When I teach my MBA class in Organizational Behavior, the last article I cover on the last day of class is “Changing Others Through Changing Ourselves: The Transformation of Human Systems” by Robert Quinn, Gretchen Sprieitzer, and Matthew Brown.  After a semester of encouraging students to practice exemplary followership and leadership, the task of going back to your organization and making a real difference can seem overwhelming.  This article offers difficult but solid advice and hope:

Real adaptive change can only be achieved by mobilizing people to make painful adjustments in their attitudes, work habits, and lives.  In adaptive change, people must step outside known patterns of behavior – they must surrender their present selves and put themselves in jeopardy by becoming part of an emergent system.  This process usually requires the 1) surrender of personal control, 2) the toleration of uncertainty, and 3) the development of a new culture at the collective level and 4) a new self at the individual level.

How can an individual engage others in a change effort when doing so requires them to make painful adjustments and put themselves in jeopardy? The answer is that changing others requires changing ourselves first. We attract others to change when we first change ourselves.  (pp. 147-148).

Quinn et al. call their approach to adaptive change Advanced Change Theory (ACT). It is a systematic approach to change that has the following principles:

• Create an emergent system
• Recognizes hypocrisy and patterns of self-deception
• Personal change through value clarification and alignment of behaviors
• Frees oneself from the system of external sanctions
• Develops a vision for the common good
• Takes action to the edge of chaos
• Maintains reverence for others involved in change
• Inspires others to enact their best selves
• Models counterintuitive, paradoxical behavior
• Changes self and system

I hope to address all of these principles in the coming days and weeks.  My video today addresses the first principle – Create an emergent system. Emergence is a property of self-organizing systems, so you can see their approach is firmly rooted in the science of complexity and chaos theory.  Your organization needs to change to survive, and while that change can have direction, the end state is neither completely predictable nor controllable.

Creating an emergent system is the first step the leader takes to align with a vision for the common good.  It requires a shift toward purposeful behavior and away from self-interested behavior.  To create a purposeful, emergent organization, the leader must build a community where individuals can learn, adapt and grow. The hallmarks of this community are honest dialogue, intense commitment, and voluntary contribution.  The leader strives for inclusion, openness, and a reduction of hierarchy.  Followers have to be willing to make a significant personal sacrifice that will result in their own transformation.

You are not going to find a formula or 10-step prescription in this approach. It’s abstract, which means you are going to have figure out for yourself how to apply it and deal with the mess of learning by doing.  But the result will be more effective for you and your organization than some spoon-fed approach to change.

Stay tuned!

My left leg is one inch longer than my right.  That caused a number of seemingly unrelated problems for me, including lower back pain, headaches, and a bone spur behind my left big toe. I saw two different general practitioners, four separate orthopedic surgeons, three different physical therapists, an acupuncturist and a chiropractor for my symptoms.  Collectively they rotated, manipulated, massaged, needled and injected me with steroids (epidural).  None of it worked.

The root problem was not my back, head, toe, or even my left leg.  My legs are actually the same length. But my right hip is deformed in such a way that it causes my right leg to hang an inch shorter than my left.  None of these highly qualified specialists caught the real problem because they each had a generic solution they were best at applying, so they only looked for sufficient confirmation that my symptom could benefit from their solution.

There is no formula or prescription for improving employee performance.  Employee performance in your organization will always be contingent on a variety of factors, all of which interact continuously to make it difficult for us to know with certainty what is causing the effects we observe.  Despite the complexity, there will always be something you can do that will provide more leverage than anything else, but you have to deal with the mess of searching to find it.

There are a variety of things you can try to improve performance, all of which will probably work to one degree or another.  But a degree of success with the wrong intervention effort can actually mask the most significant root problems. 

For example, we know that employee satisfaction, commitment, and trust all affect employee performance, and a lot of folks believe that engagement affects performance.  You can invest in a program to increase employee trust, and you should see improvements in trust and probably in performance.  But just because employees trust you does not necessarily mean that they are more satisfied with and committed to your organization.  And it is possible that satisfaction, commitment, or some other variable are stronger drivers of performance in your organization.

But you will never know unless you measure correctly.  If you only measure one thing, and roll out a program to improve that one thing, you should see improvements when you measure that one thing again.  Please understand that your efforts to optimize a part of the system that affects performance can actually sub-optimize the larger system.

Avoid anyone that wants to sell you a specific solution before they have done a multidimensional assessment.  They should be looking for a number of potential root causes to the symptoms you have identified. And before you allow them to assess your organization and employees, find out what kind of tools they have in their bag.  They should be able to present you with a variety of options, including the option that their own measurement might reveal that you need to see someone else to address your root problem.

If all they have is an epidural or surgery, find someone else to assess your symptoms.