The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture - Hardcover

Gibbons, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0134000331 ISBN 13: 9780134000336

Publisher: Pearson FT Press, 2015

Synopsis

Every leader understands the burning need for change–and every leader knows how risky it is, and how often it fails. To make organizational change work, you need to base it on science, not intuition. Despite hundreds of books on change, failure rates remain sky high. Are there deep flaws in the guidance change leaders are given? While eschewing the pat answers, linear models, and change recipes offered elsewhere, Paul Gibbons offers the first blueprint for change that fully reflects the newest advances in mindfulness, behavioral economics, the psychology of risk-taking, neuroscience, mindfulness, and complexity theory.

 

Change management, ostensibly the craft of making change happen, is rife with myth, pseudoscience, and flawed ideas from pop psychology.  In Gibbons’ view, change management should be “euthanized” and replaced with change agile businesses, with change leaders at every level.  To achieve that, business education and leadership training in organizations needs to become more accountable for real results, not just participant satisfaction (the “edutainment” culture). 

 

Twenty-first century change leaders need to focus less on project results, more on creating agile cultures and businesses full of staff who have “get to” rather than “have to” attitudes. To do that, change leaders will have to leave behind the old paradigm of “carrots and sticks,” both of which destroy engagement. 

 

“New analytics” offer more data-driven approaches to decision making, but present a host of people challenges—where petabyte information flows meet traditional decision-making structures. These approaches will have to be complemented with “leading with science”—that is, using evidence-based management to inform strategy and policy decisions.

In The Science of Successful Organizational Change, you'll learn:

• How the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) world affects the scale and pace of change in today’s businesses
• How understanding of flaws in human decision-making can help leaders guide their teams toward wiser strategic decisions when the stakes are largest—including “when to trust your guy and when to trust a model” and “when all of us are smarter than one of us”
• How new advances in neuroscience have altered best practices in influencing colleagues; negotiating with partners; engaging followers' hearts, minds, and behaviors; and managing resistance
• How leading organizations are making use of the science of mindfulness to create agile learners and agile cultures
• How new ideas from analytics, forecasting, and risk are humbling those who thought they knew the future–and how the human side of analytics and the psychology of risk are paradoxically more important in this technologically enabled world
• What complexity theory means for decision-making in the context of your own business
• How to create resilient and agile business cultures and anti-fragile, dynamic business structures

To link science with your "on-the-ground" reality, Gibbons tells “warts and all” stories from his twenty-plus years consulting to top teams and at the largest businesses in the world. You'll find case studies from well-known companies like IBM and Shell and CEO interviews from Nokia and Barclays Bank.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

The VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) World Demands Change-Agile Businesses

Turbulent environments demand constant change, but the mindset, skills, and behaviors taught to business leaders are unhelpful and sometimes flatly misleading. What is more, many high-profile approaches to change do not help: they are based on untested belief systems, unreliable methods, and psychological myth.

The Science of Organizational Change identifies dozens of myths, bad models, and unhelpful metaphors, replacing some with twenty-first century research and revealing gaps where research needs to be done. Paul Gibbons links the origins of theories about change to the history of ideas and suggests that the human sciences will provide real breakthroughs in our understanding of people in the twenty-first century. For example, change fundamentally entails risk, yet little is written for business people about how breakthroughs in the psychology of risk can help change leaders. Change fundamentally involves changing people’s minds, yet the most recent research shows that provision of facts may strengthen resistance.

Gibbons’ explorations of the frontiers of twenty-first century behavioral science will help you build influence, improve communication, optimize decision making, and sustain change.

In complex organizations and systems, there are no silver bullets. But you can shift away from techniques that are harmful or that science says do not work and toward techniques supported by solid evidence.

• Leading people through change: Tactics from 21st century human sciences
  Getting beyond flawed “pop psychology”–and failed “pop leadership”
• New ways to change behavior–without coercion (carrots and sticks)
  Preserving dignity and autonomy, avoiding coercion or paternalism–and succeeding
• A new science of changing hearts and minds
  Reconceiving resistance, handling social complexity, using facts, and leveraging metacognition
• Leading with science: The emergence of evidence-based management
  From “anti-scientific” management to experiment, hypothesis testing, and analytics

RETHINK EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT CHANGE

• Discard metaphors such as “carrots and sticks,” “burning platforms,” the “soft side” of business, and “resistance,” all of which destroy effectiveness
• Think about the risk, the true costs, and the results of change programs in a completely new way
• Turn new insights from mindfulness, behavioral economics, complexity theory, and analytics into practical tools
• Discard pseudoscience, and pop psychology as guides for how people in business behave
• Make the shift towards greater accountability, scientific validity, and measurement
• Replace change management with change agility and change leadership

To make change work, you need to base it on science, not intuition or myth. In this book, Paul Gibbons offers the first blueprint for change that integrates recent advances in neuroscience, mindfulness, behavioral economics, sociology, complexity theory, and analytics.

Rigorously grounded in evidence, this multi-disciplinary approach fully reflects the realities of change in today’s complex organizations. Gibbons offers actionable guidance for every facet of your change initiative–from strategy and planning, through the tactics of changing hearts minds and behaviors, to creating change-agile organizations.

You’ll gain a more mature understanding of how people and systems change. And you’ll learn to apply these insights–increasing resilience, agility, and innovation throughout your organization.

About the Author:

Paul Gibbons has a 35-year career straddling international business and academia. His research and writing explores how philosophy and science can be used to enlighten contemporary business thinking and solve practical business problems, including changing culture, developing leaders, and using analytics and evidence to make strategic decisions. During his 30 years in Europe, he was a derivatives trader, consultant, adjunct professor, and founder/CEO of an award-winning Organization Development consulting firm, Future Considerations. He now writes, teaches, and raises two boys in Colorado.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pearson FT Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0134000331
• ISBN 13: 9780134000336
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320