Managing Change in Research Organizations

Summary

Pressure for organizational change tends to be the result of pressures exerted from outside the organization, inside the organization, or both. Responding to these pressures in a planned and participatory way that encourages organizational learning can help organizations under pressure to change, to become more successful and sustainable. Change initiatives can have relatively limited or more radical goals depending upon a diagnosis of an organization’s “health” within its operational context. Successful efforts to manage change require consistent leadership and support from senior managers. They must provide a clear vision, ensure that it is widely shared, build their staff’s capacity for change and nurture their willingness to take action. A framework based on four frequently-asked questions can help managers make sense of and select appropriately from the array of approaches and tools offered to manage change. A number of simple, practical steps that managers can take to approach and manage the change process are summarized in the final section.

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to help researchers and research managers to appreciate the nature and scope of the field of change management, to become familiar with a way of approaching change management to better understand the many approaches and tools that exist and to provide practical illustrations of and advice for managing change.
The chapter is of interest to all those researchers and research managers committed to enhancing the sustainability of their organizations by making them more effective, resource efficient, and responsive to their clients’ and partners’ needs.
Managing change in agricultural research organizations means acting to improve their performance so that they can more effectively accomplish their mission.

A Brief Overview of Change Management

It is useful at the outset to get a broad idea of what change management means.

Definition and origins of change management
Change management involves taking a systematic approach to moving individuals, teams, projects, programs, and the organization as a whole from a current less-than-ideal state to a future, more desirable state. Those responsible for change management intentionally undertake activities within the organization, usually as a result of a diagnosis to determine what is currently preventing it from performing better.
The practice and theory of change management come from diverse sources including organizational behaviour, industrial psychology, systems engineering, and sociology as well as project and human resource management.

Organizational change can be more or less radical

Organizational change (Box 1) can be developmental, transitional or transformational (Anderson and Anderson, 2001).

Box 1 Three types of organizational change

Developmental change tries to “grow” the organization by focusing on the improvement of one process or a group of capacities at any given time. Many organizations, for example, have built their capacities to engage in teamwork, to undertake rigorous priority planning for their research programs, or to monitor and then evaluate their progress and achievements. The principal example used in this Chapter (Box 2) is one of developmental change. This is the most common kind of change that organizations engage in. While no change process can really be said to be “easy” perhaps developmental change is the most amenable to planning.

Based on Horton et al., 2000

Transitional change is more radical than developmental change. It sets out to “transform” the organization from a state of poor performance into one where the organization performs well by being more effective, more efficient, more relevant to its clients and/or more financially secure.
Transitional change is usually portrayed as a three-stage process: (1) unfreezing, (2) moving, and (3) re-freezing (Lewin, 1951 referred to in Iles and Sutherland, 2001). The current organizational mindset, procedures and practices are “un-frozen”. This unfreezing permits managers and staff to abandon in a very conscious manner the less than optimal way in which the organization undertakes its business. They then “move” towards a new way of acting and working that is more appropriate to accomplish success as its operating environment and partners alter. The changes pursued -- in values, vision, strategy and procedures -- are those that they have determined will lead the organization to improved performance. Once the process of moving from old to new reaches a certain comfort level, the organization “re-freezes” and accommodates itself into the new, more effective state (Box 3).
 

Transformational change is the most radical form of organizational change. It is often intended to alter the identity of an organization in fundamental ways. Transformational change may become necessary if the organization has for long neglected to adapt to its operating environment. Transformational change may represent an urgent response to a diagnosis that suggests an organization is severely dysfunctional in its current form (Box 4). It may even be imposed from outside if the internal will for positive change is undemonstrated.

Factors in successful change management

Successful change management depends upon four key factors: (i) pressure for change; (ii) a shared vision of how the organization will benefit from the change; (iii) resources to undertake the change; and (iv) decisive and continuous participatory action to drive the change.

1. The organization acknowledges pressure for change. Pressure comes both from outside and from within the organization. Outside forces may include pressure from governments, donors, clients, or a new regulatory regime. Pressure may also come from within, from the scientists and support staff themselves. Whatever the source of the pressure, senior management must understand the reasons for and be committed to change and must effectively communicate the need for change, and their commitment to it, to all those involved.

