No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any license allowing limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Change is one of the recurring themes of developed companies in general and management literature in particular.
Why the cost of uncontrolled change has become intolerable
It therefore no longer meets the needs of the moment, and only organizations that are not yet fully accountable – for example governments6 – can afford this privilege. And again, here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, their slow death process seems particularly agonizing for both their individual members and the corporate entity.
Seeking reassurance or trying to control events?
The actual initiation of the process itself is always pushed back until, out of necessity, that is, as external constraints press more and more, one no longer has a choice, one is backed up against the wall, or, to to put it more brutally, being placed in a crisis situation. One can start with something that they themselves point out - and therefore join some of the authors referred to above:7 they bet on knowledge - that is, they did not want to hide from reality - at the same time as on trust – that is, they wanted to share such knowledge with those most concerned about change: their workforce.
The importance of knowledge and knowledge sharing
Why add another stone to this edifice - so hopeless or so well cemented together, depending on the angle from which it is viewed. This approach is centered on the organizations, because it is they who are primarily concerned with change: under pressure from customers, they have to reassess, often urgently, their normal "ways of working", i.e. members work, make decisions, solve their problems, cooperate or, on the contrary, defend themselves.
Using strategic analysis of organizations
Although it is true that it is not possible to control everything, plan everything and, in fact, organize everything, it is possible to propose an approach that, if modestly, allows solving the problems of knowledge and trust described above. Part I, "Winning the customer: the challenge for organizations", will therefore focus on analyzing the environment that fosters organizations - and especially those that we will define as.
The Customer’s Victory: A Challenge for Organizations
Globalization, internationalization and their effects on economic systems are at the center of debates of all kinds in the early twenty-first century. This is indeed true, but nevertheless, that segment of the population plays a very important role in the evolution of business firms, and is therefore worth examining.
Let us set the scene!
Among the possible developments outlined by Robert Castel in his book's section on future crises, "the first is that, beginning in the 1970s, wages will continue to depreciate." are very serious indeed. An original way to better understand them can be to look at some words that appear in the titles of the main works of this period: metamorphosis, end, death, crisis.
Confidence crisis
Each expresses the feeling, both strong and diffuse, that a world is disappearing before our very eyes, at a speed we cannot fully comprehend because we ourselves are so involved in the process. But in this book it will become clear that not only do these people not work in the same industries – something we already suspected – but they are also part of very different organizations.
Middle Ages or Mad Max?
We will have to keep this in mind later as we take up the issue of managing change. 24.
The American model
They are better organized to meet the needs of their employees and also attract people who are more effective than their competitors. They actually protect them from it, and in the case of the strictest organizations, they remove cooperation altogether.
Many words for a single disease
This much deeper interpretation of the American situation is not intended to make claims about its durability, superiority or success. We still do not have sufficient perspective to assess the situation.37Nevertheless, our analysis helps to show to what extent the day-to-day work of the workplace in the 1990s is influenced by this third industrial revolution.
Germany: escaping the crisis in a different way
From this angle, we arrive at the second point that appears in the case of Germany, namely the attempts to get out of this dilemma with something less than a full-blown crisis. A final important aspect of the German example – but the same could be said of Sweden – the bureaucratic crisis is also affecting, in a sort of ricochet effect, the organizations that were traditionally grafted into and fed by these bureaucracies.
Asia: the frailty of the “dragons”
If the latter is not the "end of the story", it is at least the "sense of the story".6. Finally, why does this victory pose a fundamental problem for the organization, as defined in the previous sections.
From a scarce product to a scarce customer
In their heated struggle to contain the drastic changes that are coming, bureaucrats—a term we will define more precisely in the next chapter—“swallow” the idea of customer victory, but see it as little more than a tasteless pill. Firstly, what does it mean that "the customer has won" in everyday life, but also conceptually in relation to the distribution of power.
The hazards of segmentation
In fact, this cost includes three dimensions: price, of course; quality, in the most basic sense of the term, that of the product; but also in terms of quality in a more complex sense, i.e. the quality of the way goods or services are produced and delivered to the customer. Although the observation that power shifts from the hands of the producer to the hands of the customer is true, it is not very specific.
How not to listen
John is told by a company representative, clearly well trained in "the customer welcome process", that the company regrets not being able to accept orders over the phone. Finally, on the recommendation of the "professional" that they call in the evening, the representative replies that the company has not yet resorted to working after hours.
