Alejandro Serralde S.*
Organizations of our times are undergoing extremely severe pressures to achieve what now seems to be their most fervent desire: survival. Among multiple efforts being made, the most outstanding are those whose purpose is to regain the capability for generating wealth, competitiveness and importantly, the production of economic value added. Managed organizational change and selected change (management development) programs, as well as those of compulsory change (traditional consulting and re-engineering), are being evaluated due to the seriousness of the situation. Each approach has its cost/benefit ratio, which is surely not just economic in nature. Managed organizational change seems to have taken a secondary place behind the spectacular drive of re-engineering and, of course due to the speed of response desired for the approach. However, it would seem that the latter harsh technique is able to provide good short-term results, without necessarily contributing to a cultural network through which future organizational needs can be met.
This article proposes an alternative radical change for organizations that clearly provides for creating the future through an equally radical change in attitudes. If the future comes from out there, in the fourth dimension, that is where change must be born in order to later produce, at each instant, particles of the future that will bring organizations to the desired state. It proposes to develop within the organization a generating capability for the future in situations of adversity and uncertainty.
For purposes of this presentation, I want to see managerial organizational change as an effort operating through a set of strategies that develop organizations’ adaptive capabilities, so that the latter may be capable of overcoming environmental requirements. When this has been achieved, the organization will be ready to exert its influence on the environment and thus able to manifest its leadership. It is however clear that, when environmental requirements are greater than the organization’s ability to respond, then collapse or in the best case a highly malignant disease will occur. Since the prevailing culture for directing organizations still causes us to look inward most of the time, there is frankly little being done to pick up signals from the surrounding environment that would give meaning to any efforts of change.
Many companies were aware, so to speak, that very difficult times were coming, against which they would have to be prepared. But to no avail, it seems definitely clear that our businessmen and managers in general only make change efforts when the situation is already desperate, and when there is someone to be held responsible for the desperate situation we are living in. There are still very few businessmen who anticipate the need for change and work out strategies that will lead them to meet the future in good condition. But even fewer of them practice the art of change through organizational members’ own initiative: managed organizational change, because under yet prevailing techniques, only top management will participate in determining how organizations are going to change, which model is to be adopted, and defining who will go where and who will stay. We know very well that re-engineering is not always done with the participative focus that managed organizational change proposes.
Due to the postponement of change found in many organizations, a different technique was required, leading to radical modifications almost under the slogan: “strong measures against great evils”. This postponement is mainly due to the lack of top management commitment, but neither have we, the professionals of Human Resources, been very convincing, so there has also been a lack of clearness regarding the contributions to results made by change programs. If we had been more effective, changes would have been managed in a different manner, without the social cost of re-engineering. Perhaps more attention would have been paid to the organization/environment interphase, which contains the most reliable particles of information for deciding how we should connect with the environment, in order to maintain a position of growing influence.
When focusing one’s attention toward the organization/environment interphase, the speed-of-change phenomenon is immediately highlighted: 1) in environmental factors, and 2) within the organization itself. We can thus speak about positive or negative harmony in the above-mentioned speed. It is of course better for us to have positive harmony, so that when the speed of change in our organization is great, we are influencing the environment and thus setting guidelines for the change process in the factors surrounding us.
If the above speed of change can on the one hand be increased at will, we face the possibility of provoking turbulence in the environment, which will help us in strengthening our presence, position and leadership. If on the other hand the harmony is negative, then the organization’s creativeness will have to turn to salvage efforts, which become terribly difficult when we each day verify the crushing pace of an undesirable future, loaded with challenge that we are not and never will be prepared for, even making superhuman efforts.
The environment can only be overcome through anticipation. This is why, in my opinion, managing the future has such importance, not only in managed organizational change, but also in strategic direction. Facing the future is time management or, in the best of cases, managing speculations about the future, promoting predictions about what we think is going to happen, for the sake of our cause. All goal-setting is betting on the future, and any desire for change commits us to seeking a desirable state therein; it is therefore necessary to state that managing change is equivalent to managing time.
It is quite risky to work with change without understanding time. My proposal includes setting up the latter as a focal point for managed change and strategic direction. When dealing with the future, we are undoubtedly manifesting our time culture. I do not remember ever having received any class about time itself, not even an explanation about its nature, during my training period in organizational development. Time is taught to be known and understood, and we all practice the same rituals for managing it. We see it more as linked to clocks and calendars than to our will to act. We see it more as linked to mysterious phenomena than to acts of human creation.
Such being the case, how can it be possible to plan on initiating an organizational change process without clearly understanding the essence of time? It is impossible to define change without considering time, and vice-versa. Imagine the act of planning an organizational change relating to the environment without adding the notion of a future that affects the social system and the environment itself.
