Change we can believe in

In a departure from our scheduled crawl through "Creativity" by Mihaly C just to write a post about something change management. Unless you have a friend who's a librarian (thanks James), you won't be able to read this in it's entirety.

One of the reasons I began this blog was because I feel there is a lack of rigour, interest in new thinking, and to be frank basic, competence in some of the underpinning theory and practice of what passes for organisational training. I have worked for many years in various guises as an OD consultant, change manager, trainer on some fairly well known major initiatives in local government and the private sector, and for all the bafflingly complex approaches to change, from Prince 2 to John Kotter I am always amazed by the inherent lack of coherence in the field.

Despite the somewhat jargony title, the article in question has a very simple experimental basis. Take a well researched psychological tool for making change, in this case cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and find an industry going through massive change, in this case an insurance firm going through a merger.

Next focus on a group of people, sales agents here, and divide them into two groups one who will receive the change intervention and one which will not. Finally select a way of measuring whether your intervention has been successful or not, in this case job satisfaction, self esteem productivity and general turnover.

Finally run the experiment, then compare groups and see if your intervention worked.

So seven weeks, 3 months and 2 years later how have our two groups fared?

• Psychological stress (measured on several different scales) requiring psychological intervention reduced from 37% of respondents at the start to 10% after the intervention
• Reduction of 66% in staff turnover in the group receiving the intervention compared to the group that didn't
• These differences persisted after a three month evaluation.
  
• After two years 65% of those who received the training hit their sales target compared with 29% of those who didn't receive the training.

I am aware of methodological limits in this kind of study, sample sizes, gender differences etc, but I am not aware of any scientific studies of any other consistent way of managing change in organisations. Surely the cost of an evidence based, repeatable, seven week training programme for your staff and possible counselling in between is a better bang for your buck than the millions presently spent on consultants fees?

The Fields

While the domains provide the architecture for creativity, the fields determine which innovation makes it through. Only a tiny percentage of creative ideas will make a lasting impression on the domain, and become part of that domain. Cultures need to be conservative, there are far too many good ideas, compared to what we can judge and implement without descending into chaos.

Members of the field are the cultural arbitrators of what information or skill is added to the domain. Fields vary greatly in amount of members, and their specialisations. It is not uncommon for several fields to interact, we've all heard of 'musicians bands' beloved by other musicians but with no great following by the music press or people at large.

Fields can affect the rate of creativity in three main ways:

• Being reactive or proactive - How engaged is a field in stimulating novelty? Are the members of the field actively seeking new ideas, spending in research and development, attending technology conferences, sponsoring prizes etc.
• The filter - How liberal or conservative is the field, do they accept a lot of novelty at once or only allow a few ideas to be deliberated over? Some fields move very quickly, like technology, others are more staid, like insurance, or accountancy (at least in popular imagination).
  
• Connection to the wider cultural systems - fields which have good connections to the greater society can channel resources into their given domain. This is why so many large organisations employ lobbyists. Connections can ensure legislation is conducive to the domain, additional funds are channeled into the domain, graduates are attracted etc.
  

The first objection I hear when discussing fields is usually, "but everyone is creative, we don't need other people to tell us we're creative." While to me the thought that ideas can't really be creative unless knowledgeable people say they are is stunningly obvious I seem to be in a minority, and I think there are powerful social and cultural barriers at work as well. The continued dominance of individual and personal views of creativity, (the lonely and suffering artist mentality), has come to dominate the idea of creativity as it is trained and disseminated in organisations. Unless some balance is brought to the study of creativity by examining the group and the systems, businesses will continue to waste funds and squander the good ideas already being generated.

The second major objection, is this idea of liberal and conservative fields. It is easy to think of the sexy pro-active organisations like Apple and Google, and think they must have the monopoly on being creative, while forgetting about the proactive organisations that failed in their field during the dotcom era, or the dozens which will no doubt follow in the current recession. There are excellent reasons for fields to be conservative, the market you are in, economic conditions etc. For instance I don't really want my accountant allowing too many creative ideas into my tax returns, though any executives of Enron reading this can feel free to differ. This may also explain why so many "creativity initiatives" of the blue sky thinking variety are so painfully dull, moribund, and unfocused.

Only by a thorough understanding of the domain and field your organisation operates in can you understand what the real value adding creative and innovative ideas are.