Joseph Roevens - The essential Change with Chaos

The Essential

Change with Chaos

Nurture Participation and Entrepreneurship for Organizational Success

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Copyright © Robin Rowley ͕ :ŽƐĞƉŚ Zoevens ĂŶĚ sŝŶĐĞŶƚ WůĂƚĞŶŬĂŵƉ͕ 201ϯ

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers.

Publisher: UNIVERSITAS http://www.universitas.be/nl/bookshop Middelmolenlaan 121–123 BͲ2100 Deurne, Belgium

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978Ͳ90Ͳ3370Ͳ060Ͳ6 3

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Enhance to Perturb to Attract to Excite

In this booklet we present the revised essentials of Organize with Chaos (1997, 1999, 2007), namely the ‘Enhance to Perturb to Attract to Excite’ (EPAE) Change Lens, as an approach to understand how organizations change, and how they can be run more effectively and humanely. It is written for anyone interested in organizing better.

Evolution From examining human evolution and other living forms of temporal adaptation, we came up with two phases, control and chaos, and four distinct scenarios. These scenarios provide a useful way to mentally classify the various actions and interactions of a change process. We have termed these scenarios: Enhance to Perturb to Attract to Excite.

This is how change happens in nature: • Something changes in the environment. The old ways of doing things, stop working.

• Confusion reigns and individual variations and mutations are pragmatically tested.

• Small adaptive differences favor the survival of some new types.

• These surviving differences act across populations, reproducing a new breed or species.

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Then something else changes in the environment, and the whole process starts again, endlessly.

If we apply evolutionary dynamics to understand and to change a human organization, it is apparent that we can sometimes intervene to promote, to sustain or even to accelerate the change process.

And at the same time, great care must be exercised, because we can also damage the change. It is often the scenario context in which an intervention is made that can make the difference between success and failure. Sometimes it is better for a manager to do nothing, instead of managing. The question is when?

Chaos theory We have borrowed several concepts from chaos theory, such as unpredictability, selfͲorganization, emergence, the Butterfly Effect, fractals and the concept of the “strange attractorâ€?. How they contribute to the complete Change Lens was explained in the original Organize with Chaos. Check http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL31A9DF0A6180458A for an update.

For now, we ask you only to distinguish between the unmanageable aspects, and the manageable ones of an organizational change, which together, can be grouped in four major scenarios. These are:

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Enhance: Environmental pressure to change is detected, and felt.

Perturb: Existing routines fail, and what occurs is stress & creative turbulence.

Attract: Fresh diversity emerges: a few other ways of working are successful. They survive & grow.

Excite: These survivors converge to create a new critical mass of how we now do things successfully in our organization. Then the whole cycle starts again.

An organization, its individuals, its groups, its departments as well as the whole will pass through each scenario. How long each scenario will last depends on the organization’s culture and its learned ability to go through participative change successfully. Direct management intervention can mostly be made to Enhance and to Excite the process. The other two selfͲorganizing scenarios of change, Perturb and Attract, defy most external intervention.

An organization ‘Enhanced’ to change will spontaneously go into turbulence and ‘Perturb’ itself, as each individual or group attempts to successfully adapt. In nature, the change process releases all manner of strange variations, but will ‘Attract’ only those outcomes which pragmatically work, not those that fail. These outcomes can then be ‘Excited’ through management intervention to 7

become the new regular way of how we do things successfully in our organization. In the next paragraph, concrete actions will be proposed, which are in a coherent scenario relationship to each other, and are also linked to the whole change process. At the start it is important to know, how the first actions that you take, can fit into the overall Change Lens. You can then recognize and trace their potential movements and probable outcomes.

Understanding the change scenario, within which each action is playing out, will help you to know what to do, and it will indicate what not to do, until the situation gets ripe.

Seeding Organizational Change

Let us put what we have discussed so far into a practical Change Lens. It is a way to handle the transformation of chosen sectors of your organization, and to help you to understand: Ͳ what may happen when you intervene, Ͳ where to plan, Ͳ what to watch out for, Ͳ where and what to structure, Ͳ how to read change as it happens in your organization.

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As a manager, your job is to coach your down line people to do great work, in their own terms, and to link this to customer appreciation. Your people do most of the work of change, not you. You can only intervene to improve the chances of fortunate coincidences occurring, or to reinforce the behaviours and strategic outcomes that you welcome. You may also protect creative projects from dying too early. All these interventions and their outcomes can never be exactly predetermined or certain.

With this lens however, you are not condemned to watch helplessly, as chaotic behaviour unfurls. The Change Lens only Enhances the probability of you taking effective action or inaction. As your inͲdepth understanding of, and experience with, change improves your own behaviour will also become more change coherent.

Planning for a journey is different to taking it. Taking a transformational change in realͲtime, does not conform well to a mechanical model of levers and drivers, because you are not actually driving. Your people are. On this journey, you navigate more than you steer. It is ok for you to relax a bit and sit back to watch the road for any big turns, or new developments. Your people will get better at driving 9

change themselves the more they practice. An experienced driver needs to do very little to keep the car going straight, compared to the erratic overͲ steering efforts of a novice. Like any creative journey, fundamental change means that you cannot possibly know exactly where you are going when you start out.

The Four Scenarios of Change

When you observe how a natural system changes, by human intervention, or by some accident of nature, four scenarios to the overall system’s behaviour, can be recognized. Things will happen in each scenario which cannot be predicted. Yet they are capable of classification, as belonging to a particular change scenario. The flow of events runs as follows:

Something new or unexpected happens which produces major changes in the environment. This will ENHANCE a pressure for the total system to change. The old ways of doing things no longer work effectively and PERTURBations occur. During this turbulent process a diversity of new untried types and behaviours are released into the world. They contest and collaborate, in a kind of pragmatic experiment to survive.

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