1 00:00:01,560 --> 00:00:20,840 Are. So for this talk, I'm going to talk about something which is quite close to my my heart, 2 00:00:20,840 --> 00:00:29,930 which is about process thinking, which is a way of thinking about the world that we're trying to understand. 3 00:00:29,930 --> 00:00:40,670 And I've written quite a few things about about this topic, mainly methodological work. 4 00:00:40,670 --> 00:00:49,400 And one of the one of the pieces that I've written is about thinking a process, thinking in four different ways of process thinking. 5 00:00:49,400 --> 00:00:55,610 And so what I'm going to do is introduce them to you, discuss them a little bit. 6 00:00:55,610 --> 00:01:00,050 And I'm also going to try. I don't know whether they will let me do this, 7 00:01:00,050 --> 00:01:10,400 but I'm also going to try and relate this a little bit to Richard Norman's work because looking at his work, 8 00:01:10,400 --> 00:01:14,010 I think he was many things Richard Norman. 9 00:01:14,010 --> 00:01:19,820 I think he was a systemic thinker. But I think he was also a process thinker. 10 00:01:19,820 --> 00:01:27,020 And so I would like to like to draw attention to some of that as I talk about this topic. 11 00:01:27,020 --> 00:01:31,700 So, Richard Norman, there's a process think of first class. 12 00:01:31,700 --> 00:01:38,900 And so here are a couple of quotes from books that that Rafael mentioned. 13 00:01:38,900 --> 00:01:50,240 First of all, from his book Management for Growth, clearly he was dissatisfied with in his work with positive mystic approaches. 14 00:01:50,240 --> 00:02:00,050 And so he says naturalistic theory is based on positive based methods can be used to plot regularities between observable and existing phenomena, 15 00:02:00,050 --> 00:02:08,270 but they provide an inmate an inadequate tool for any attempt to penetrate the dynamic world of social change process. 16 00:02:08,270 --> 00:02:12,920 Thinking is really thinking about changing and change. 17 00:02:12,920 --> 00:02:24,360 And then we have to change in order to say the same as kind of a it's the first line that you read in his book on reframing business. 18 00:02:24,360 --> 00:02:32,180 So what is process thinking so? 19 00:02:32,180 --> 00:02:42,680 We defined process thinking in an article that I wrote with Clive Smallman, Harry Soukous and Andrew van der found in this article, 20 00:02:42,680 --> 00:02:51,710 process thinking implies considering phenomena as in motion as unfolding over time and US becoming process. 21 00:02:51,710 --> 00:03:01,490 Researchers seek to understand and explain the world in terms of interlinked events, activity, temporality and flow, 22 00:03:01,490 --> 00:03:08,090 rather than in terms of variants and relationships amongst dependent and independent variables. 23 00:03:08,090 --> 00:03:18,590 So the basic. Entity or or object that process research researchers look at our events and activities, 24 00:03:18,590 --> 00:03:27,170 things that happen rather than variables, and so variables may into it into some of the research that we do. 25 00:03:27,170 --> 00:03:34,010 But the real focus is on a temporally evolving phenomenon. 26 00:03:34,010 --> 00:03:39,290 So the next question is why is this important? 27 00:03:39,290 --> 00:03:42,170 OK, so well, 28 00:03:42,170 --> 00:03:53,840 a first very obvious reason why this is important is the centrality of time to our experience of the world and to our understanding of it. 29 00:03:53,840 --> 00:03:57,890 It's the only thing that we cannot escape, right? 30 00:03:57,890 --> 00:04:11,120 It's important. And yet a lot of the research that we see done and written up in in journals actually doesn't pay much attention to it. 31 00:04:11,120 --> 00:04:23,330 It's kind of left out. So we think that there's room for a perspective that really takes it seriously. 32 00:04:23,330 --> 00:04:32,960 A second reason to think more about process is that it helps us understand not only changing, 33 00:04:32,960 --> 00:04:39,800 which I spoke about, but also about all the activity that is necessary. 34 00:04:39,800 --> 00:04:49,390 And Richard Norman said this in some way to stay in the same place that the activity that is required. 35 00:04:49,390 --> 00:04:58,570 So that every year the Norman lecture takes place in this room, which is staying the same and those who organised that, thank you very much. 36 00:04:58,570 --> 00:05:08,260 But you had to work hard for this, so work is required even for staying the same, and we should recognise that and think about it. 37 00:05:08,260 --> 00:05:15,160 What is that activity that is enabling us to stay in the same place? 38 00:05:15,160 --> 00:05:26,260 A third reason is that, you know, most of our research we think about, well, does an independent variable and there's a dependent variable. 39 00:05:26,260 --> 00:05:35,670 There's an outcome and then it's over. Actually, the world isn't that way, and that there are there are ripples. 40 00:05:35,670 --> 00:05:45,960 I think things get done and they have short term consequences, and they have longer term consequences, sometimes surprising ones. 41 00:05:45,960 --> 00:05:55,050 And so if you just stop, you know, with the measure of performance at the end of the year and you say, well, we've got the outcome now. 42 00:05:55,050 --> 00:06:05,340 But there are things that you did in order to obtain that performance that might have other subsequent consequences. 43 00:06:05,340 --> 00:06:10,690 And so unless you're taking a process perspective, you would just ignore that. 44 00:06:10,690 --> 00:06:16,750 A process perspective enables you to take that into account. 45 00:06:16,750 --> 00:06:27,550 A fourth reason why this is important is because we need to understand not only what the best practises are. 46 00:06:27,550 --> 00:06:34,690 So I had a discussion earlier with some friends from Norman Partners and we were 47 00:06:34,690 --> 00:06:44,530 discussing Ikea's wonderful value constellation system that they had developed. 