Orchestrating Change: How to Navigate Complexity and Get Results

To My Mother

For always believing in me,

even when I wasn’t so sure myself

Contents

Seeing Change through a Different Lens

Understanding Complexity in Organizations

A New Framework for Change

A Leader’s Role in People-Centric Change

Implementing ELF-Style Change

Beginnings and Endings

Afterword

Select Reading List

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

People are not a company’s most important asset.

They are the company. Everything else is an asset.

Adrian Levy¹

Chapter 1

Seeing Change through a Different Lens

I remember the day that my professional world changed – at least my understanding of it. I was facilitating an all-day meeting in Rotterdam for a group whose members each had some involvement in an upcoming project to drill an oil well off the coast of the Netherlands. There were forty people in the room, from the senior manager responsible for the oil field through to the roughnecks who manhandled drill pipe on the floor of the rig. Through the course of the day’s activities, they were asked to drill the well on paper as a prelude to starting the work at sea. There are lots of advantages to doing this, as I had explained to them at the start of the day. And to that point in my performance-coaching career I had facilitated dozens of similar events, largely mechanical processes of presentations, followed by structured discussions where risks were identified, actions tabled, and commitments made. But that day I watched an event unfold that changed the way I looked at the exercise and, in turn, business as a whole.

Of the five different small breakout groups, each with seven or eight people focusing on a different phase of the plan, there was one that was discussing how best to complete the well. After a well is drilled to the depth required, a set of highly specialized piping, valves, and mechanical instruments are run into the hole through which the oil or gas can then be brought to the surface. It is a detailed affair and an expensive one; a completion can often cost up to half the price of an offshore production well, which itself can run to many tens of millions of dollars. This completion group included the asset manager, who was funding the well and had set the requirements for it; the engineer, who had designed the completion to be run; and a driller from the rig. It was the first time any of these people had met, much less worked with each other.

From an early stage in their discussion it became obvious that the design the engineer had developed didn’t meet the key requirements of the asset manager. As they continued to discuss solutions, they came to a point where the asset manager and the engineer agreed about what needed to be done, but then the driller weighed in, saying this new solution wouldn’t work because of the rig’s design limitations. By the end of the day, they had managed to come up with a solution that satisfied the asset manager’s needs for the well, that the engineer believed would work structurally, and that the driller was confident could be executed on that rig. It was enormously satisfying for me that the session had helped that exchange take place and given rise to the successful design. But there was something about how it happened that intrigued me.

Changing My Perspective

The well design had been in place for months and yet, before that meeting, no one from the asset team had identified any significant issues with it. The same rig had been working for this oil company for the past year and still the proposed design was unsuited to the rig’s capacity. The company had myriad processes for project management, engineering design standards, quality control measures, and the like. Despite these processes and controls, the issue only got solved when those three different players sat around the table and talked about it together. It occurred to me that it hadn’t been the workshop process, or any other process for that matter, that had been the key to success. It was the conversation itself that had made the difference. In other words, the solution wasn’t to be found in a mechanical process but rather a social one.

I have a colleague and friend, Don, as sage as he is sensible, who says that business can be described as a series of conversations. If you want to improve your business, then change the dialogue and you will change the results. That day in Rotterdam was my first real awakening to the power of that idea. Over the years I have worked to better understand what changing the dialogue really means and how to leverage it to improve the results of the organizations I work with.

My search eventually led me to differentiate between mechanical and living systems and the rules that govern each – and they are different. I came to realize that for years (and still today) organizations – be they businesses, governments, NGOs, or the like – are usually run as if they are mechanical systems, though they are in fact made up of and operated by groups of people who act as a living system. The net effect is like trying to stick a square peg into a round hole. It might fit, more or less, but will leave you with gaps that you either have to work around, fill in, or rationalize away. In the past, this was often enough. At least it was enough to ensure that targets were met and the job got done. But that world moved slower, was less connected, and in general demanded less.

Remember the phrase Work smarter, not harder? I used it all the time when I first started as a performance coach. Today, most CEOs and other organizational leaders have discovered the results that are possible from working smarter but have never let go of working harder. The result? Ever higher expectations of the same or fewer resources. To deliver to the level of expectation of today’s world, it is no longer enough to use an approach that mostly fits. We need a better one.

The approach I want to speak to in these pages is one I have used for some time in my own work with organizational change and performance improvement. The essential premise behind it is this: Effectively delivering better organizational results requires change programs that are people-centric and involve interventions across multiple dimensions (individual, team and organizational) at the same time. Making people the primary focus of a change effort is crucial because their efforts effectively define the organization’s outcomes. And no intervention at just one level is ever enough to create a critical mass of new conversations and behaviours that will enable the organization, and the people within it, to deliver tangible changes in their results over a sustained period.

Finding My Way

Like most coaches and consultants, I didn’t start as one. My first career after school was at sea. I spent fourteen years as a naval officer with the Royal Canadian Navy. It was a fantastic learning experience even if, when they tell you in the recruiting office that you will see the world, what they fail to mention is that three-quarters of it is water. There were lots of days of grey seas, some great port visits, and unlimited opportunities to discover how to get teams of people to work together in difficult, time-critical situations. The navy was where I first learned the value of people over equipment. In my day, most of the Canadian navy’s frigates were older than most of the sailors who served on them. But the calibre and preparedness of those sailors were such that Canadian warships routinely beat out the US and other allied navy ships in joint exercises. Our ships out-manœuvred and out-performed ships half their age. They could because of the quality of the crews and the time and attention paid to them. From the captain to the newest able-bodied seaman, the training – individually, in teams, as a ship’s company, and in squadrons – was thorough, precise, and relentless. And the reason was simple. From the moment I joined the service, it was drummed into me that a ship was nothing without its crew. Look after the sailors, and they will look after the ship. And they did.