2. The organization shares a clear, common vision. A shared vision ensures that the entire organization is moving towards the same goals for the same reasons.

3. The organization has the resources to undertake change. The organizational change effort must be provided with the resources that it requires – leadership, information, time, open communication channels, and finance.

4. The organization is committed to action leading to change. Change is about acting within an iterative cycle of planning, doing, reviewing, and proceeding.

A Practical Framework for Undertaking Change

Unfortunately, managing change successfully is not just a matter of employing a simple formula or a single comprehensive tool such as total quality management, business process reengineering or organizational development. This section is intended to present in a forthright way a practical solution to the often daunting task that managers must address when faced with making changes within their organizations. This framework helps make sense of some of the wide array of tools and practices that they will inevitably encounter.
The key to this framework lies in posing four closely related and very practical questions. Tools are then selected for their suitability to help obtain answers to each of these questions (Box 6). The change manager then selects the most appropriate tool, given the particular circumstances, to answer each of the four questions.
Although a number or alternative tools may be listed under each question in Box 6, only the highlighted tool is discussed as each question is addressed. These tools have been widely and successfully used in R4D and other organizations. Further reading on the others has been included in the reference list at the end of this chapter.
 

Four organizing questions
The four organizing questions are:
1. How can we really come to grips with the current complexity of and interdependencies within our organization?
2. For what reasons might our organization need to change?
3. Who and what can change in our organization?
4. Once we decide that it is necessary, how can we best help make effective change happen?

Box 5 Practical framework for approaching change management

Based on Iles and Sutherland, 2001

Question 1: How can we better appreciate the current complexity of our organization?

All of the tools in this section will produce information that will help change managers to better understand the complexity of their organization and highlight the interdependence of its various parts. Such understanding is a prerequisite to the task of addressing change.

Organizational self-review (Lusthaus et al., 1999) presents a well-tested, four-part framework and a set of key questions for understanding and assessing how an organization’s performance is a function of factors related to its environment, capacity and motivation (Box 7). This tool is particularly useful for helping managers and staff to acquire and share a more holistic view of their research organization, the role of their program, division, project or function within it, and how the inter-relationships are helping or hindering overall organizational success.

Box 6 A framework for organizational self-review

The Lusthaus et al. model is generic and can be used to understand any type of organization. The Organizational Performance Assessment System for Agricultural Research Organizations known as OPAS (Peterson, Gijsbers and Wilks, 2003) offers a conceptual framework created specifically for organizations engaged in agricultural research.

Use of either of these tools will produce results that lay the organization out as a complete system and highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the various parts of that system. Such an overall picture and diagnosis provides managers and staff with a view of their entire organization. It also provides the basis for posing the second question.
 

Question 2: Why might our organization need to change?

Armed with a picture of the entire organization, its component parts and how well each of these is working for the success of the whole, the change manager and staff are in a better position to agree on why and in what ways the organization needs to change.

A second tool, SWOT analysis (Box 8), helps managers and staff to see their own organization and the environment in which it has to operate at one and the same time. SWOT analysis answers the question “Why does our organization have to change?” It provides both managers and staff with a single, common, a coherent picture of what the organization is currently capable of and how it might be expected to perform in the future if it is to respond to the future needs and desires of its clients and partners that make up its operating environment.

SWOT analysis, also referred to as the TOWS matrix is an acronym for an approach used to focus on the Strengths and Weaknesses of an organization as well as the Opportunities and Threats that face it. The results are used to identify priorities for change.

It is an easy tool for managers to use with staff in a participative way. The organization, or a sub-unit e.g. program or project, writes down its mission statement and purpose. With mission and purpose in mind, managers and staff identify all the strengths that help the unit accomplish its mission and all the weaknesses that are holding it back. Once strengths and weaknesses have been agreed upon, then managers and staff identify all of the opportunities that are present in the circumstances that offer the organization ways to better accomplish its mission. Once the opportunities have been agreed on, the factors that constitute threats to achieving success are identified and ways the organization and its staff might address these threats so as to eliminate, contain or minimize them are considered.

