Change is collective

Smart leaders know this

All the accepted and codified models of change are linear and top-down, defined by leaders issuing directions and project managers with Excel spreadsheets who fiercely guard their red, yellow and green traffic lights. But change is human and complex, and Excel is not sufficient to wrangle our complicated response to change that we feel is forced upon us in the workplace.

A collective of strawberries by Shoumendu Mukherjee on Unsplash

In last week’s episode of Speech Bubbles, strategic advisor and executive coach Daniel Atlin told me that change usually happens on the edges of an organisation:

Changes usually happen not at the center of an organisation but at the periphery and at the edges. And I think a better way to somehow do that is to capture those things with a broader strategic direction rather than actually a plan that actually tries to nail down and predict the future, which as we know is unpredictable.

Daniel’s work on sense-making is worth following and he launches his podcast - the brilliantly named Messy - this month. I realise more and more that his work on sense-making in complex organisations and my work in changing our leadership archetype are highly complementary. We are both challenging conventional narratives and inviting in new conversations. And there’s no surprise that we met in a masters programme on change leadership.

The reason I chose that course of study was I realised after a decade of leading communications that all organisational comms is about change. No leader gets on stage to tell their team everything is staying the same. I wanted to have a deeper understanding of the theoretical side of change leadership. After hundreds of readings, and 18 months of study, the core message was: most change initiatives fail. And why do they fail? Because of people.

During a recent dinner conversation, the topic of AI came up, as it always does. The general agreement was that leaders who implement AI initiatives to replace jobs are relying on the very people whose jobs will be removed to implement the initiative - and they should never underestimate the ability of middle management to effectively derail a change initiative.

The humans you wish to effect the change need to believe in the change. Simple.

A recent article in The Journal of Change Management talks about moving away from the ‘heroic leadership’ model of change towards what the authors call collective agency. Hat-tip to Thomas Otter for sending me the LinkedIn post by ‘Cheese’ Cheeseman that first alerted me to the article.

Old ideas about change are being replaced with new ones. The old idea is that change can be planned, linear, step-by-step, project management, traffic lights - what Allegra Patrizi calls the rationality mirage. This aspect may work for a software implemention, but it doesn’t work for bringing the humans along.

The authors of the study say that change ‘emerges through embodied interactions rather than top-down directives’:

Such a relational understanding positions change not as something done to people, but as something that unfolds through people as they navigate, negotiate, and co-create new organizational realities in their daily experiences.

They also encourage us to regard both leadership and followership as things that are emergent, relational and plural. If we understand leadership as linear and top-down only, then we only understand change as something that exists in a hierarchy. As ‘Cheese’ says:

… they're pushing for what they call "collective agency" - basically the idea that change happens best when everyone's involved, not just the person at the top barking orders. They want us to see change as something that emerges from relationships and everyday interactions, not something imposed by management.

I’m finding in my work as it evolves from We Need New Leaders to Speech Bubbles that I’m more and more interested in leadership outside or resistant to the hierarchy. The question I always ask in my podcast is how can we change the archetype of leadership that we have in our heads, and what I’m really asking (I now realise) is how do we change the archetype of hierarchy - and get to something more emergent.

In the next season of Speech Bubbles, I’m going to be interviewing co-founders, co-leaders and people who lead in alternative constellations such as employee-owned trusts. I’m interested to find out how leadership works when there’s not one single person directing from the apex. If you’ve something to say on the topic, and would like to be a guest, feel free to get in touch!