The case of a British catering company
If this happens, the director intervenes immediately; to avoid such a scenario and remain autonomous, the sector supervisor "almost literally hangs on" the customers, trying to anticipate their needs and satisfy them. From a certain point of view, restaurant managers "pay" for the sector supervisors' freedom, and when the latter complain about pressure, whether they know it or not, they actually transfer most of this pressure to the.
Getting off the beaten track
The loose structure of the organization – the exact opposite of a bureaucracy, as we will see in the next chapter – is not a sign of disorganization, as some of the American corporate executives seem to fear. First, a system of sanctions must exist to put the dream that everyone "has the right to make a mistake" into proper perspective.
Human resource management, as an essential counterweight to the customer’s victory
When this idea is taken a little further - less comfort in the most general sense of the term - we begin to see how important the management of human resources is in an organization's struggle to adapt to the customer's victory. These become, as in the case of the British catering company, keys to behavioral change, and it's always surprising to see how many businesses still haven't.
The story of an evolution
After presenting Reich's dissertation, Rifkin adds: "The corporate organization management system is a giant sucker, a powerful producer capable of creating significant quantities of standardized goods but lacking the flexibility to make nimble adjustments to adapt to adapt to rapid fluctuations in the market. domestic or global markets.”4. The author does not share Michel Crozier's view that "the bureaucratic phenomenon" owes its success in the United States to the fact that it helped explain French bureaucracy; it just helped explain the American corporations whose functioning is described by Robert Reich.10 Likewise, he decisively identified “the fear of face-to-face interaction,” which we will reinterpret for our purposes in terms of non-cooperation, as well as the gap between what employees do and how staff are managed.
Taylor, or the sole rationality
This calls into question not only the "organization" in the broadest sense of the term, including what employees actually do on the job (their job descriptions), but also its rationale. This is due to the nature of the business and of course for security reasons.
Hell is everybody else!
Surprising as it may be, it is a completely natural result of an organization built around the customer, that is, where people work together (as we saw earlier in the case of the air transport industry, and as we will see again later in the case of the automotive industry ), is more efficient in the use of resources than an organization built on the segmentation of technical tasks, which allows its members to avoid cooperation. Freed from their "occupations" in the "projects", engineers, managers and technicians had to work together towards a common goal.
Integration and cost cutting
In the traditional divided context, where there is no communication, the only ones who ultimately have an overview of the whole are the suppliers. From this point of view, the way costs are transferred in organizations is more a functional problem than a matter of "savings", in the most basic sense of the word.
The hospital: less spending, more cooperation
In general, they do not understand what such a reform would mean for the organization of public or parapublic services. From this standpoint, knowing that the elite of the private and public sectors overlap both in the United States and in Europe, the mindsets are more or less the same here and there.
Task segmentation
It is worth noting that this alternative results in a change in the duties of a given job (the stylist is now involved in shampooing), or in new ways of cooperation between members of the organization (small teams work within one area of the saloon). Just before returning to Europe, his wife decides to purchase a duvet, which she says is of better quality in America than in the Old World.
The better a teacher you are, the less you teach!
While experience should be the guarantee of quality learning, it is nothing more than a way out of it. It's up to the student – the customer, in the true sense of the term as far as business schools are concerned – to integrate it all, to bring the whole picture together as a system.
The client held as hostage
By the standards of the company, for the bureaucracy itself, its statistics and complacency - the plane arrived on time. For an airline, the way it operates will determine how it calculates that it is "accurate".
The end of monopolies
New economy, old bureaucracy
Therefore, the last bureaucracies to initiate their revolution will be those in charge of the royal functions of the country and therefore unlikely to be put on the market. Their client is a politician, and they can impose their way of thinking on their environment, as long as it minimally negatively affects the elected official, who is ultimately responsible for public administration in the eyes of the voters.
Coordination and cooperation
In the new realm of the nanosecond, the traditional functions of managerial control and coordination seem unbearably slow and completely unable to respond in real time to the speed and volume at which the organization is absorbing information.13. It must be made possible, rationally for those involved, as will be argued in the next section.
Changing a winning team
Beer, Eisenstadt and Spector think that the first strategy is bound to fail and that it is even one of the main identifiable factors of immobility. In fact, there is no longer any model that really focuses on the nature of the organizations to be created, neither on their structures nor on how to run them.
A theoretical debate: to centralize or to decentralize?