48 00:06:44,530 --> 00:06:48,700 And that's wonderful. They developed this. We can examine it. 49 00:06:48,700 --> 00:06:55,120 We can see how, how it performs. But my question is, how did they get that? 50 00:06:55,120 --> 00:07:05,050 If you are another business that wants to do as IKEA did in a different sector, for example, 51 00:07:05,050 --> 00:07:09,760 you could invent you could say, OK, well, we need to do this, this, this and this. 52 00:07:09,760 --> 00:07:15,070 But the question I would ask you is, OK, well, fine, that's your objective. 53 00:07:15,070 --> 00:07:21,520 But what are you going to do tomorrow morning and then next week and then next month? 54 00:07:21,520 --> 00:07:27,220 So a lot of the research we do doesn't provide answers to that question. 55 00:07:27,220 --> 00:07:33,770 It tells you what's better. Maybe it says that a is better than be. 56 00:07:33,770 --> 00:07:38,280 If you're a bee, how do you become a. 57 00:07:38,280 --> 00:07:46,200 It's not it's not by waving a monetary mom and saying, now we're be that there is a process. 58 00:07:46,200 --> 00:07:50,490 Unfortunately, a lot of our work doesn't really address that. 59 00:07:50,490 --> 00:07:58,710 So these are for reasons for doing that and the next looking at process, in fact. 60 00:07:58,710 --> 00:08:07,590 And the next step, I'd like to introduce you to four different ways of thinking about process. 61 00:08:07,590 --> 00:08:15,930 And in order to do this, I need to recognise an ex student of mine, Fernando Fakin, 62 00:08:15,930 --> 00:08:24,060 who together with whom we wrote this chapter in the Sage Handbook of Qualitative Management Research Methods, 63 00:08:24,060 --> 00:08:31,830 which introduces this these same four modes, which I have built on in order to do this presentation. 64 00:08:31,830 --> 00:08:40,260 So this is the summary of my presentation. So if I don't make it to 50 50 minutes, here it is. 65 00:08:40,260 --> 00:08:50,820 In fact to me, put it there. So first, one first way of of thinking about process is thinking about evolution over time. 66 00:08:50,820 --> 00:08:55,800 And the question here is how does an entity change or evolve over time? 67 00:08:55,800 --> 00:09:01,620 So entities like the identity of an organisation, how does it evolve over time? 68 00:09:01,620 --> 00:09:10,670 The structure of an organisation? How does it evolve over time? And so you've got something which becomes different? 69 00:09:10,670 --> 00:09:21,850 And we call this as having a substantive ontology, because there's a focus on this entity, which is an entity and which changes. 70 00:09:21,850 --> 00:09:30,610 The second one processor's narrative is really thinking about the temporality, not necessarily in what you might call the real world, 71 00:09:30,610 --> 00:09:36,310 but in terms of people's experience and how they express it, the stories they tell. 72 00:09:36,310 --> 00:09:41,110 So people tell stories which have time within them. They say this happened and this happened. 73 00:09:41,110 --> 00:09:48,130 Then this happened. This is the story. It may bear some relationship to what happened, but it could just be a story. 74 00:09:48,130 --> 00:09:54,280 And so the second way of thinking about process, which is a kind of experiential technology, 75 00:09:54,280 --> 00:09:59,020 is this notion of temporality being in the stories that people tell. 76 00:09:59,020 --> 00:10:10,330 Oh, the third one, which we which is philosophically speaking, if there are philosophers in the room, 77 00:10:10,330 --> 00:10:15,100 a process ontology, what people usually mean by that is the idea. 78 00:10:15,100 --> 00:10:19,630 That process is all that is OK. 79 00:10:19,630 --> 00:10:23,920 There are no things. Things are made up of processes. 80 00:10:23,920 --> 00:10:32,420 So the notion here is how a phenomenon is reconstituted in and through activity. 81 00:10:32,420 --> 00:10:39,170 And then finally, the last one takes and we're getting more and more professional as we're going through this, 82 00:10:39,170 --> 00:10:48,410 the last one process as witness is the idea of not only is the thing that you're studying, 83 00:10:48,410 --> 00:11:00,950 moving and process, but so are you as a researcher so that the researcher is moving along with the elements they're looking at? 84 00:11:00,950 --> 00:11:07,760 So these are these for. And so my purpose in the rest of the talk is to illustrate them. 85 00:11:07,760 --> 00:11:17,420 And hopefully Denise will help me to make sure that they we manage to at least talk a little bit about each of them. 86 00:11:17,420 --> 00:11:25,250 And so in order to do this, I'm going to use some examples from my own research, sometimes from my own research, some from other. 87 00:11:25,250 --> 00:11:29,580 But for each of them, I'm going to give a few little examples from my own research. 88 00:11:29,580 --> 00:11:34,790 So let's start with the first one. So process this evolution. 89 00:11:34,790 --> 00:11:42,440 And if you look at the literature in organisation studies, this is the version of process, which is most common. 90 00:11:42,440 --> 00:11:47,750 And to be quite honest, most of my own work is based on this idea. 91 00:11:47,750 --> 00:11:58,160 And the distinction that I see is particularly important between process and variance is very present in this picture, 92 00:11:58,160 --> 00:12:02,930 where process studies are kind of represented by the picture on the right. 93 00:12:02,930 --> 00:12:13,770 So if you take these two pictures, you could argue that both of them provide an explanation of strategic change. 94 00:12:13,770 --> 00:12:21,570 On the left, you have a series of variables that predict the degree of strategic change. 95 00:12:21,570 --> 00:12:27,990 That's the traditional way of thinking in most of our scientific disciplines. 96 00:12:27,990 --> 00:12:33,000 The picture on the left, on the other hand, is another way of explaining a strategic change. 97 00:12:33,000 --> 00:12:42,960 But it traces the path of that change over time through not through variables, but through advance activities and choices. 98 00:12:42,960 --> 00:12:50,250 And so this is the version of process that I'm going to focus on when I use the term process as evolution. 