Strategisk Ledelse

Strategisk Ledelse 13. undervisningsgang – 3. december 2012

Lectures, Autumn 2012

Main points on organisational dynamics • Organisations are Complex Responsive Processes of relating between people. Since relating immediately constraints, it immediately establishes power relations between people • Complex Responsive Processes are patterned as propositional and narrative themes that organise the experience of relating and, thus power relations • These themes takes many forms. Of great importance are the official ideological themes that determine what is legitimate to talk about in an organisation and the unofficial ideologies which may besupporting or subverting official ideologies

Main points on organisational dynamics • Conversational patterns may take stable forms of repetition in which people are stuck. They may also take more fluid forms, analogous to the dynamics of the edge of chaos • Change occurs in novel ways through the presence of sufficient diversity in organising themes. This is expressed in fluid conversation in which shadow themes test the legitimate • The evolution of fluid conversation and the emergence of creative new directions are radically unpredictable • Fluid conversation is made more possible when people are able to live with anxiety

Main points on organisational dynamics • The choices people make are fundamentally based on ideology • Population-wide patterns emerge in local interactions • There is no guarantee of success

Refocusing attention:Strategy and change • SCT takes the position of the objective observer and immediately implies the need for control mechanisms • CRP joins challengers to the dominant discourse by firmly making a methodological move away from the notion of the manager as objective observer • Instead, managers are understood as participants in interaction with others with the possibility of engaging in emergent enquiry into what they are doing and what steps they should take next • They also have the possibility to enquiring into the nature of their own complex responsive processes, which, in essence, is reflexive behaviour

Refocusing attention:Strategy and change • The CRP theory explains what managers are doing instead of prescribing what they should be doing • CRP instead refocuses attention

Strategy and Change Refocusing attention:Quality of participation • From the CRP perspective, top executives are thought of as participating with other members in evolving processes of communicating and power relating • The meaning of participation is completely different in SCT and in CRP; • SCT: Executives can form organisation-wide intentions for an organisation’s future evolution and if members are appropiately motivated, they will move according to this • CRP: Executives articulates an organisation-wide intention, they’re engaging in the activities of second-order abstractions, which is communicated as gestures

Strategy and Change Refocusing attention:Quality of participation • Attention is instead focused on the thematic patterning of interaction, such as: • Pattern of power relations • Patterns of inclusion and exclusion • Ideological themes sustaining such • Feelings of anxiety shame aroused by shifts in patterns of identity • Moving from the position of the manager as objective observer of a system to that of a manager as participant in emergent enquiry, attention is focused on the unexpected and complex patterning of the responses of organisational members to manager’s intentions

Strategy and Change Refocusing attention:Quality of participation • Intention and design are understood as emergent and problematic processes and attention is focused on the interplay of intentions • The emphasis shifts from the manager focusing on how to make a choice to focusing on the quality of participation in local conversations from which such choices and responses to them emerge • It becomes a personal matter of reflecting together on the quality of participation

Strategy and Change Refocusing attention:Quality of Conversational life • In organisations, relationships between people are organised in conversation that forms and is formed by the power relations between them • Attention is thus focused on the conversational life of an organisation as the changing, evolving local communicative interaction and power relating, sometimes patterned as intention and design using abstract communicative tools such as systems models • The quality of that conversational life is thus paramount

Strategy and Change Refocusing attention:Quality of Conversational life • The key role of managers is their participation in those conversations and their facilitation of different ways of conversing • A key implication of this way of understanding life in organisations has to do with being sensitive to the themes that are organising conversational relating • Another is awareness of the rhetorical ploys that are being used to block the emergence of new conversational themes • Effective managers are those who notice the repetitive themes that block fluid conversations and participate in such a way as to assist in shifting those themes

Strategy and Change Refocusing attention:Quality of anxiety and how its lived with • Anxiety is inevitable companion of shifts in themes that organise the experience of relating because such shifts create uncertainty, particularly uncertainty around individual and collective identities • Themes organising the experience of relating are not only expressed in the vocal public conversations between people, they also resonate with and change the silent, private conversations that are individual minds • It because of these deeply personal reasons that shifting patterns of conversation give rise to anxiety, but without this, there can be no emergence ofcreative new themes

Strategy and Change Refocusing attention:Quality of anxiety and how its lived with • The manner in which people live with anxiety is crucial to organisational change and innovation • When managers focus attention on this matter, they begin to pay attention to what it is about particular work, at a particular time, in a particular place, that gives rise to anxiety • What are we doing that enables us, or disables us, from living with the anxiety that change generates? • Central to this possibility is sufficient trust between those engaging in difficult conversations

Strategy and Change Refocusing attention:Quality of anxiety and how its lived with • Attention is then focused on what, in a particular organisation, at a particular time, is promoting or destroying trust • We should question prescriptions that have to do with setting stretching targets and placing people under stress in the belief that this will move them to try harder • What this may do is simply make them feel more anxious and so less likely to develop the kind of conversational life that makes creativity possible

Strategy and Change Refocusing attention:Quality of diversity • If members of an organisation have nothing in common at all, then obviously any kind of joint action will be impossible • However, if they conform too much, then the emergence of new forms of behaviour is blocked • Organisations display the internal capacity to change spontaneously only when they are characterised by diversity

Strategy and Change Refocusing attention:Quality of diversity • This focuses attention on the importance of deviance and eccentricity • It focuses the attention on the importance of unofficial ideologies that undermine current power relations • Such unofficial ideologies are expressed in conversations organised by shadow themes • A condition for creativity is, therefore, some degree of subversive activity with the inevitable tension this brings between shadow and legitimate themes organising the experience of relating • Diversity is inseparable from conflict

Strategy and Change Refocusing attention:Unpredictability and paradox • The CRP implications of coping with not knowing and the potential for feelings of incompetence and shame that this arouses • Managers in organisations often find themselves in situations in which they must act without knowing what the outcomes of their actions will be over long time periods • They must act because failure to act will also have unpredictable long-term outcomes • Surprise is part of the internal dynamic of the processes themselves and is inseparable from creativity

Strategy and Change Refocusing attention:Unpredictability and paradox • Quality action is one that keeps options open for as long as possible and creates a position from which further actions are possible • It is not necessary to understand the ‘whole’ in order to act; it is simply necessary to act on the basis of one’s local understanding, which will always include one’s perceptions and feelings about social objects and cult values • Control has to be understood as constraints • One important implication of CRP may have to do with putting a stop to many initiatives and abandoning control systems and procedures that are not fulfilling the purposes they are supposed to

Refocusing attention:Control, performance and improvement • Strategies emerge, intentions emerge, in the ongoing conversational life of an organisation and the ongoing conversations between people in different organisations • Strategic management is the process of actively participating in the conversations around important emerging issues

Control, performance and improvement Refocusing attention:Control • Managers are simultaneously ‘in control’ and ‘not in control’ in the sense that they intend their next gestures which are simultaneously evoked by previous responses • It is transiently stable patterns of meaning arising in local interaction that maintain a sense of order and therefore sense of control as managers go about their daily activities • Intentional goal-oriented acts emerge in the local conversations of managers and those conversations functioning as patterning, meaning-making processes

Rethinking the role of leaders/managers • Exercise! • Form three groups and distil the five most important implications the text in chapter 18.7 (one hour) • Discussion in plenum

Strategisk Ledelse