Box 7 SWOT Analysis or the TOWS Matrix

The change manager can decide to conduct the exercise in a different order, i.e. instead of starting with strengths and weaknesses and moving on to opportunities and threats (SWOT), the process can begin with identifying the threats and opportunities that exist in the environment of the organization and then proceed to determining the weaknesses and the strengths of the organization in relation to these (TOWS).

SWOT is basically a problem-finding, followed by a problem-solving approach to planning for change. The result is a better understanding of organizational strengths and a list of contextualized priorities for change.

Question 3: Who and what can change in our organization?

Successful change in an organization can only be accomplished though the cooperation of its people – its managers and staff. Both the people themselves and the processes they engage in have to contribute to improving organizational performance. Structural changes alone are not enough, though they may give the impression of positive action – at least for a time.

To go back to the example of transformational change in Box 2, it is worth noting that ISNAR, in its last half decade, made structural changes to the way it organized itself but people and processes were left largely untouched, unconvinced and uninvolved, so no constructive change actually occurred. Successful change managers know that involving and motivating people as well as improving the processes they engage in are more important than structural change.

Force field analysis (Box 8) is an approach to identifying who and what is helping the organization and who and what are working against it. The result is a clear indication of how people and processes have to change if improvements are to be achieved.

Box 8 Lewin’s tool for analyzing the organization’s “force fields”

Based on Iles and Sutherland, 2001, pp 45-46

Question 4: How can we make effective change happen?

Knowing that changes are needed and what these changes should be is one thing, making them happen is another. There are specific tools that help the manager to implement change successfully. One of the most influential of these is project management with its ways of refining purpose, managing resources and monitoring the time frame. A manual especially designed for agricultural research project management has been prepared by and is available at http://www.fao.org/sd/RTdirect/RTre0026.htm

Caveats

Organizational change is a “system” process

Whatever the kind of organizational change pursued, developmental, transitional, or transformational, change is rarely a simple or orderly process or one that can be entirely controlled. This is because an organization is a system made up of people and the processes they engage in. Although a system is made up of linked component parts, the entire system is greater than its parts. Hence any change, no matter how apparently simple can have unpredictable reverberations within the organization. For example, a developmental change project designed to enhance the practice of planning, monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) within national agricultural research institutes, increased participating researchers’ capacity to obtain and analyze information obtained through monitoring (Horton et al., 2000). This apparently simple developmental change made demands on middle managers to act on that information in ways that directly challenged existing lines of authority and responsibility. Without explicit authority to act on new information, managers found the new PM&E systems were to a large extent ineffectual. Hence changes in managers’ authority to make decisions and take responsibility for the results were also seen to be required.
 

There is a “people reaction” to change

Different perspectives on how people in organizations react to change have important implications for managers (Bennis, Benne, and Chin, 1985).
The empirical-rational perspective claims that people are rational and will follow their self-interest once it has been revealed to them. Change management is based on the communication of information and offering incentives for people to comply.
The normative-re-educative perspective claims that people are social beings and will cling to cultural norms and values. Change management is based on reviewing current norms and values, determining how they should change, and then developing a commitment to new ones.
The power-coercive perspective claims that people are basically compliant and will generally do what they are told or made to do. Change is based on the exercise of authority and the imposition of sanctions.
The environmental-adaptive perspective claims that people resist alteration and loss but they adapt readily to new circumstances. Change is based on building a new organization and gradually transferring people from the old to the new one.
In practice, these perspectives often co-exist (Box 5)

The example shows how, in agricultural research organizations, scientists form influential professional groups. Even if they are not the top managers, scientists represent important opinion-makers and their cooperation and collaboration must be engaged by top management for any change initiative to be successful.