99 00:12:50,250 --> 00:12:54,750 I'm not necessarily referring to Darwinian evolution here. 100 00:12:54,750 --> 00:13:02,400 I'm just referring to development over time. 101 00:13:02,400 --> 00:13:10,840 So, OK, so how one would one go about studying this, so usually the kind of research design we use, 102 00:13:10,840 --> 00:13:16,320 this is longitudinal or retrospective case studies of change. 103 00:13:16,320 --> 00:13:22,680 This is a very demanding research methodology if you want to really use this approach to and do it well. 104 00:13:22,680 --> 00:13:30,810 You actually need to be there following things over time. Data from multiple sources, mostly qualitative. 105 00:13:30,810 --> 00:13:40,200 And then your your task as a researcher is to find patterns to detect patterns and temporal trajectories. 106 00:13:40,200 --> 00:13:50,460 I'm a qualitative researcher. I do most of this qualitatively, but quantitative methods to the extent that they might be useful in process research, 107 00:13:50,460 --> 00:13:59,430 this is here where they could be used. Well, we can look at things like agent based simulations as being potentially used, 108 00:13:59,430 --> 00:14:04,200 and longitudinal quantitative models might be helpful for this kind of thing. 109 00:14:04,200 --> 00:14:09,660 This is not what I do, but that's that's where they could come in. 110 00:14:09,660 --> 00:14:19,350 So an interesting contribution to this kind of perspective comes from Andrew van der Veen and Marshall Scott Poole, 111 00:14:19,350 --> 00:14:28,290 who developed for all kinds of ways of thinking about process as something evolving over time. 112 00:14:28,290 --> 00:14:33,090 And so the first one is a kind of a theoretical mechanism is lifecycle. 113 00:14:33,090 --> 00:14:44,880 So, you know, genetic processes, for example, human life follows are predictable, fairly predictable life cycle. 114 00:14:44,880 --> 00:14:46,890 We know what happens next. 115 00:14:46,890 --> 00:15:00,030 Generally, a second kind of process theory theory is the idea of agency where people decide that what they want to do and do it, 116 00:15:00,030 --> 00:15:05,790 they learn from what they do and adjust what they do is a function of this learning. 117 00:15:05,790 --> 00:15:12,020 So the team geology theoretical model is really about learning. 118 00:15:12,020 --> 00:15:20,090 And agency, the third one that is Darwinian evolution here. 119 00:15:20,090 --> 00:15:29,150 So the notion of there being variation occurring amongst species or it could be, for example, 120 00:15:29,150 --> 00:15:35,060 if you're looking at organisations making a large number of ideas being produced in your 121 00:15:35,060 --> 00:15:40,580 organisation and at some point you have to select which ones are going to survive. 122 00:15:40,580 --> 00:15:45,320 So there's a kind of a survival of the fittest thing going on. 123 00:15:45,320 --> 00:15:49,970 And those that are most adapted to the context will survive and continue. 124 00:15:49,970 --> 00:16:02,360 So that's that kind of model. Finally, and this last one is my favourite, which is the dialectical model, 125 00:16:02,360 --> 00:16:09,680 which is the notion that change is driven by the opposition of opposing forces. 126 00:16:09,680 --> 00:16:17,600 And why is this so attractive to me? I think it's because I I study pluralistic organisations, 127 00:16:17,600 --> 00:16:25,430 pluralistic organisations where there are always tensions where you cannot decide 128 00:16:25,430 --> 00:16:34,010 something on your own because you're going to have to interact with others. And so a conflict contradiction, tension is kind of endemic. 129 00:16:34,010 --> 00:16:39,080 So this is the kind of approach that very often I have used in my research. 130 00:16:39,080 --> 00:16:47,930 Some people find this rather pessimistic. It sort of makes you seem that you can't do anything, but I don't think that that's quite true. 131 00:16:47,930 --> 00:16:57,070 So, so here is a dialectical model of strategic change, which is which I will try and explain to you. 132 00:16:57,070 --> 00:17:03,230 So change in organisations is constant, right? 133 00:17:03,230 --> 00:17:07,830 It's just incremental. Things happen differently every day. 134 00:17:07,830 --> 00:17:12,710 So the basic circles here is that part of it. 135 00:17:12,710 --> 00:17:16,060 When we come in and we say, OK, we're going to do a change. 136 00:17:16,060 --> 00:17:23,720 The purpose of this change is to reconfigure the organisation in a certain way, which we hope is going to be better. 137 00:17:23,720 --> 00:17:35,010 And projects in organisations might include restructuring, mergers, reconfigurations, etc. So but then we implemented. 138 00:17:35,010 --> 00:17:40,950 And does the organisation just let itself be forced to implement? 139 00:17:40,950 --> 00:17:45,600 No, this is where the dialectics happens. 140 00:17:45,600 --> 00:17:50,550 So you insert this wonderful project into the organisation. 141 00:17:50,550 --> 00:18:04,600 The project does have some kind of change that effects in the organisation, but at the same time, the project itself changes. 142 00:18:04,600 --> 00:18:11,350 I'm sure you have all experienced that the thing that you thought you were going to implement doesn't look the same once it's implemented, 143 00:18:11,350 --> 00:18:18,280 it just kind of gets transformed. Uh oh yes. 144 00:18:18,280 --> 00:18:21,980 And yeah, even to Norman thought the same thing. 145 00:18:21,980 --> 00:18:31,810 So this is another quote from Richard from Norman, who is actually talking about the dialectic nature of processes. 146 00:18:31,810 --> 00:18:39,640 So consequences of this. So change projects change as they interact with their context. 147 00:18:39,640 --> 00:18:49,900 Change often has to be implemented by navigating through the very power structures and cultures that made change seem necessary in the first place. 148 00:18:49,900 --> 00:18:59,800 Makes sense. OK, so what happens to end intervention that dissipate, it usually dissipated. 