There will always be a mythical element to organizational change theories and practices, not least because humans like to create and tell stories. In that narrative process, however, what can happen is that heroic elements are amplified, uncomfortable data is edited out, and the tale is simplified to make the telling and swallowing a lot easier.
After all, it is a lot easier to swallow a smooth and nugget-like change meme than something slightly more nuanced that requires chewing before digesting it.
This means it is as important to acknowledge and engage with myths as it is to bust them.
In this webinar, Mark Hughes, author of many organizational change journal papers and books and a critical voice in the field of organizational change over two decades, joins me for a conversation. We will link this to my own work in No Silver Bullet, and the collusive behaviours between buyers and sellers of quick fixes to complex problems.
In a change to the normal routine, there is a short pre-read, to prime your thinking, namely the first chapter of Mark’s Managing and Leading Organizational Change (accessible here). This is on the theme of mythunderstanding organizational change, and gathers together the many myths Mark encountered studying organizational change. The book promised to bust them, but came with the requirement to seriously engage with their enduring role. Which is the chewy bit here.
In this session, I will explore with Mark three of the biggest myths he attempted to bust during his career.
- The mythology of research-informed teaching in universities
- The 70% of organizational change failure myth?
- The myth that the shift from managing change to leading change was empirically rather than culturally informed.
Then we will get into some small group inquiry to explore how others view things, consider whether anything has changed, and what other myths are taking hold…
Expect:
- Reflection, inquiry, amused pondering, seasoned with déjà vu, a twist of befuddlement that so little has changed and a wondering at what it might take for us to all not be suckered into believing these myths as much as we (apparently) are prone to do.
Don’t expect:
- Easy to swallow change memes.
The event is free, and not limited by anything other than the maximum on our Zoom account. We will scale the conversation accordingly.
Bring own tea, biscuits, cream buns and cats to walk across the desk in front of you.
Mark’s Myths and where to find them...
- “The desirability of research-informed teaching has always appeared an eminently sensible belief. However, the research in support of this belief was lacking. This was the myth that inspired me.” (Mark Hughes)
Hughes, M. (2005) The mythology of research and teaching relationships in universities. In Barnett, R.(ed) Reshaping the university: New relationships between research, scholarship and teaching. Open University Press, Maidenhead.
- “Academics and practitioners regularly asserted a Harvard Business School statistic that 70% of change initiatives fail. I decided to explore the evidence in support of this assertion, discovering an absence of evidence. This was the myth that made me.” (Mark Hughes)
Hughes, M. (2011) Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail? Journal of Change Management, 11(4), pp.451-464.
- “Over two decades, I witnessed a profound shift in interest amongst both academics and practitioners from managing change to leading change. I wanted to know why this shift had happened. I concluded that this shift had been rhetorically rather than empirically driven; this was the myth that broke me.” (Mark Hughes)
Hughes, M. (2016) The leadership of organizational change. Routledge, London.
Hughes, M. (2016) Leading changes: Why transformation explanations fail. Leadership, 12(4), pp.449-469.
