{"id":976,"date":"2015-09-16T00:01:36","date_gmt":"2015-09-15T22:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/?p=976"},"modified":"2015-09-07T11:53:16","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T09:53:16","slug":"finding-the-unicorn-organizational-change-persuasion-and-belief-by-lesley-crane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/finding-the-unicorn-organizational-change-persuasion-and-belief-by-lesley-crane\/","title":{"rendered":"FINDING THE UNICORN: organizational change, persuasion and belief
by Lesley Crane"},"content":{"rendered":"

One could be forgiven for thinking that managing change in an organization is a simple matter of persuasion. After all, we spend a great deal of time trying to get people to do or think things we want them to. The goal, conscious or not, is to induce a shift in the belief system of the recipient. Persuasion, then, is a form of making demands which, as Peter Drucker notes in his essay on Functioning Communications<\/i>, is one of the fundamentals of communication. Fundamental it may be, simple it is not.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The implicit understanding here is that when we perform an everyday act of persuasion (e.g., I know more than you, so I must be right), we display a tacit knowing of what others believe \u00a0so that we can (a) determine that a shift in belief is warranted in the first place, (b) set the shift\u2019s direction, and (c) apply the most efficient rhetorical strategy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Humans are actually pretty good at using our linguistic \u2018persuasion toolboxes\u2019 to persuade and change the beliefs of others at the mundane level \u00a0(you could compile a substantial phrase book of such rhetorical devices). If we were not, nothing would get done and we would probably still be hunting-gathering. The efficacy of such actions is shown to be wholly reliant on speakers\u2019 shared experiences and \/or knowledge of context. This is precisely where organizational change management seems to get it wrong.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

An organization wants to transform its culture to a more open, sharing and collaborative one. To do this, as one leading UK consultancy recommends, management needs to understand what people will have to believe, <\/i>which is billed as \u2018one of the secrets to successful change\u2019. But does this \u00a0not effectively side-line the prevailing beliefs? \u00a0Logically, this kind of communication only deals with half of the equation in its formula of predicting people\u2019s future beliefs, as it ignores their starting position. This is perhaps symptomatic of what Lee Bryant<\/a> describes as \u2018traditional change management\u2019 with its top down, \u2018big bang\u2019 ethos \u00a0which, he claims, is prone to failure or, at best, unsustainable impact: the elusive unicorn that Peter Drucker talks about.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To attempt change in an organization is the attempt to persuade in order to manipulate belief. Recall Peter\u2019s Drucker\u2019s definition of \u2018communication\u2019 as being the action of the listener, not the speaker. The speaker merely utters: the utterance only becomes communication when it is understood. In my terms, the speaker broadcasts a persuasion action (which crucially orients to what the listener knows, thinks and so on); the listener accepts and applies it, in which case a communication is shown to have taken place as a collaborative <\/i>action accomplished in social interaction. It works because speakers share common knowledge of experience and context, largely at the tacit level. Much of organizational change management practice simply fails to factor these fundamental human behaviours into the plan. Rather, it subscribes to the communication fallacy in differentiating between the communicator (the speaker) and the listener (the recipient). It treats humans as robots to be programmed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Beliefs, according to Peter Senge\u2019s Fifth Discipline<\/i><\/a>, are often invisible, taken for granted, but influence action \u2013how people accomplish things, set goals, figure out what is to be done and so forth (see Crane on tacit knowing<\/i><\/a>,). Senge\u2019s ideas find resonance in the earlier influential Theory of Planned Behaviour<\/i><\/a> in which Icek Ajzen links beliefs with attitudes with beliefs as the antecedents to attitudes and behaviour. Further, Ajzen notes that we can only attend to a small number of salient beliefs at any given time because of memory limitations. This could explain how the \u2018unexpected utterance\u2019 is not heard (Drucker), or how participants failed to notice a man dressed in a gorilla suit<\/a> wandering through a basketball game.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Despite a battery of conflicting claims and theories, some common features of beliefs can be drawn:<\/p>\n