149 00:18:59,800 --> 00:19:09,280 They don't usually get more ambitious, but you get dissipated as they are implemented and this going to happen, though in different ways. 150 00:19:09,280 --> 00:19:17,590 So one way this can happen is you can decide that, OK, I'm going to implement this and I will make you do it. 151 00:19:17,590 --> 00:19:22,000 So this is the coercive approach where you say we are doing this. 152 00:19:22,000 --> 00:19:34,900 And of course, in that circumstance, if you're in a pluralistic setting, you will get reaction resistance, which will force you to move back. 153 00:19:34,900 --> 00:19:46,150 So that's one way that you can dilute. The second way is that you could really realising this you propose something, but then you negotiate. 154 00:19:46,150 --> 00:19:56,480 You have to consult with the people who are going to have to implement it. And as you do that, the project changes. 155 00:19:56,480 --> 00:20:01,940 And the third way with just a little bit cynical is to do nothing and then claim you've done it, 156 00:20:01,940 --> 00:20:10,370 which I call symbolic implementation, which does happen and people do get people do declare victory here. 157 00:20:10,370 --> 00:20:19,010 But then in all three cases, you see a dilution occurring, but you never actually implement exactly what you propose. 158 00:20:19,010 --> 00:20:27,500 So this always happens. The the question is, though, I mean, this is this sounds like a pessimistic story, right? 159 00:20:27,500 --> 00:20:34,760 But but maybe some of these one of these approaches is actually better than others. 160 00:20:34,760 --> 00:20:37,410 It may be better to do one of these rather than the other. 161 00:20:37,410 --> 00:20:47,660 And so I'm just going to show you this diagram comes from a study which actually done with someone from Norway in Gaston Sokka, 162 00:20:47,660 --> 00:21:07,320 and this was in a nameless oil company in Norway, and she was looking for her thesis. 163 00:21:07,320 --> 00:21:12,410 This thesis, actually, she was looking at how three different I've only got two here, 164 00:21:12,410 --> 00:21:21,740 but three different divisions of the same company were implementing the same organisational change on different oil platforms. 165 00:21:21,740 --> 00:21:26,120 And you have this, this is on the top. 166 00:21:26,120 --> 00:21:31,910 This is the one division and on the bottom, this is one division, and what we did was sort of traced. 167 00:21:31,910 --> 00:21:36,020 There's even a little bit of quantitative sort of stuff here. 168 00:21:36,020 --> 00:21:41,120 You can sort of trace trends in various things here. 169 00:21:41,120 --> 00:21:46,730 So what you see is in the in the top one very coercive implementation. 170 00:21:46,730 --> 00:21:51,590 So they moved right away to implement this thing. 171 00:21:51,590 --> 00:22:04,190 So this black line is how much of the change they were actually trying to do and the blue line is what the the top management thought about this. 172 00:22:04,190 --> 00:22:14,630 So they were very pleased about that, they thought that this was wonderful, this this this division is really properly implementing the plan. 173 00:22:14,630 --> 00:22:24,380 But the employees hated it. So the relational trajectory is about the quality of employee relations trust. 174 00:22:24,380 --> 00:22:33,470 And so that went right down the tubes strikes all kinds of relations. 175 00:22:33,470 --> 00:22:38,720 And in the end, those who had implemented it left. 176 00:22:38,720 --> 00:22:47,750 And so what happens is you end up with a moderate amount of change actually occurring. 177 00:22:47,750 --> 00:22:56,420 In the end, they lost all their credibility with the top management, and they didn't really get the trust with employees back. 178 00:22:56,420 --> 00:23:04,770 The other trajectory is the reverse of that. Right from the beginning, the division was not very keen to implement this, 179 00:23:04,770 --> 00:23:09,780 but they said if we're going to implement this, we're going to work with the employees from the beginning. 180 00:23:09,780 --> 00:23:14,890 That was not popular at first. With top management. 181 00:23:14,890 --> 00:23:24,130 But it was a good way to maintain the trust of employees, and so you see the different trajectory. 182 00:23:24,130 --> 00:23:35,610 I mean, we argue that it could be discussed debateable, but we argued that they did just as much change. 183 00:23:35,610 --> 00:23:43,560 But they were much better off at the end because they had sustained employee trust. 184 00:23:43,560 --> 00:23:53,670 They had, you know, after a low kind of recouped the credibility of top management because they hadn't created the crisis. 185 00:23:53,670 --> 00:24:05,280 This this group created across this group was able to do as much as the project as the first group, but without the without the mess. 186 00:24:05,280 --> 00:24:14,040 So I mean, this is this is an example of the types of things that that this kind of research can lead to. 187 00:24:14,040 --> 00:24:23,190 And although the story seems pessimistic at first, there are some interesting findings which, you know, gas dissipation will occur. 188 00:24:23,190 --> 00:24:27,090 But there are better ways of doing it than others. 189 00:24:27,090 --> 00:24:37,680 And so probably a good idea to work with the people who are affected by your change rather than to try to force it through. 190 00:24:37,680 --> 00:24:42,120 Small lesson. OK, so how am I doing? 191 00:24:42,120 --> 00:24:51,920 You fine, you've got 25 minutes, OK, grip. So, yeah, I'm going to. 192 00:24:51,920 --> 00:24:59,570 Very quickly talk about this one. This is a kind of corollary of this, which is which I call the boomerang effect, 193 00:24:59,570 --> 00:25:07,550 which is also that change not only has substantial consequences and what happens in the organisation, but it has political effect. 194 00:25:07,550 --> 00:25:15,180 So. So if you do something like the first unit and in that study? 195 00:25:15,180 --> 00:25:19,490 Your future in the organisation may be. Yeah. 196 00:25:19,490 --> 00:25:27,800 I mean, it depends on which point at which point people make these decisions, but at the beginning of the track record, 197 00:25:27,800 --> 00:25:33,020 actually you might be promoted at the end of the trajectory you might use, you might lose your job. 198 00:25:33,020 --> 00:25:43,730 So the issue is that leading change can affect personally and lead does a capability of leading change in the future, 199 00:25:43,730 --> 00:25:51,200 which which is another kind of consequence to considering this this viewpoint. 