In order to legitimize his role, he has virtually no other options than to always ask the central financial management for more investments, more financial resources, which will allow him to show that he is able to play a positive and active role in everyday life. the daily operation of the factory. In the case we are looking at, it is thus the eight factory managers who are placed in the same situation and thus develop the same strategy of "always more".
Change by acting on structures
More than that – it also indicates greater freedom to work on daily reality, provided the end results are acceptable. These young managers, who consider their stay in this factory as only a small step in their career, represented the group's functional management departments on site, such as the industrial department, all of which were major producers of regulations and procedures intended. to harmonize the overall procedures for doing things in all the group's factories.
The declaration of good tax conduct
The first, responsible for the application by the second of directives and policies drawn up by the bank, in the conventional system had some maneuver margins that were very useful in the negotiations of the operational manager. Everyone embraced the new standards and used them, not as intended by those who issued them, but in line with their own situation in the local game.
Change through play on attitudes
But they don't open until nine o'clock in the morning and, as we could see, even when it's raining, there's a line waiting in front of the offices. The individual attitude is impeccable, the result in terms of perceived quality.
The negative attitude of inspectors
However, it is the inspector who is responsible for everything that happens in the company without any possibility to pass the responsibility for the problems to other people, to whom the client has no access and about whom he knows nothing. So when an incident occurs during a trip and the inspector asks the manager of the next station to call law enforcement, there is little chance that his request will be heard and executed.
The Change Process
Let's start with the following statement that has already been formulated several times: it is all the more difficult to change an organization if the actors in the organization – both leaders and employees – have a poor understanding of how the organization functions. It is this added value that is lacking in spontaneous knowledge, in the “quick glance”, however founded on factual experience.
The dilemma of the shampoo girl
Once the main characteristic of an actor has been identified, how he or she will react in the future is "known", regardless of the environment - the organization - in which this actor operates. Early in chapter 3 we observed the Taylorization of this small world, in the fact that as part of the classical production process of the.
How to identify the relevant actors
On the other hand, to start a problem (in this case a symptom) it is possible to identify quite quickly which actors are directly or indirectly involved, regardless of the official structure of which they are a part. Here the relevance of the actors is compared – one might say reduced – to the structure of which they are a part, which is thought to be the cause of the problem.
Listening”, a critical and hazardous exercise
He has a powerful resource which is his monopoly on access to the "high level manager", and his main limitation is his lack of real power over the members of the organization. Here, too, a real discussion of the problems that actors need to solve opens new doors for dealing with change.
The coordinator and the delay
What was there about the previous situation that made cooperation with the coordinator a rational strategy for members of the various teams working around the aircraft. Therefore, the power of the coordinator has nothing to do with the official hierarchy.
The leverages for change
But we can go further here: the intelligent adaptation that actors make, which is presented here, affects not only their strategy (the context has changed, I adapt my strategy), but also the problem to be solved, which ultimately opens up . many new possibilities for managing change. More directly, they focus on possible goals, those they think they can achieve in the context in which they find themselves.
Intermediate stock as symptom
The unit is primarily involved in the production of various models of radiators on two production lines, one of which, the factory's pride and joy, has just been completely restructured. The operation doesn't seem unduly bothered by what's being said (he must be about twenty years older than his driver), and calmly explains that it's actually a bumper stock, but it really doesn't matter because, officially, in the data carefully collected at the end of the line, these coolers do not actually exist.
Human intelligence as problem
From Symptom to Problem 133 In his haste, he confused the symptom - there is an intermediate stock - with the problem - how to protect yourself in a context that sees the interweaving of attractive manufacturing, drastic quality management in the chain and physical. positioning the operative isolated in his. What is at issue here, as in the case of the shampoo girl, is the worker's ability to understand this logic.
What is a step in the process of change?
So here we are again with the issue of convincing people discussed in the previous chapter. At the end of the day, in wanting quick action, in the hope of finding immediate solutions that will avoid us appearing to be "slow", "intellectual", not very dynamic, in being too quick to to draw conclusions or, in other words, to believe anecdotes rather than facts, we deceive ourselves.
Why this talk of “symptoms”?
Putting himself on another level, Edgard Schein, a great specialist in applied therapy in organizations, writes: "His instinct that previously he had to collect data in order to plan a later intervention, I now understand, is one of the most nonsensical ideas in counseling.”1 While the idea that diagnosis and intervention should be performed simultaneously rather than sequentially is certainly attractive and appropriate when this is a therapeutic approach, it nevertheless needs to be adjusted as it involves management of a process. change, which does not necessarily want to result in a phase of destruction before reconstruction. Work must be done on its processing, analysis and interpretation, to ensure that what is communicated has an added value in terms of the initial feeling of the actors.
