Changing Conversations in Organizations: A Complexity Approach to Change

This book describes a new approach to organisational change guided by complexity perspective which is laid out in the earlier volumes of the series titled “Complexity and emergence in organisations”. Complexity perspective (Stacey, 2001) provides a different way of understanding organisational phenomena in an age of knowledge economy where the effective use of human resources is stressed. Knowledge, which is co‐created and shared by organisational actors, is now acknowledged as the driver of economic growth (Harris, 2001) leading to a new focus on the role of learning, sharing and participating in organisational performance. As stated in the series preface, complexity approach places emphasis on the reflexive nature of humans, the responsive and participative nature of human processes of relating in organisations.

Drawing on her experiences in organisations as a consultant, Shaw contributes to this strand of thinking by questioning the conventional systemic approaches to organisational change which have dominated the previous literature. In this book, she seeks to convey the role of informal conversations in the course of daily organisational life in creating, sharing knowledge and yet co‐created, open‐ended, never complete activity of jointly constructing the future (p. 70). Flowing from this idea of change as an ongoing dynamic process, this book, in her own terms, is about “the way we humans organise ourselves conversationally” (p. 10). The founding assumption of the book is that the activity of conversation itself is the key process through which forms of organising are dynamically sustained and changed. Throughout the book, she suggests a number of ways, which are directed at practitioners i.e. consultants, managers and leaders, to understand the transformative nature of conversing in organisations.

The book consists of seven chapters. In the first chapter, Shaw locates her work within the aforementioned complexity approach to change, drawing attention to the self‐organising patterning of communicative action in complex responsive processes of human relating (see Stacey, 2001). She sets out her aim of “describing and illustrating conversation as a process of communicative action which has the intrinsic capacity to pattern itself” (p. 11). Building on this idea of conversational or dialogical practices that people use to co‐ordinate everyday activities, Shaw highlights the importance of a different way of thinking about any kind of organisational practice that focuses on change. She notes that:

The main focus of this book is practice, in other words, the way we make meaning of the activities of any of us who may be explicitly charged with “leading change”, “managing change”, “planning change” or “facilitating change”. This book is not about systematic change methodologies based on abstract models of organisation, rather it explores how we might make sense of our experiences of working with continuity and change day to day (p. 11).

In chapters 2 to 5, she takes up different aspects of the themes of complexity and emergence through stories or “practice narratives”, as she puts them, which show the kind of sense‐making at work, as she works and reflects on her experiences of organisational change. Guided by social constructionist approach to studying organisational phenomena, she describes her position as being reflexive in the sense that she attempts to reflect on how she is thinking about what is going on and how this thinking is informed by her background. She defines her role as the author of this book as assisting the readers in forming their own understandings by shifting their attention to particular aspects of their experience in organisations.

The second chapter deals with more informal processes of gathering, talking and dispersing at business meetings, workshops or conferences. She views these processes as emerging constantly in the conduct of everyday organisational life. This discussion is achieved through the stories of two organisations where she was invited as a consultant. In line with her concern on reflexive thinking and writing, she applies an interestingly different method of analysing the stories: she interviews herself and takes us through a number of issues emerging from the stories. The attention is drawn to the spontaneous nature of work in the organisations by using a metaphor of “drama”:

I am suggesting that we could approach the work of organisational change as improvisational ensemble work of a narrative, conversational nature, a serious form of play or drama with an evolving number of scenes and episodes in which we all create our parts with one another. This does not mean that business models, tools and plans are not valuable, but my focus is more on how we devise them and make use of them as important props in the drama (p. 28).

Building on the second narrative of the second chapter, she elaborates on the transformative nature of conversations in the third chapter. Shaw resonates with Shotter's (1993) rhetorical‐responsive form of social constructionism, where he is mainly concerned with – as argued in another publication (Shotter and Cunliffe, 2003) – the creation of meanings in the spontaneously co‐ordinated interplay of people's responsive relations to each other (p. 17). Similar to Shotter's writing, Shaw attempts to write as a participant sense‐maker or participant‐inquirer from within the movement of the social sense‐making process in this chapter. She views this as a movement into paradoxical known‐unknown. She explains this by focusing on our past experiences informing our future and give it meaning and thereby the future being shaped by the sense‐making of the past:

… social process of learning our way forward is paradoxical because the past (our personally experienced histories of social relating) helps us to recognise the future and give it meaning, yet the future is also changing the meaning of the very past with which we can recognise the future (p. 46).