200 00:25:51,200 --> 00:25:59,800 And you can see that. There are various kinds of outcomes to all of these processes, so I'm going to skip the next slide. 201 00:25:59,800 --> 00:26:05,570 Thank you. And summarising this, really. 202 00:26:05,570 --> 00:26:12,130 So the main thing, the main insights of the complexity and reality of the change processes. 203 00:26:12,130 --> 00:26:17,440 Unintended consequences and how short term and long term effects are different. 204 00:26:17,440 --> 00:26:22,690 It's time consuming and we are still talking about entities here. 205 00:26:22,690 --> 00:26:30,250 So maybe there's another way to talk about it. OK, so let's move on to the second one processes of narrative. 206 00:26:30,250 --> 00:26:33,430 This is about how people make sense through narrative accounts, 207 00:26:33,430 --> 00:26:44,350 and so process here is constructed through the stories people tell not necessarily seem to be occurring objectively in the real world. 208 00:26:44,350 --> 00:27:01,200 And here I'm going to. Come back to Richard Norman. Who I think actually with the development of the scenario method and his approach to consulting. 209 00:27:01,200 --> 00:27:07,020 This comes from him from his book on reframing business, 210 00:27:07,020 --> 00:27:11,940 and he's talking about one of the first things you need to do is to understand 211 00:27:11,940 --> 00:27:18,560 the story of the past and how that is represented in the future and also to. 212 00:27:18,560 --> 00:27:21,800 Think about the story of the future and how that is represented in the present, 213 00:27:21,800 --> 00:27:27,500 and so he said the more and richer the experience we can dig out and bring into the future from the past, 214 00:27:27,500 --> 00:27:37,760 the rich of the present and the more we can bring out of insightful and ritual rich scenarios from the future, the rich of the present. 215 00:27:37,760 --> 00:27:47,660 So that actually he was a process thinker and maybe a narrative thinker as well. 216 00:27:47,660 --> 00:27:55,530 So what is the methodology that one would use for this, so it could be interviewing where people tell their stories? 217 00:27:55,530 --> 00:27:59,780 And so the process is you are looking out at the stories that they are telling. 218 00:27:59,780 --> 00:28:10,100 You could also be written texts where you can actually see stories being told in these text using narrative and rhetorical analysis methods. 219 00:28:10,100 --> 00:28:20,360 There's a famous paper by Barry M Arms about strategy as a narrative which really builds on this approach. 220 00:28:20,360 --> 00:28:24,770 And I'm just going to give you a snippet from one of the studies, 221 00:28:24,770 --> 00:28:31,740 and I actually presented this study in depth this afternoon where in a certain sense, we're doing this. 222 00:28:31,740 --> 00:28:37,070 So this is a study of a large Canadian cooperative organisation, 223 00:28:37,070 --> 00:28:44,510 and we looked at how the company actually uses the history of its founder and its communications. 224 00:28:44,510 --> 00:28:50,030 And in order to do this, we had access to an 80 year archive. 225 00:28:50,030 --> 00:29:01,760 The magazine sent to employees this organisation, and a really interesting story is how what they write, 226 00:29:01,760 --> 00:29:11,990 these stories they tell about the founder construct continuity, so continuity in the past and the future. 227 00:29:11,990 --> 00:29:20,270 And so this one we call conservative and vocation. And this is a CEO who is talking about a potential change. 228 00:29:20,270 --> 00:29:24,680 People in his organisation are pressuring for change. 229 00:29:24,680 --> 00:29:33,940 And he is saying, No, no, no. No, we're not changing because our founder told us that this is what we should do, 230 00:29:33,940 --> 00:29:40,090 so be careful not to be pulled in a false direction and lose the spirit that the founder wants to 231 00:29:40,090 --> 00:29:46,690 give to the less popular Mr Sharma never seems to say that the popular must be parish organisations, 232 00:29:46,690 --> 00:29:51,850 which is what was being changed. Good. He repeated. 233 00:29:51,850 --> 00:30:03,850 Everywhere this teaching, which is our strength and security. So here is a narrative which says in order to be continuous, we must not change. 234 00:30:03,850 --> 00:30:13,030 That's obvious. Now it seems like an obviously. But then a bit later, we have this quote. 235 00:30:13,030 --> 00:30:23,590 Which which actually enables them to keep the founder as the symbol of continuity, but to change at the same time. 236 00:30:23,590 --> 00:30:29,620 And so here is a narrative which says it has been said of our phones two of and that he knew exactly what to keep, 237 00:30:29,620 --> 00:30:32,230 what to change and as needed, what to innovate. 238 00:30:32,230 --> 00:30:37,990 It has also been said of him that he knew how to remind his collaborators of the social duty of adaptation, 239 00:30:37,990 --> 00:30:41,230 as well as the democratic demands of corporations. 240 00:30:41,230 --> 00:30:52,030 So between the two quotations, you can see the similarity of continuity based on the story of the founder. 241 00:30:52,030 --> 00:30:59,590 But the difference in terms of what that story enables you to do in the first case? 242 00:30:59,590 --> 00:31:04,120 Nothing, actually. It's a static story. 243 00:31:04,120 --> 00:31:10,960 And the second, in order to be like our founder, we need to change and innovate. 244 00:31:10,960 --> 00:31:21,100 And so that story that is being told there actually has some power in terms of organisational change. 245 00:31:21,100 --> 00:31:29,950 I'm going to stick that might looks very nice, but I think I don't have enough time if somebody asked me a question, we can go back to. 246 00:31:29,950 --> 00:31:43,570 So, so what are the insights from this so we can see how history is reconstructed and how it can serve different purposes within organisations? 247 00:31:43,570 --> 00:31:48,820 Or we can see also the power of narratives to actually construct realities. 