More Change

Following on from the last post, one of the most insightful books I have read recently on the topic is by Patricia Shaw and called Changing Conversations in Organizations. Shaw is part of the shadowy & secretive Complexity & Management Centre based out of the University of Hertfordshire (though I think they're just a front for someone else). An organisation so shadowy & secretive, they have published a large number of books* (including the book by Philip Streatfield mentioned below) and run numerous masters & doctorate programs. If I was a documentary maker, I'd probably be drawing all kinds of sinister conclusions from the incontrovertable fact that Ralph Stacey once had a scone at tea shop run by Richard Pearle's nephew's piano teacher but for now I'll just have to talk about Changing Conversations.

The beauty of this book is that it does not attempt to make things simple for the reader. Change in the book is messy. The central case study (although the result is nothing as clinical as that term implies) concerns a change programme at an Italian Chemicals Factory (the chemical factory bit somehow manages to cancel out the Italian part in the glamour stakes, eh?). This is leavened with references to complexity science, the shortcoming of trad organisational development theory & some episodes where Prof. Shaw interviews herself as a way of reflecting on events in a dissociative manner. As with individual gambits described in the book, the result is is a calculated risk that eventually works. There is no papering over failure & changing the our world with others is never presented as anything less than a contingent, partial, ongoing business. I reckon this book should be required reading for all would-be "change agents**".

*Routledge do their bit to try to keep the CMC shadowy & secretive by charging an arm & a leg for hardback copies of these.

**Does a change agent get 10% of all the change that occurs - like a theatrical or literary one?