Reflections on Management

Kurt Lewin famously said “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” In the past two decades, this quote has been cited hundreds if not thousands of times in the literature, but in recent years there has been renewed attention to the problems of a theory-practice gap and how to resolve it. Yet since 2000 there has been a lot of attention paid to closing the ‘gap’ between theory and practice to limited avail? So was Lewin right, or is something else wrong?

In this talk, I argue the latter -- mainly that we are being misled by the very metaphors we use to describe the differences between theory and practice. I offer a different metaphor from the 'gap.' This alternative metaphor -- that of the 'rheostat' -- suggests some theories are simply not meant to be practical, but they are still good theories. Meanwhile, the inverse is also true in that certain matters of practice have little business being theorized. Below is a graphic, referenced in the episode, that shows how the rheostat metaphor works.

Initiating change is already a big challenge, with all the resistance that change agents face and so on. Therefore, popular change management literature places tremendous emphasis on gaining forward momentum through early successes or quick 'wins' which are to be roundly celebrated. They supposedly convince organizations that achievement of the change goals is possible, all that is needed is more energy and excitement, and hopefully more quick wins. But my experiences suggest that this is where change efforts tend to stall because the organization is unable or unwilling to further invest in it. Instead, the pilot (or experiment) that was supposed to kickstart the change effort becomes its full extent, with the organization repeating the pilot from then on and thereby avoiding the risk of reversing gains. While this sounds undesirable and counter to what traditional change management considers OK, can it sometimes be said that good enough is good enough?

We talk about change quite a lot, and have an incredible array of tools at our disposal. But how complete are these tools and how much is left for us to figure out. For example, a common thread in popular change management literature is the need to motivate or ‘establish a sense of urgency’. But in my experience that is incredibly difficult to do no matter how compelling the change. What’s missing?

My proposed answer is the change story, in which the analysis of the organization's problem is connected to choices between the current path which leads to a degradation of performance and an alternate path representing a decision for change leading to a vision. Writing such a story, however, is not so easy.

‘Competitive advantage‘ is one of those terms that I have puzzled over. It is used so often that I know people believe it means something, but it is rarely defined in practice. Scholars have attempted to derive formulas for it, but do those formulas mean anything or do they just tell us in scientific language what we already knew? In other words, is it just a MacGuffin–a prize or goal that drives a narrative forward but isn’t actually anything at all?

On the other hand, if the term is meaningful, then how can one use ‘competitive advantage’ as a construct to make convincing arguments about the need for change? Several have tried, but those efforts have not always borne fruit.

An important part of an organization’s identity is its ties to the past, claims of temporal continuity as they are known. One type of organization that plays up its enduring historical characteristics are governments at the national, state, or local levels. Evidence of this is quite prevalent in Europe, where artefacts of history are well-preserved and attract tourists from around the world, and in the United States. It requires a lot of resources to preserve the buildings and grounds, sustain the culture (e.g., traditional dress, music, food, dance, and so on), and provide environments for contemporary visitors to immerse themselves in the past. Yet in addition to the risks of environmental damage is the risk that the tourist trade negatively affects the accuracy of the stories being told. Ceremony and ritual may distort the truth.

Using one European and one American location, each of which I have visited and enjoyed many times, I hope to explain the potential impacts on organizations in general. Misremember the history and risk losing the identity!

The story goes that 70% of all change efforts fail, which means I’m sure many of you have experienced transformational change that failed to achieve its goals. While we can debate the precision of the figure but no doubt it is high. But is it really because we human beings are that bad at it? Or are there factors that make it utterly intractable?

In this inaugural episode, I argue that the answer to the second question is probably 'yes,' which makes the first question irrelevant. The design, functions, or behaviors of certain organizations carry persistent tensions that can be paradoxical in nature, such that any transformational change triggers opposition that is invested in one side of the tension or the other. Along with being a natural source of resistance, how might such tensions color the way members assess the success or failure of change, particularly when it is easier to level claims of failure? I will use military organizations as my example, also as a way of contrasting some ways that such organizations differ from private sector or other forms of public sector firms.

In this special episode I go beyond the curriculum vitae kinds of things and tell you about my life history, and my background shapes the stories and ideas I wish to share in this podcast. I am retired military officer who pursued his doctorate late in life as a way of trying to understand what I had experienced as a military officer who spent the latter half of his career working at the so-called "strategic" level. In the military, "strategic" often describes one's place in the environment of a defense ministry (the Department of Defense in the U.S.), a Service (e.g., Army, Navy, Air Force), or one of the major commands within a Service. As I had no prior experience in the humanities, my forays into matters of organizational culture, change, communication, and leadership were essentially learning on the job.

What have I learned, and therefore how do I approach matters of scholarship and practice? That is the subject of this episode. I hope you enjoy it!