Engaging in change: Twelve points to remember

There is no simple, magic formula for approaching change management but the framework that has been discussed, made up of the four questions and the answers to these, offers a practical approach to undertaking organizational change at different levels.
This chapter ends with a list of twelve practical points, based on McNamara, 2007, that the change manger would do well to constantly bear in mind:
1. Never be tempted to trivialize the complexity of undertaking organizational change.
2. Be prepared to learn more than you already know about change concepts, theories, approaches, and tools.
3. Beware of adopting or encouraging others to adopt overly-optimistic expectations from particular approaches or individual tools. There is no “magic bullet”.
4. Get your feet wet! Change management is not only an intellectual activity it is a practical undertaking. As senior manager, accept the responsibility yourself. Alternatively delegate another, suitable person to lead the initiative while giving that person your constant support. In addition, seek out for volunteers to champion the change process. The skills, enthusiasm and energy of volunteers are key.
5. Make sure that appropriate resources are made available –people with dedicated time and a dedicated budget being the most important.
6. Use a team approach share power. Collaboration and participation achieve better results than authority. Build a team of committed individuals with a range of skills, high energy levels and a willingness to take risks.
7. With the team, develop a clear sense of vision and purpose for the change exercise and a clear understanding of how the changes will better the organization and its people. Create a flat team structure.
8. Engage in rapid feedback loops – plan, act, and obtain feedback in short intervals. This helps to reduce uncertainty by providing continuous information on results. Monitor the progress and success of each change effort.
9. Maintain an open mind about the evolution of the change. Do not lock into a particular change too early.
10. Provide the team with the resources they ask for – they are unlikely to ask for more than is really necessary.
11. Keep everyone informed of what is happening and what progress is being made. Maintain the communications channels as wide open as possible.
12. Remember that organizational change happens through people and so it takes time, learning, patience, and unremitting effort. If you do not get immediate success, keep trying.

Key references and sources of additional information

Anderson, D and, Anderson, L.A. (2001). The Change Leader's Roadmap: How to Navigate Your Organization's Transformation. Wiley, John & Sons
Bennis, W., Benne, K. and Chin, R. 1985. The Planning of Change. New York: International Thompson Publishing.
Horton, D., R. Mackay, A. Andersen, and L. Dupleich. 2000. Evaluating capacity development in planning, monitoring, and evaluation: A case from agricultural research. ISNAR Research Report. No. 17. The Hague: International Service for National Agricultural Research.
Iles V., Sutherland K. (2001). Organisational change: A review for health care managers, professionals and researchers. London: National Coordinating Centre for NHS Service Delivery and Organisation.
Iles, V. and Sutherland, K. Organisational Change: A review of for health care managers, professionals and researchers. London: NCCSDO, 2001.
Lusthaus, C.; Adrien, M-H; Anderson, G; and Carden, F. (1999). Enhancing Organizational Performance: a toolbox for self-assessment. IDRC, Ottawa, Canada.
McNamara, C. 2007. Basic Context for Organizational Change. www.managementhelp.org downloaded 14 August 2008.
W. Peterson, G. Gijsbers, and M. Wilks. 2003. An Organizational Performance Assessment System for Agricultural Research Organizations: Concepts, Methods, and Procedures. ISNAR Research Management. Guidelines No. 7. The Hague: International Service for National Agricultural Research.

References for tools listed in Box 5
Organizational Self-Review see Lusthaus et al. reference above
Wiesbord’s Six-Box Organizational Model http://www.marvinweisbord.com/sixboxmodel.html
OPAS see Peterson et al. reference above
Process Modelling http://www.projectperfect.com.au/info_business_process_modelling_overvie...
SWOT/TOWS
http://www.oie.eku.edu/SPManual/SWOT/steps/
Force Field Analysis
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_06.htm
Sources and Potency of Forces
http://www.healthknowledge.org.uk/Organisation%20and%20Management%20of%2...
Readiness and Capability
http://www.renovacorp.com/blog/index.php/assess-your-readiness-for-organ...
Total Quality Management
http://www.managementhelp.org/quality/tqm/tqm.htm
Business Process Engineering
http://www.managingchange.com/bpr/overview.htm
Project Management
http://www.managementhelp.org/plan_dec/project/project.htm
Organizational Development
http://www.toolpack.com/
Evaluative Inquiry
http://portals.wi.wur.nl/ppme/?Evaluative_Inquiry