Suppose it is desired to change the organization’s patterns of response toward the influence of the environment. We could not do a good job if we do not know the future effects on the customer-environment system. When planning today and trying to outline future scenarios (situations), we put together information about the present, the past and predictions about the future, for example on the economy, the behavior of political and social factors in the environment, the behavior of competitors and other market influences, in a frank list of wagers trying to guess what will then be happening and what things will have favorable or unfavorable effects toward our cause. We do the above assuming that the future we must prepare for is a product that surges from the environment, and we get to be capable of placing all of our chips to try to overcome or at least come out even against this future that has nothing to do with the accomplishment of our undertaking.
My vision of time is one where fluids that allow transformation surge from human beings and thus from the human teams that drive the organization. Events that come from other human beings’ initiative and their action affect the environment’s behavior and thus change in the environment. In other words, the totality of human beings’ actions and natural elements provide directions for this change; individual action can do little to modify it.
The physical environment with its physical changes belongs to the third dimension; time belongs to the fourth dimension; thus, any notion about the future belongs to the latter. Change in an organization, that is a desirable state for the organization, crystallizes in this dimension and is built by creating proper conditions for the desired phenomena to occur. Because of the influence that present reality has on our perception of the future, I must point out that top management’s leadership style in any human organization determines its future, and not the environment as is generally believed. It is frankly comfortable to blame the environment for not being able to attain the desired future horizon. It is clear that the future is created by human beings’ work. Therefore, the future is not something that falls on us from there to over here, but something that we produce from here to over there.
When a leader is clearly aware that, as he (she) is capable of maturing, creating and changing, he (she) to the same extent produces his (her) work in time, creates his (her) future and generates his (her) own time. Following the above logic, leadership effectiveness influences effectiveness for creating the future and generating time.
Organizations can produce conditions that enhance the achievement of their projects and thus create their own future. Each individual, like every organization, regularly takes an attitude about the time that passes and also takes one toward the future; such attitudes are the source for the initiatives that each personifies to achieve what he (she) wants. Thus, it is totally irrelevant for individuals in an organization to be orchestrated for operating under the dominion of plans, policies and procedures if they do not take an appropriate attitude with respect to time. Because attitude determines the potential for achievement.
When leaders have clear ideas about the future they want to create for their organizations, what they must do is use their array of resources to materialize the actions they will take to that future, regardless of the limitations present in the environment. I want to emphasize that organizations’ future does not depend on environmental forces, but upon leaders’ determination, as also happens in the case of human beings. If this were not so, organizations and individuals would be mere puppets. And though hard and painful to recognize, there are obviously more puppets of the environment every day.
In order to create the future, we need to get the organization away from the influence of time that passes as well as the influence of the physical environment, in a clear effort toward transcendence (transformation). The key is to take a correct attitude toward time and the future. Leaders who manage to transcend (go beyond) time produce substantial change in their organizations, since they are capable of generating growth in the midst of recessive environments or facing the most troubling adversities. We find many leaders around us, in the business world, social activities, the government and sports, who have the virtue of knowing how to transcend the effects of time that passes.
Organizational change today needs to be approached starting from a commitment toward the future that is to be created, uniting efforts as a function of objectives and adapting means in order to stimulate the precipitation of events through essential conditions. This requires for organizational leaders to have clearness in visualizing future horizons, in accordance with realistic achievement capabilities. Leaders frequently lack objectivity regarding environmental phenomena and the creative capability of their organizations as well as their own. Distortion at the top does not only drive toward the wrong horizons; having inadequate attitudes also leads the organization to take a position that does not nurture the creation of the future.
Such distortions are commonly encouraged by low self-awareness, little awareness toward the organization and of environmental phenomenology. We tend to perceive through the vision of others, for example news media, criticisms of the moment, history, etc. In other words, we add little of our own capability for interpretation, common sense and judgment, allowing ourselves to be influenced by manufacturers of virtual realities. For example nowadays, we have fallen into the habit of resorting to surveys (polls) to perceive what is going on, thus attributing value to the opinion of a sample of confused and troubled persons. Majority opinion about a fact is not necessarily its reality; it can be the mass phenomenon created for that fact; however, it can also be a macabre concoction, the fruit of collective distortion. On the other hand, stress increases distortion so that, if we imagine an opinion poll in an irritated social system, it will give us a measure of unrest but not necessarily an indication of reality.
When thinking about the need for making changes in an organization, surveys (polls) are not always good indicators. The culture of objectivity and the development of tools to validate it are necessary conditions for the process of change. I believe that organizational behavioral change is easier if one adopts a proper attitude toward time than if it is generated through skill development efforts.
Finally, the effectiveness with which one responds to a situation depends more on congruity than upon skill. When an organization needs to respond better to the expectations of environmental factors, congruity is required above all; what is the use of a perfect but erroneous response? There lies the importance of developing sensitivity to take the proper position toward the time segment in which we find ourselves. A position of urgency in a situation that requires patience may create behaviors of anxiety and haste. A behavioral change solution following the classic approach might lead us to provide training for people’s learning how to be calm in urgent situations, when perhaps the matter is simpler: teaching persons to be aware of the context. The same thing happens with organizations; a great amount of effort is deployed year after year in training persons to develop skills, as revealed by surveys (polls) to discover training requirements.