The understanding of problems as a listening mechanism
For actors have a biased interpretation, in the strategic rather than polemical sense of the word, of the symptoms that manifest. In fact, what matters is not the conscious and deliberate action of individuals, but the informal mechanisms that no one can control and that ultimately produce the elitist result that we have already shown.
The tools for listening
Here it involves the tracing of the sociogram, that is to say the representation of the relationships between actors, as experienced by the actors themselves. This makes it possible both to achieve a first illustration of the system that forms itself around the identified symptom, and to look at the positive, negative or neutral aspects played by the actors in this system.
Understanding and controlling complexity
When questioned in depth, the traffic officers in turn appear to be unaware of the existence of inspectors, who are not part of their From Symptom to Problem 141. However, these actors themselves act without any anticipation of the consequences of their actions and their decisions regarding the face-to-face contact between the client and the inspector.
From organizational complexity to systemic complexity
Although this presentation is caricatured, it helps to understand how, in the eyes of the state representative, the "transportation" that we will analyze as a complex system is reduced to a single activity - transport by vehicle - and a single actor - the truck driver (but only until he breaks the law). Let's stop here for a moment: starting from a simple vision with a single actor – the truck driver – here we are now in the presence of at least four actors – the dispatcher, the coordinator, the large carrier and the small carrier.
The principal resource of the most powerful actor
One could say that in such a case the collapse is not simply a machine that stops - at the end of the day, a very impoverished vision of reality - it is the main resource of the most powerful actor. In the second case – organizational vision – reducing the rate of collapses to adapt to competition means reducing the power of the dominant actor, which is a completely different matter and much more difficult to manage.
The search for autonomy as the most universally widespread problem
At the same time, it is obvious that changing strategies presupposes a different context, i.e. an emphasis on the resources and limitations of the various actors involved. It is a method of reasoning that focuses on the reasons for an action, emphasizing the importance of context, regardless of its nature.
Can one deal with everything at once?
Systemic change does not imply overall action
From problem to priorities 155 These consultants were the responsibility of the management team – in general and more specifically in the event of change. In this case, as for the snake, one tries only to remain immobile.
The case of the European Development Bank
Nevertheless, I'm going to try to illustrate the two most common situations with the following two examples - it's up to everyone to take them as examples and not as models. But by that they mean the account managers and not the branch managers.
Responsible but not guilty
Turning now to the content of the change process, we have just identified the main resource of the most powerful actor. In contrast to this absence of resources, they suffer from the same lack of information as the rest of the bank.
From the symptom to the problem
As soon as it is time to lay down the budget, the management of the network decides on the main lines and then distributes them to the rest of the organization. Placed in a situation of non-information, as described above, which we must remember is linked to the sales force's strategy, management seeks to obtain some reliable forecasts from the next level down – in this case, the area managers.
The choice of strategic priority
In short, these are the ones who set their own goals, and one understands why they should have so little difficulty in achieving them, as it is easy, beyond any control, to underestimate them in the name of sincere prudence. In the case of the bank, it is tempting to immediately reassess the information system, that is, to end up favoring the channels rather than what runs through them.
The systemic aspect of priorities
This question is at the heart of the problem of change, and it has confronted all those who have had to manage the real and fundamental transformation of an organization. But problems commonly known as "human problems" in colloquial language, which are really organizational problems, are much more difficult to overcome.
Three trends for a mediocre result
As soon as the priorities are identified, the question arises of how to modify the strategy of intelligent actors, how to get them to make other decisions, to solutions that are acceptable to them.
The limits of belief
The torments of project management
Calling for interoperability as an absolute necessity to provide the customer with quality at the lowest possible cost will never be enough to change the actors' strategy. In fact, they share the rewards, under the watchful eye of the man they call themselves.
The ineffectiveness of coercion
In the year 2000, one in 174 Americans was "living" in prison, and the proportion is constantly increasing. From Priorities to Levers 171 and Procedures is impressive – for its quantity – in its intention to leave nothing to chance and especially not arbitrariness; on the other hand, the diversity of solutions and practices is remarkable.