248 00:31:48,820 --> 00:32:00,090 So if we think about, you know, the scenario method which which is used by Norman partners or even just by generating a scenario. 249 00:32:00,090 --> 00:32:05,270 And talking to people about how that scenario might happen. 250 00:32:05,270 --> 00:32:10,230 You might actually be making it happen. To some degree. 251 00:32:10,230 --> 00:32:14,640 OK. Because they had not thought of it. And so this is kind of a power to that. 252 00:32:14,640 --> 00:32:21,060 That's sort of a performance of what we would call a performative effect of projecting into the future, 253 00:32:21,060 --> 00:32:26,660 because then that becomes the reality that you are producing. 254 00:32:26,660 --> 00:32:37,880 So, yeah, the other important thing to remember with this kind of approach is that narratives are always constructed to persuade. 255 00:32:37,880 --> 00:32:49,070 So we need to be sceptical of some of the things we hear, especially on Twitter. 256 00:32:49,070 --> 00:32:59,210 And also we rarely see the interactions of narratives, and we just see that the stories that individuals tell so. 257 00:32:59,210 --> 00:33:06,110 So that has limits as well. So we'll move on to the next one, so a process of activity. 258 00:33:06,110 --> 00:33:15,230 So the idea behind this is is how a phenomenon is reconstituted in and through activity and interaction. 259 00:33:15,230 --> 00:33:20,710 So this notion that process is all that is. 260 00:33:20,710 --> 00:33:30,820 So you have this picture of the waterfall. This is a quote from Nikolai Russia process is fundamental. 261 00:33:30,820 --> 00:33:37,400 The river is not an object, but an ever changing flow. The sun is not a thing. 262 00:33:37,400 --> 00:33:44,360 But a flaming fire. Everything in nature is a matter of process, of activity of change. 263 00:33:44,360 --> 00:33:49,760 So this is a perspective where things that seem. 264 00:33:49,760 --> 00:33:58,670 Stable are actually in constant motion, and there are a set of philosophies that believes that this is the way the world is constructed, 265 00:33:58,670 --> 00:34:11,060 so when we are doing this in organisation studies, one of the ways we try and get our minds around this idea is adding energy onto the ends of words. 266 00:34:11,060 --> 00:34:13,580 What that does is it puts them in motion. 267 00:34:13,580 --> 00:34:25,760 So instead of saying organisation, which kind of projects a thing, we talk about organising which projects an activity similar. 268 00:34:25,760 --> 00:34:33,260 Similarly, we might take a concept and identity as a as a concept which are just interests me a lot. 269 00:34:33,260 --> 00:34:36,410 But instead of talking about identity as a thing, 270 00:34:36,410 --> 00:34:47,710 we might put the word work at the end of it and identity work is what people do to try and make something, have a certain identity. 271 00:34:47,710 --> 00:34:58,610 So, so there's the the efforts that are put in place to protect the identity rather than the entity as a thing. 272 00:34:58,610 --> 00:35:03,930 Richard Norman has, of course, been there also. 273 00:35:03,930 --> 00:35:14,720 And this, I think, which should speak to some of the partners, what we usually think of as products or services are really frozen activities, 274 00:35:14,720 --> 00:35:18,920 concrete manifestations of the relationships amongst actors and a value creating 275 00:35:18,920 --> 00:35:23,900 system to emphasise the way all products and services are grounded in activity. 276 00:35:23,900 --> 00:35:30,770 We refer to them offerings. So the notion that in fact. 277 00:35:30,770 --> 00:35:36,350 Products such as stuff being made constantly by different people do different things, this is what. 278 00:35:36,350 --> 00:35:44,230 It's not a fixed thing. It's ongoing activity. 279 00:35:44,230 --> 00:35:56,350 So this has some interesting, different consequences, so if you really want to study process as activity, as a management researcher, 280 00:35:56,350 --> 00:36:05,920 normally what you would tend to do is engage in naturally occurring observation of real time interactions, meeting observations, 281 00:36:05,920 --> 00:36:08,860 email conversations, 282 00:36:08,860 --> 00:36:21,190 ethnography and deep dive vignettes into into small activities where you can actually see the activity constituting or accomplishing that, 283 00:36:21,190 --> 00:36:29,410 performing the thing which does not exist, but which is continually being constructed. 284 00:36:29,410 --> 00:36:36,990 I'm going to. Skip the example, because I think it'd be more healthy to move forward. 285 00:36:36,990 --> 00:36:48,870 And talk about an example from my own research, and this is again with my ex student Fernando Phakeng, and for his thesis, 286 00:36:48,870 --> 00:37:00,690 he studied this peer to peer hardware organisation, which was trying to make it was a start-up and it was trying to make sensors. 287 00:37:00,690 --> 00:37:10,090 Actually, that's what it was. Its business was. And they have this email list. 288 00:37:10,090 --> 00:37:18,550 And he was receiving these emails, and people who are members of this organisation would continually exchange emails. 289 00:37:18,550 --> 00:37:23,890 I was also on this list and it was so we just got these emails. 290 00:37:23,890 --> 00:37:32,380 And in these emails, people would say things about identity, for example, they would say things. 291 00:37:32,380 --> 00:37:39,820 We are an open organisation. And they would then, you know, they would have some ideological discourse, 292 00:37:39,820 --> 00:37:45,670 but they would also have really concrete problems as well that they would try and discuss. 293 00:37:45,670 --> 00:37:52,800 And so he treated these conversations as offensive identity work. 294 00:37:52,800 --> 00:38:03,030 So we look at these e-mail conversations over four years, and we reveal it reveals strong identity tensions between being open, I mean, 295 00:38:03,030 --> 00:38:19,140 one of the leaders of this organisation was convinced was convinced of the need to change the capitalist company and to really profit as an evil. 296 00:38:19,140 --> 00:38:28,540 And so we need to be open, et cetera, et cetera, and being viable, which is they need the money in order to continue. 