The model of leadership for the future proposes two appropriate variables for the fourth dimension:
- Attitudes toward the future (perspective of time)
- Need for achievement (ambition)
Attitude toward the future is a faithful reflection of our existential achievement expectations as a function of time, either because we have short term / long term expectations or else are indifferent. Achievement needs, as indicated, are a measure of aspirations or ambition. We know there are cautious leaders who act as a function of very conservative objectives, whereas there are others who provoke real turbulence in striving for highly challenging and demanding objectives. It is possible to outline, as a function of the above two variables, different types of attitudes which I have called types of existential positions as indicated below:
This proposal essentially consists of striving for attitude changes before trying to change the behavior of organizations and individuals. Attitude changes help to transcend the simple and superficial vision of facts (events), thereby making it possible to develop a position of congruity with reality and not with different versions of the latter. It is thus perfectly understandable, through leadership for the future, for persons to be capable of transcending the reality of the majorities, the reality of the masses. Conventional leaders can perhaps produce progress in favorable conditions; however, leadership for the future consists of the skills to create real alternatives for progress in the midst of the most adverse conditions. This is what dominion over the fourth dimension consists of.
The contribution of leadership for the future is to be able to progress in recessive mediums; for this, it is necessary to make changes in the organization for the latter to acquire the capability for progress in conditions of great adversity, through efforts that go beyond organizational development. This is an effort that leads to organizational transcendence (O.T.); we then propose instead of managed organizational change the use of O.T., which is the alternative of managed change, based on leadership for the future approach.
Organizational transcendence proposes questioning personal projects against organizational projects, instead of simply questioning the insertion of people into their positions. The latter can only enable us to have structure in a three-dimensional medium, but not in the field of the fourth dimension. A person may have all the attributes required for his (her) position and yet be continually uncommitted because his (her) personal project does not harmonize with the organizational project. Completing tasks of this type in the organization may help us be efficient but will in no way improve organizational effectiveness because, in the best of cases, we will be getting people to carry out their obligations with discipline but will not be obtaining creative contributions from them.
Each individual, each group of individuals, each group of groups and each organization is surrounded by a series of atmospheric type influences that make it possible for them to undertake congruous or incongruous action. In my proposal, I call these influences the Quanθum (written deliberately with the greek letter theta, the universal symbol for time). Each one, each entity, ought to work continually to cultivate these influences properly and thus obtain greater capability for accomplishment.
The componenθs of Quanθum are:
- Awareness of one’s own capabilities (certainty about limitations)
- Objectivity about one’s personal situation and others surrounding one
- Ontological climate (positive state of mind)
- Dissatisfaction with the present situation
- Degree of commitment
- Existential position (what I expect of myself)
- Impetus (desire for achievement)
The development of the componenθs (influences) of quanθum is the equivalent alternative in O.T. for the management skill development efforts in managed organizational change.
The Organizational Transcendence effort proposes the diagnosis of quanθum instead of simply diagnosing organizational climate as done by the followers of managed organizational change. Similarly, determining the position of individuals and that of groups or organizations, instead of determining mission, is the recommended practice for being able to harmonize with efforts for creating the future. The reason is quite simple: mission is generally defined from the third dimension, in the physical environment, whereas position is defined in the fourth dimension, since that is where it must be attained. It is also proposed to develop skills for trans-situational management, instead of developing skills for conflict management as occurs with managed organizational change. Likewise, the O.T. approach proposes the development of skills for making choices instead of developing skills for making decisions.
Lastly, this new approach proposes to do a fundamental job with each participant, and each group of organization members, for the purpose of determining individual and group areas of achievement and thus providing direction for the application of efforts instead of simply determining areas of results. In synthesis, O.T. intends to add notions of the future to each organizational improvement action, because we know that every job carried out in the present immediately goes to the past, whereas every application of the future will soon become the present.
In contrast to the practice of determining management styles through any theoretical approach and thus be able to derive conclusions about organizational culture etc., O.T. outlines the benefit of learning the existential position of individuals and organizations, as well as the practice of organic planning instead of mechanical planning.
Finally, it is more profitable to determine the future aspirations of individuals and organizations than to merely identify values. The following process is suggested for the purpose of cultivating organizational transcendence:
- Phase I – Diagnosis of organizational quanθum
- Phase II – Development of leadership-for-the-future skills
- Phase III – Raise the level of quanθum components
- Phase IV – Redefine the existential position of organizations and structures
- Phase V – Establish strategies for the future
- Phase VI – Implement organic planning
- Phase VII – Implement true evaluation
Each phase is oriented toward creating a leadership-for-the-future culture realizing that, even though individuals have a past, organizations’ experiences, whether they be successful or erroneous, do not go to the past but end up directly in the market.
* Alejandro Serralde is an organizational effectiveness consultant,
and Reddin Consultants’ President.