After I left the navy and re-tooled for the civilian world by completing an MBA, I discovered that this concept of a people-centred approach was more lip service than reality in much of the business world. I took my insights and the few improvement tools I had and joined a professional performance-coaching firm. For much of the time I had been in the navy, the firm had been building a business based on the belief that – if only it could be unlocked – there was enormous value embedded in the men and women at the front lines of companies who were designing, building, or delivering products and services to customers. Their approach was to implement a blend of different business tools, coupled with coaching, to make an impact on a client’s working culture and, through it, their operating results. Over the years, they had been very successful at it.

With my background, I appreciated both their approach and style. Just as I was finishing my MBA, they were looking for someone with experience in complex, highly technical operating environments and the ability to work in remote locations, who could build relationships with people up and down an organizational hierarchy and happened to speak Spanish. These boxes ticked, I quickly found myself in the Caribbean approaches of the Orinoco River in eastern Venezuela on a shallow-water drilling rig, otherwise known as a swamp barge.

For over two decades since then, I have been supporting people within client organizations, at every level of responsibility, in finding new ways to work together more effectively to deliver on their potential – individually and together. While much of my work has been in the oil and gas sector, I’ve also had the privilege of working with people in other industries and non-profit sectors across every continent save Antarctica.

Over the years, through my work with different clients and projects, I have been fascinated by the complex interplay of relationships within organizations. None of these relationships are mechanical because, as is blindingly obvious to most of us, people do not operate in simple, straightforward, automated ways. Behaviours clash with objectives, egos compete for attention, fears overwhelm common sense, and communication can often become a one-way street: more about landing a point than listening to others. I came to realize that the dialogue that goes on within organizations is more than just a social process. It is what makes the organization and its results, whatever they may be, possible.

Think about it. Except for lone hot dog vendors and the like, there are few organizations that don’t have some collection of people working together in some fashion to deliver its product or service. Even in the most technologically advanced firm, all the technology comes with on/off switches somewhere that have pairs of hands controlling them. It’s the ability of the people to work together in such a way that the right decisions get made in a timely fashion that propels the business forward effectively. In my experience, organizations that lack a healthy, well-connected dialogue are like bodies without enough blood or cars without oil; they don’t work very well or get far.

Re-Thinking My Approach

For a time, my approach to working with clients was missing a framework around which I could hang my growing collection of performance improvement tools. When I would walk into a new client organization, I could see issues and opportunities everywhere and would want to tackle all of them at once. Building relationships, setting up problem-solving forums, identifying new performance measures, broadcasting information about the change process all seemed critical from the outset. It could be overwhelming, and I knew that trying to tackle it all at once was a recipe for disaster.

At first I tried to order the tools I used as a business coach, looking for a sequence that I could lock in to make my implementations more standardized and thus more efficient. But each situation would always call for something a little bit different, and the order of the tools would necessarily change. It wasn’t until I came to realize that change is a social process that my search for a pattern started to bear fruit. As I learned more about the role of conversation in business, performance, and change, I came to understand that there was an important distinction to be made between a mechanical and a living system.

Context is crucial when you’re stepping into an organization that has a defined way of doing things, especially if you are about to try to change it. Much of the thinking around the development of organizations, and to a large extent the change processes that are routinely used to help them improve, comes from a centuries-old, linear, mechanistic view that they are as manageable and programmable as machines. This approach is built on concepts that emerged during the scientific revolution, dating back to the seventeenth century. In fairness, this approach hasn’t been all bad. Over the years it has helped to fuel the spectacular growth of the West and the companies that have profited from it since the start of the Industrial Revolution. In the end, however, this mechanistic view of organizations is very limited in its ability to help one understand the dynamics of messiness² that people bring to an organization.

Complexity Is Never Linear

There has been a movement in recent years to use learning from the world of the natural sciences to better understand how organizations work. It provides a new language and a different set of lenses through which to appreciate the more complicated interrelationships that make up organizations. The science of complexity suggests a world where the whole is more than just the sum of its parts. The relationships themselves, and the conversations across them, help define the organization itself. And as Don suggested, they set the limit on what that organization can accomplish. For me as a change professional, a business performance coach, this focus on relationships and conversations allows for a much richer understanding about the nature of how things get done within organizations and how to influence them. Effectively, the science of complexity – and the living systems it describes – proposes that creating value in any organization comes from more effectively harnessing these relationships.

The result of looking at an organization from the perspective of a living system is to put people front and centre, before the tools, the data, or the processes. While these will matter in a successful change effort, they all come after the people. That discovery, and the paradigm shift that came with it, led me to revisit the work my colleagues and I had done and piece together a pattern about how we actually approached performance improvement and change programs. A pattern that did not change with each new client, even though the tools used and the sequence they were used in, often did. This, in turn, helped me to create a guiding framework that stands distinct and apart from any of the tools I use but informs me when and where to use them for best effect. I call it Engage – Link – Flow: ELF for short.

A Simple Model to Navigate With

The intention of ELF is to provide a multi-dimensional framework for navigating a change journey through the social process of an organization. It is premised on the understanding that organizational change, and the improved performance it is intended to produce, is a distinctly human affair. From this follow the framework’s three principal