297 00:38:28,540 --> 00:38:36,550 So in this email list, we saw all kinds of activities taking place, so first of all, 298 00:38:36,550 --> 00:38:46,100 there would be people who would pronounce themselves about being open, et cetera, and other people would just ignore them. 299 00:38:46,100 --> 00:38:53,900 Just not engaged. A second kind of second kind of activity would take place with these conversations with never led anywhere. 300 00:38:53,900 --> 00:39:00,110 I mean, they just people talk past one another. Some people say we were open and the other one would say, Yeah, 301 00:39:00,110 --> 00:39:06,470 but we still need to consider the people who are going to give us money and so they would talk and not resolve anything. 302 00:39:06,470 --> 00:39:11,090 And the third one was they would make these temporary compromises. 303 00:39:11,090 --> 00:39:16,880 So they would they would carry on without a fundamental agreement. 304 00:39:16,880 --> 00:39:27,350 Typically, when one case is patenting, so they have to decide whether they would patent the project, the device that they were developing. 305 00:39:27,350 --> 00:39:35,060 And so they didn't want to patent because that's the kind of commercial non open thing to do. 306 00:39:35,060 --> 00:39:39,590 But on the other hand, how are we going to get investors to put money in this thing? 307 00:39:39,590 --> 00:39:49,670 So they decided to do it temporarily. And, you know, next next year, when this is the last time we're going to do this right? 308 00:39:49,670 --> 00:39:57,610 So so through this process of talking, talking, talking for four years. 309 00:39:57,610 --> 00:40:04,250 They did identity work. But they had no identity. 310 00:40:04,250 --> 00:40:09,640 Right. That everything was ambiguous, fluid. 311 00:40:09,640 --> 00:40:18,910 And so this e-mail list came in all the time, I was the conference on collective leadership of all things. 312 00:40:18,910 --> 00:40:29,370 How many times OK? And in the middle of this conference, the emails started coming in and I realised. 313 00:40:29,370 --> 00:40:42,000 That this organisation was in the process of falling apart. And it was falling apart because at this point, they had to clarify its identity. 314 00:40:42,000 --> 00:40:52,530 And a clarifying of it made it impossible for these people to work together at all. 315 00:40:52,530 --> 00:40:59,370 And so it collapsed. They split up came two separate organisations. 316 00:40:59,370 --> 00:41:12,210 So this is a this is a study where. Yeah, the identity is never there, it's just activity, but still, there was some interesting insight in this. 317 00:41:12,210 --> 00:41:22,990 The what the work is doing is keeping this organisation going, even though it doesn't have an identity. 318 00:41:22,990 --> 00:41:32,770 So this is an interesting I think some of the insights here is how you sustain stability as well as change 319 00:41:32,770 --> 00:41:40,260 how you keep things going in spite of the fact that you're not changing some of the dilemmas with this, 320 00:41:40,260 --> 00:41:46,150 the snippets of data that we sometimes use can be rather decontextualised. 321 00:41:46,150 --> 00:41:51,400 So you don't necessarily, when you're doing this, know where all these people come from. 322 00:41:51,400 --> 00:42:00,950 And so if you're doing the study, sometimes you lose that. And also when you're doing this, of course, the distinction between. 323 00:42:00,950 --> 00:42:06,650 The activity and what the activity is producing. 324 00:42:06,650 --> 00:42:14,750 It's very it becomes increasingly fluid, so so stuff is being done and things are being performed and accomplished. 325 00:42:14,750 --> 00:42:23,840 But what is the. You can't can't imagine talking about independent and dependent variables being separate things. 326 00:42:23,840 --> 00:42:35,950 These things are code constituting each other. So this brings us to the last one, which I call. 327 00:42:35,950 --> 00:42:45,480 After John Shatter, this word is not mine. Who who discussed this idea process as witness. 328 00:42:45,480 --> 00:42:51,210 So the idea here is how understandings of phenomena are looked forward with research subjects. 329 00:42:51,210 --> 00:42:58,050 So not only of the research subjects in motion, but the research is in process alongside the research. 330 00:42:58,050 --> 00:43:00,900 And so John Sato is one of the inspirations for this. 331 00:43:00,900 --> 00:43:11,490 He has this article in organisation studies, understanding processes from within an argument within us thinking. 332 00:43:11,490 --> 00:43:16,470 Another source of inspiration of inspiration is Karl Wyck, 333 00:43:16,470 --> 00:43:23,940 who in 1999 wrote this article in the Journal of Management Enquiry, and I just read you the quote. 334 00:43:23,940 --> 00:43:31,050 And he's arguing here for the importance of studying things forward rather than backward. 335 00:43:31,050 --> 00:43:39,540 And he's arguing that we, as academic researchers, speak for myself here, always study things that are deep and gone. 336 00:43:39,540 --> 00:43:46,880 But in fact, there's. There is value in thinking forward, so unsettled, 337 00:43:46,880 --> 00:43:56,840 emergent contingent looking forward contrasts sharply with our backward oriented theoretical propositions that depict that living as settled, 338 00:43:56,840 --> 00:44:01,210 causally connected and coherent after the fact. 339 00:44:01,210 --> 00:44:10,510 The compact causal structures that epitomise our theories are artefacts of retrospect rather than narratives of prospect. 340 00:44:10,510 --> 00:44:14,300 So I think there's something fundamentally interesting about that comment. 341 00:44:14,300 --> 00:44:20,860 I think that academics tend to be trapped by this because we need to publish these articles and journals. 342 00:44:20,860 --> 00:44:31,350 And so it's hard to do that with perspective thinking, but it didn't worry Richard Norman. 343 00:44:31,350 --> 00:44:39,600 And so what are some of the ways to study this so dialogic action research was something that was recommended by shorter, 344 00:44:39,600 --> 00:44:48,810 real time auto ethnography could be some way way to do this and clinical process interventions of the type that Richard Norman was engaged. 