Linear reasoning and systemic reasoning
Action by leverage or recognition of the actor’s intelligence
At the same time, it is almost impossible to change something in these organizations - so intractable the tangle of issues created in this way appears at the end of the day. 5. The physical metaphor of the lever is not without interest: it actually consists of applying weight somewhere to get a movement somewhere else, as opposed to what was just said about the linear approach.
When cooperating is not rational
For safety reasons, as noted above, each division is rated based on the number of incidents affecting the part of the aircraft it is responsible for (for example, the number of computer failures for the computer division). The one-dimensional and vertical character of the assessment criterion leads to the one-dimensional and vertical character of the actors' actions.
Bringing actors to acknowledge the complexity of reality
Playing with a simple element of context—salary, for example—can successfully produce this effect. They not only suggested that a certain number of operations on different parts of the plane could be carried out in the same place, but also showed that they could be carried out at the same time.
Two lessons to be learned
With regard to attitudes, without re-entering the complex sociological debates about attitudes and behaviours, the example shows that they are the effect rather than the cause, and that attacking them preferentially is not to the great advantage or even to the great disadvantage of "theorizing". and pointlessly introducing conflict into the change debate. In the same way that the structures of organizations are becoming increasingly fluid and complex, despite repeated demands for simplicity, the environments in which actors develop are also becoming increasingly diverse and contradictory.
Difficulty in identifying the relevant levers
In doing so, one only adds new constraints to those that are already leading to the strategies one wishes to change. Thus, their situation of dependency increases, and thus their vulnerability in relation to other operators in the system, who therefore find it even easier to manipulate them.
Levers, banding effects and reinternalization of costs
But the main thing here is that the applied reasoning has moved us away from the linear view and made it possible to use, for the benefit of change, all the resources that the complexity of the system offers. On the contrary, knowledge and acceptance of complexity open up unsuspected leeway.
Linearity of reasoning and complexity of organizations
These make it possible to anticipate a number of possibilities and, above all, avoid focusing exclusively on the visible part of the iceberg, i.e. on the symptoms. An in-depth analysis of this situation has made it possible to highlight two points that will be useful when considering the introduction of real changes in this company.
The weakness of middle management
Now that the general management itself is assessed by the regulators on the frequency of labor disputes, which all other actors have known for a long time, it is completely locked in the powerful and determined unions with which it "plays" the priority it has as its exclusive contacts, because they are the decision-makers in case of obstetrical problems. In case of incidents, they are not in the transport vehicles with the inspectors and can neither provide them with the necessary information nor influence the decisions that will be made in terms of choosing between accuracy and connectivity, which we have seen are essential in direct management between inspectors and passengers.
The ravages of verticalization
Micro-decisions and definition of priorities
Crossed priorities
This wording helps to understand that the change is not forced, that it is not a mechanical effect of the levers used. In relation to this, it is proposed to give them the resources that will make a change in strategy acceptable – rational – for them.
From close-up control to conducting the orchestra
This will no doubt look less certain, insofar as experience shows that it is pointless to try to predict all the consequences of using leverage. Since everyone shares the same fears when something is done, it is often enough to show managers that not everything is ready, that the different steps are neither clear nor under control, that one cannot guarantee the agreement and support of so and so a category, to block everything and postpone transformations.
The principal factors of immobilism
Regarding change more than anything else, the best is the enemy of the good, and fastidious perfectionism is a strong factor in immobility. The difficulty is all the greater, since by reminding ourselves that the methods of functioning are above all what people do, the way they work, decide, cooperate and sometimes protect themselves, we will at the same time have been reminded the extent of issue.2.
Calculation of cost-effectiveness
This is understandable to the extent that, for all the reasons given so far, this constitutes the most delicate and often the most dangerous part of the change process. However, it is precisely the priority given to the program, i.e. to what it must do, as opposed to the knowledge of reality, i.e. what it can possibly do, that prevents one from seeing the reactions of the actors to anticipate.
The example of insurance companies
The leader becomes the Pontius Pilate of the change process and cannot really help it if Jesus ends up on the cross. Faced with such difficulties, the managers responsible for implementation generally called in external consultants, who often only reinforced the technical orientation of the decisions that had been made, at the expense of a strategic understanding of the real problems.
The inertia of organizations
And all things being equal, the fact that they agreed to give this up, however good the reason, was tantamount to professional suicide in the truest sense of the word, to the extent that they could easily in the long run foresee that some of them would certainly disappear and the companies would absorb some of their current work again. The development of a “good information system” has once again replaced effective listening to the actors involved.
The vicious circle of conservatism
