IDEOLOGY AND ACTION
An ideology represents a way of looking at the world
that
tends to maintain the status quo of a particular group through a systematic bias
-- a
distortion that's largely unconscious and unintentional. The particular bias inherent in
the collaborative ideology of Organization Development (O.D.) is apparent not only in
helping strategies (e.g., developing "team" management) but in the values placed
on various sources of influence to change.
In The Planning of Change
Warren Bennis defined planned change as:
"…a conscious, deliberate, and collaborative
effort to improve the operations of a human system…" This definition is noteworthy because it makes O.D.'s
collaborative ideology explicit, as if planned change could not be conceived
of without collaboration. More implicit is the reality that planned change in these terms
is an attempt to change clients' behavior so it manifests and affirms
the value of collaboration. There are several sources of influence in the change process:
The
power-coercive
approach is based on political, economic, and/or moral
sanctions as sources of influence, is widespread in
organizations but not particularly valued by change agents.
The
empirical-rational
approach relies on knowledge as a source of
influence, is valued somewhat more (the change agent, as "expert," attempts to
change the individual's conceptual/perceptual organization).
With the
normative-re-educative
approach preferred in O.D., knowledge is less a source of influence than is a
system of mutual influence. The major objective is "learning to learn;"
where clients develop their own ability to examine and reconstruct premises, and apply this process
to deal with future similar problems.
More has been written
about the concepts of change than about how to make
change happen. Theories of planned change acknowledge the presence of forces
for change and resistance to change, but resistance tends to be interpreted as the
client's
problem (the coach/consultant is usually seen as a source of positive energy). The social
and cultural values those of us in helping roles bring into the system, along with our individual
predispositions, are rarely taken into account.
I believe the coach/consultant's conscious task is to
think of change within a system of mutual influence. The client and coach
share knowledge and the coach aids the client's growth, partly through
examining together the premises of their relationship.
It's also important to openly examine the extent to which
we as coaches/consultants
unwittingly fail to collaborate and instead
maintain the status quo as "expert." For example, viewing
resistance as the client's problem maintains a biased view of the client as dependent.
IT IS INHERENTLY CONTRADICTORY TO ARGUE ON THE ONE HAND THAT CHANGE
OCCURS THROUGH A RELATIONSHIP, AND ON THE OTHER HAND THAT RESISTANCE
TO CHANGE IS NOT A PROPERTY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BUT RATHER THE FAULT
OF ONLY ONE PARTY. Every time we say the system
must
change, we maintain the underlying status system (coach/consultant as
expert). Every time we label the client as "resisting change" we
maintain the underlying status system. Both coach/consultant behaviors reinforce the status quo!
By ignoring the role of the coach in maintaining the status quo, we may block the
normative, re-educative approach's highly valued goal of learning to learn about the
system's premises.
SOURCES OF
RESISTANCE
Resistance to change is functional when not carried to
extremes. In other words, the energy we put into resisting change also permits us to
preserve
balance in our lives by relegating habitual responses to the unconscious. If we couldn't do
this we'd go crazy, continually bombarded with data we'd have to assess anew every moment.
In this sense, some resistance is inevitable. Two key components of resistance are
selective
perception and selective retention -- these
generalizations help us
organize our understandings of our environment. Unfortunately, they also keep us from
exploring the differences between experiences that are otherwise similar.
As we grow up, we learn to depend on others' expertise in
various roles -- parents, teachers, doctors, sports coaches. Basically, society teaches us to
accept the status quo. This leads to self-distrust in the face of potential change
("I shouldn't") and even to regression (as in reverting to old, familiar
practices in new situations). All of these, of course, are processes to which the coach/consultant
would be as readily subject as the client. Yet resistance is almost always
discussed in the context of client behavior. Moreover, while resistance is
theoretically functional, the word takes on a pejorative quality when we talk about
"client
resistance."
No one else seems to have written about resistance as a
property of an interpersonal interaction; rather, there are theories of
resistance in social systems and resistance in
individuals. Attempts to
eliminate resistance, therefore, tend to focus on the
targets of change. If team
members are "resisting" their manager's directives, for
example, we might facilitate group meetings where we communicate the need for change and
encourage group plans to enact the change. In doing this we might use joint diagnosis and
consensus-building to reduce feelings of threat, to engage peoples' interest, to help them
feel the project is at least somewhat their own, and try to make
it fit their values and ideals. We search for the key "defenders" of the
status quo and try to enlist their support for the change effort by taking their concerns
seriously:
What are the threats to their well-being?
What might be dysfunctional about the
proposed change that we've overlooked?
What have we not yet understood about the sources of their
mistrust?
We can use resistance to show the "sore spots" in
a change situation.
These efforts may well be helpful, but they only reinforce the unexamined premise
that we (or their managers) are not part of the problem.
Anthropologists are good role models for us. If we see organizations as if we were anthropologists, we're better able to observe even
subtle differences between our perceptions and those of our clients. We
appreciate
the importance of understanding clients' values and sources of identification and of
determining where our values are likely to fit, rather than vice versa. We are
less likely to forget that difficulties in a change effort may stem from our own
assumptions about what clients need.
What actually takes place in so-called collaborative
relationships may differ only in degree from the more traditional role interaction of
doctor-patient, marked by feelings of dependency (or counter-dependency) and deference,
accompanied by some degree of discomfort and non-compliance. However,
because collaborative behaviors on the part of the coach are
assumed, we
tend to explain any resistance we encounter on some other basis than resistance to (our)
authority.
Resistance as a System Variable
Lewin's
force-field analysis
is the most commonly used model to illustrate elements of change
and resistance to change:
According to Lewin's model, pressing for change tends to
threaten stability and thus increases the power of forces maintaining the system.
Therefore, the most effective way to bring about change is to
reduce the forces of
resistance. This implies, however, that resistance exists only
on one side of the force field. The energy to restrain movement toward change and
the energy to move toward change are treated conceptually as arising from
different places. This can be seen in the graphic depiction above. As coaches/consultants,
we see ourselves as the "driving forces." Thus theory guides practice when
we interpret resistance to change as emanating only from clients ("restraining
forces").
In contrast, I believe
both change
forces and status quo forces exist within the interaction system. And if a system depicts an interaction, the
forces must also be depicted as interactive:
This theoretical approach would guide us to interpret
resistance to change as
potentially
emanating from both parties to a relationship.
Some behaviors of both in the present state of interaction would be expected to
resist change where stability in similar relationships had been functional and thus
reduced to more habitual levels of learning. Where resistance exists, it cannot be a
property solely of one individual in the system. It
must
have its counterpart in the other person.
