want to stir it too much, because I just think sometimes good people speak out, and it doesn't always serve their workplace interests as well as it should.

I echo that a lot. And, you know, people talk about things like whistleblower training and all this kind of stuff, but, but nonetheless, there is a need for a bit of a word of caution around that stuff, just in terms of self interest and and I guess with that, you know, permeating this entire conversation is the importance of a self and maintaining the self. And we can want to change the world, but we need to look after ourselves as well. And I think that comes into this here, and part of that then is about managing that duality of what we want to achieve, and looking after ourselves, and then managing some of those conflicts. I think that's an important thing in some of these instances. I'm afraid mark, that we are getting to the end of our time. It's gone rather quickly, and it's been good fun, and I'd love to do it again and explore some more, but, but just before we wrap up, can we can we hear a little bit from you about maybe some thoughts on what listeners could maybe read, or where they could find some of your work, and what they could do just to learn a little bit more about, I guess, organizational change and some of your your views on the field at the minute,

of course, yes, just tempering my my sort of stay quiet, what I would encourage anyone listening to do is build their own models. I think literature theories and models are really just explanations. When I was working with organizations, I encourage people to build their own and I'd like to leave people with that message that it doesn't have to be a Harvard Business School model. They can build a model which is more context specific to their unique circumstances. So that would be my positive message in terms of following up and thank you for asking. Pleasure. I'm not really on social media. I try to do Twitter to the best of my abilities, and I've got the sexy, I don't know what they call it, a handle. Handle, yeah, that handle, and it's at leading changes which anyone who's followed what we've been rabbiting on about should make some sense. I also have a WordPress site called it's got a sexy title this. I hope everyone's listening carefully. Wooden decay.com. Oh, nice. Yes.

I haven't been doing a lot on it. I've been having a gap year, to be honest, this last year, but I will be putting stuff out on that, and there's a lot of back stuff. So if anyone wants to hear any more of my ramblings, they'll find it on there. I also keep my Amazon all for page up to date. So any sort of books I've mentioned, the easiest way to find it is via that. And one final offering. If anybody does want a book chapter, I'm always happy to share a book chapter in a Word file with them if they get in touch. I I'm not here primarily to sell anything. I'd really just promote certain ways of thinking.

Yeah, about tax. And that's very kind of you, um. And what we'll do when we when we share this podcast, we'll promote Twitter, we'll promote your WordPress page, Amazon, all that kind of stuff as well, just to spread the word Excellent. Can't be bad.

Yes indeed. All right, well, I guess it's just time to say goodbye. So thank you very much for me, it was a genuinely fantastic and engaging and entertaining conversation. So thank you from. It, yeah,

and a massive thank you for me. Ever since I heard you speak, it's really shaped and framed the way I've been thinking about this topic, so I really appreciate it, and it's been really great to be able to ask you the questions firsthand as well. So thank you.

And if I could just say thank you to you, I often say in workshops, if at the end of a workshop, I've enjoyed myself. There's a good chance that those in the room have, and I've enjoyed talking to both of you. So thank you for asking me, and thank you for carrying my message out there. It's good to hear some people here by screams. Lovely. Thanks, Frank, bye.

Okay, so you are back in the room with us. That was our conversation with Dr Marquis. We talked about all kinds of exciting stuff to do with organizational change. Jen, do you have any specific takeaways or things that you want to reflect on based on that conversation?

Sure. I mean, I'm reading a little bit because I feel like we covered a lot of ground. There was a lot. There wasn't, yeah, a lot to think about. But I guess, actually, weirdly, the thing that I've taken from it is the importance of having your own view on things. So, you know, obviously Mark's a hugely well read and academic scholar, but ultimately, what he's done is read stuff and thought, Hmm, I'm not sure about that. I'm going to dig. And I think sometimes we read stuff and think, Oh, someone else must have thought that and checked that, or someone else must know that that's right for them to say it, and we just ignore our own inner concern or critic. So I think trusting, trusting your inner critic is a really good message to take from that. For me. Yeah, and you