New trends help businesses towards adaptive change for employees

Too much of the change ­management that happens in Australian industry is project management dressed up to look like change.

Would you be attracted to a workplace that developed resilience and changed readiness so that you didn’t just survive disruptive change, you got stronger because of it?

With all the systems and support for leaders and teams in the average Australian business or government agency, you might assume that environment already existed: performance management, change management, development courses, engagement surveys, career guidance, coll­aborative software, efficient systems and so on.

Pause for a moment and ask a challenging question: do these practices really make people and organisations stronger or could they have the opposite effect?

To paraphrase Nassim Taleb, author of Antifragile, are the practices that corporate Australia uses to protect and support you actually making you more vulnerable to disruptive change?

Fragility is increased by rules, by structure, by linear planning, by reliance on protection from outside and, interestingly, by size.

It’s hardly new knowledge that our own bodies respond to stressors and become stronger. Vaccination and physical training rely on this adaptive capability. People, teams and organisations do the same.

So how may the practices we rely on to enable adaptability and resilience be having the opposite effect?

Too much of the change ­management that happens in Australian industry is project management dressed up to look like change. Instead of assisting people to navigate through adaptive change, it protects them from experience and learning.

Performance management consistently misses the point that adaptability requires a rapid and continuing cycle of alignment, collaboration and learning, not an annual review. Classroom training by itself is a poor way to embed learning so that behaviours stick under pressure, which suggests that resilience training courses might not be quite what they could be.

A bias towards restructuring to address silo behaviour suggests Australian leaders won’t confront the realities that effective cross-boundary collaboration develops because of tension, not in the absence of it.

Not surprisingly, a first wave of organisations are already using this ‘‘antifragile’’ thinking to create and explore a different set of principles. These principles run counter to the mainstream but they are already being embedded in a new style of capability development.

Four trends are emerging:

• Replace change management with in-the-field adaptive change development, where leaders and teams are guided to apply problem-solving and decision-making tools within their real challenges.

• Replace performance management with frequent, robust two-way learning and performance conversations.

• Replace most classroom training with experiential knowledge gained from real-life experience, with powerful debriefing.

• Replace the bias to restructure with a one-team model of nimble, connected teams using partnering and social technologies.

Each practice moves away from notions of protecting, ­managing and controlling towards a more natural process. They acknowledge people do learn and adapt without needing overt management control.

The challenge for everyone is to accept that adaptive change involves a level of discomfort and it is from the squirming that we learn and adapt.

Graham Winter is executive director of Think One Team International.