Leading Change in an Unpredictable World: What Does Sustainable, Resilient Change Look Like?

Background

Practitioner based, or practitioner inclusive, approaches to writing about change are inherently problematic. If writing from a purely academic perspective, what would follow at this point would be a comprehensive list of relevant academic articles that would position the authors within a specific school of argument. Practitioners are however less concerned about the niceties of academic schools and the professional distinctions that matter to those who have scholastic careers to establish, maintain and justify – and will tend to pick and mix from multiple sources of insight, often pushing at the boundaries of received wisdom in order to find the right combination of language and framings that will allow an organization to deal with the situation they are facing in the, often highly politicised and power saturated, here and now. Practice rarely follows espoused prescription.

However, this doesn’t mean that anything goes; the eclectic reality of the practitioner approach to organizational change and leadership can be put into a conceptual framing by using John Heron’s notion of an extended epistemology (Heron & Reason, 1997). The practitioner perspective allows for a constant cycling between its four forms, broadening and deepening the engagement with the experiential base in such a way that new forms of expressive, propositional and actionable knowing become possible, responding to and creating in turn new forms of organizational experience. This is why it underpins the practitioner focused Ashridge Doctorate and Masters in Organizational Consulting and Change (Critchley et al, 2007; King & Higgins, 2010; King & Higgins, 2014), which is also heavily informed by the relational shift in understanding psychological development (Gilligan, 1993) and a focus on inquiry over advocacy when it comes to organizational learning (Reason, 1988).

What this chapter also embraces, with its focus on ‘what work’s’ and a dynamic flowing up and down the epistemological hierarchy of experiential and actionable knowing, is a focus of the qualities rather than the quantities of change. Within the discipline of organizational change, as with so much of the humanities and the social sciences, is an overdeveloped desire to privilege the scientific method and its truth traditions – a perspective which is rigorously critiqued, alongside other myths and paradoxes, in Cole & Higgins’ (Cole & Higgins, 2022) and their examination of the frequently unexamined headwaters of management thinking which create the confusion of so much downstream understanding. A more populist critique which covered much of the same ground, with a particular focus on the institutional habits which sustain particular ways of organizational knowing, is covered in Martin Parker’s work and his advocacy of the need to ‘Shut down the business school’ (Parker, 2018).