345 00:44:48,810 --> 00:44:59,550 And I think our ways of doing this. And and so in order to do this, you're engaging in collective sense, 346 00:44:59,550 --> 00:45:06,780 making with the people you're working with and kind of iteratively working with them. 347 00:45:06,780 --> 00:45:17,610 So this is a question that Norman asks in his book Managing for Growth, where he's talking really about this methodology. 348 00:45:17,610 --> 00:45:25,890 And I hope I'm not taking his name in vain here, but I think that his perspective was that he wanted to contribute to practise, 349 00:45:25,890 --> 00:45:31,140 but at the same time, he wanted to do this in a rigorous, rigorously academic way. 350 00:45:31,140 --> 00:45:38,490 And his question was how can the language used by the researcher be linked to the language used by the actors in the studied system? 351 00:45:38,490 --> 00:45:46,350 And how can these two languages be made to enrich one another in a combination process of research and change? 352 00:45:46,350 --> 00:45:53,100 And I think that this is with witness thinking that he was considering at this time. 353 00:45:53,100 --> 00:46:03,480 And honestly, I haven't really done this myself. So, I mean, there are very few articles which are published in our top journals about this, 354 00:46:03,480 --> 00:46:07,620 but there is a one here which I recommend to everybody who's interested in it. 355 00:46:07,620 --> 00:46:17,850 By Lottie Lucia and Marianne Lewis, who have a paper here on organisational change and managerial sense making working through Paradox. 356 00:46:17,850 --> 00:46:23,880 And it's it's a very interesting story of how the researchers. 357 00:46:23,880 --> 00:46:32,880 So Lottie Lucia was a consultant. Marianne Lewis was an academic, and so the two of them got together, 358 00:46:32,880 --> 00:46:40,590 and you can see how the authors worked with the organisation members at go on ongoing issues. 359 00:46:40,590 --> 00:46:47,850 And they come up with some theorising around paradox and the paradox lens of organisations in the study. 360 00:46:47,850 --> 00:47:00,870 So this is a really good example. We're fine. Yeah, so and I mean, the other example is certainly riches, Norman's overall perspective and heritage, 361 00:47:00,870 --> 00:47:05,640 where he really developed prospective theories based on decades of clinical research 362 00:47:05,640 --> 00:47:11,490 oriented towards helping companies reframe business and reconfigure their ecosystems. 363 00:47:11,490 --> 00:47:19,930 So I think that he was a witness thinker as well as a process thank. 364 00:47:19,930 --> 00:47:28,000 And just, well, I haven't really done this, but here is a place where we almost did. 365 00:47:28,000 --> 00:47:36,250 And so in two thousand and one with some colleagues, I published a paper on leadership and strategic change and it was about mergers, 366 00:47:36,250 --> 00:47:41,560 actually, and this has been a long longitudinal study. 367 00:47:41,560 --> 00:47:48,820 I think we've been studying this for eight years and we really need to publish something at this point. 368 00:47:48,820 --> 00:47:56,320 And so this is what we wrote at the end of it. We do not know how the mergers will turn out in the end. 369 00:47:56,320 --> 00:48:02,890 But this summary can best conveys how we see them now. This is far as we have come in our research journey. 370 00:48:02,890 --> 00:48:10,270 Hopefully, as we keep on following events, we will learn more. Indeed, if Wike was right about the value of real time research, 371 00:48:10,270 --> 00:48:14,710 the record we have set down here and now should one day enable us to increase 372 00:48:14,710 --> 00:48:19,480 our understanding when we go back to compare it with what actually happened. 373 00:48:19,480 --> 00:48:25,690 And so that's another way of doing prospective research, which is, you know, you're doing a study. 374 00:48:25,690 --> 00:48:30,880 What you should do is write down what you think's going to happen on a piece of paper, 375 00:48:30,880 --> 00:48:38,410 put it in a safe deposit box and open it one year later and see how completely you got it completely wrong. 376 00:48:38,410 --> 00:48:44,350 Or maybe not. But if you really did understand the situation, then you shouldn't. 377 00:48:44,350 --> 00:48:52,900 There should be something left after that. If we're doing good work. 378 00:48:52,900 --> 00:49:02,470 So, yes, it so I mean, worthless and can can contribute to performing the processes that it that it studies, 379 00:49:02,470 --> 00:49:12,460 and it's but the difficulty for us academics, it's not so difficult for consultants, perhaps as. 380 00:49:12,460 --> 00:49:20,570 Yeah. Two things it's hard to publish with this because process is getting increasingly hard to pin down in academic research. 381 00:49:20,570 --> 00:49:26,660 And in the end, retrospect nevertheless takes over. 382 00:49:26,660 --> 00:49:32,140 So when we started emerges, even if it's one year later, you're always looking back. 383 00:49:32,140 --> 00:49:39,850 You can't look forward. You're always describing what happened and not what will happen. 384 00:49:39,850 --> 00:49:45,320 So I'm coming to the end here, which is good. 385 00:49:45,320 --> 00:49:52,250 So there's more than one way to operationalise the notion of process thinking in research and practise. 386 00:49:52,250 --> 00:49:55,670 And each of the four conceptions has quite different assumptions. 387 00:49:55,670 --> 00:50:07,260 It requires different types of data and modes of analysis, and as we move through them, it gets more and more complicated, right? 388 00:50:07,260 --> 00:50:20,030 It gets harder and harder to get your mind around, perhaps, and it's more and more difficult to study, according to traditional research methods. 389 00:50:20,030 --> 00:50:23,900 And so I'm just going to finish with a couple of questions. 390 00:50:23,900 --> 00:50:29,870 So can the different approaches be bridged and combined? 391 00:50:29,870 --> 00:50:37,280 How do they work together and which ones are ultimately most useful and for whom? 392 00:50:37,280 --> 00:50:46,293 I'm just going to leave that open. And then we go.