She notes that through this aforementioned series they have coined the term “living present” to describe a lived‐in experience of presentness, to stimulate the understanding of the transformational qualities of conversation as communicative action in the living present: transformational of personal and social realities.

The politics of the personal and social transformation is taken up in the fourth chapter. She draws attention to the socially‐constructed nature of relating as mutual constraining embedded in webs of power relations. Underpinning the book is the notion that we are always in a process of becoming in our lives and these processes of becoming and yet change occur in a relational context. We are engaged in daily interactions with others in forming and being formed by the evolving situations which we experience as the sensible interweaving of our actions with one another. She takes this discussion forward by arguing that all relating can be understood as power relating.

To sustain a relation to another person is to actively engage in a jointly‐created process of mutual constraint that affords each of us opportunities while at the same time limiting us (p. 73).

Being informed, in large part, by the social constructionist view that social reality is socially constructed and that social interaction is an essential part of this process which unfolds culturally and historically (Berger and Luckmann, 1966), the power figurations that Shaw describes are historical, social, local communicative processes in which our activities simultaneously perpetuate and potentially transform the patterns which sustain and evolve our joint capacities to act in some ways rather than others. Therefore, the notion of organisational change as an emerging, social and political practice is informed by this perception of our participation as inevitable and inescapable political processes. She tells stories of her experiences of this kind of processes at work and one conclusion she draws is the view of the everydayness that is occurring all the time in very ordinary, everyday ways. Another conclusion can be her claim that:

…to be apolitical in human affairs makes as little sense as to claim to be able to take up a position outside interaction (p. 95).

She sees the process of organisational change as the people's efforts to have made a difference to the interpretation of situations and the evolution of meaning in the ordinary relating of everyday life in organisations.

Defining the word “practice” as “a knowingful doing”, she takes it to mean “an accepted knowingful doing” to describe professional practice in organisations. Focusing the collective qualities of such practice, she describes organisational change as ensemble improvisation in the fifth chapter. Through these professionalised ways of working which is sustained and evolves in the interaction of a shifting community of people, a core of repetitively sustained, habitual ways of relating, recounting and accounting are kept alive between the members of the community. A systematic practice discourse of word and deed emerges in the conduct of ongoing practice. Influenced by the linguistic turn in organisation and management studies which has been prompted largely by the increasing influence of social constructionist ideas about reality, knowledge, language and communication as argued by Holman and Thorpe (2003), she places emphasis on the value of such professional discourses that enable organisational actors to argue retrospectively about what has happened and why, and to argue prospectively for what we should do for other things to happen and why. Stimulated by two experiences, which include one occasion at the seminars of the theory and practice of organisational change where she was invited to work with members of a network of Swedish managers, management educators, and consultants, and the other experience an international storytelling festival, she illustrates how our sense‐making evolves as we continue to talk together. She describes it as the movement of meaning as it is constructed among a group of people relating to each other. Her argument does not imply a unified single thread of meaning that emerges for all who participate but shows how conversations develop haphazardly as different contributions elicit further responses and how these responses allow the members of a group to develop enough confidence to improvise the next step in organisations. This is in tune with Shotter and Cunliffe (2003) who suggest that practical meanings occur between members of a community spontaneously in the living responses to each other and these responses, in Shaw's understanding, give rise to creative becoming in organisations. Putting the activity of conversing at the centre of this creative becoming, she argues that such local communication between practitioners i.e. managers and consultants with diverse experiences takes place in specific action contexts and mutual recognition and differentiation occur creatively in the interaction of conversing, working together, evolving existing practices and spawning new ones (p. 117). It is this process that brings about innovative evolution of organisational practices.

Moving the discussion of “practice” forward in Chapter 6, she illustrates the artificial divide between “theory” and “practice”. Her argument is centred on the notion of sense‐making as Weick (1995) puts it. She suggests that theory is meant to map onto “practice” but map is not the territory. Provided we make sense in terms of our experiences and the experience is a continuous flow of rather unknowable kind, could we theorise differently so that we do not create gaps to be bridged by thinking in the flow of experience itself? Thus, this view suggests that we are not making sense of experience; rather sense‐making is part of the movement of our experiencing. As an organisational consultant, her “flow of experience” includes speaking, imagining, remembering, moving, feeling, designing, persuading, making connections, using tools, developing strategies, analysing situations, forming narratives, taking action in relation to others. The patterning of this experience is a part of the process of relating to one another and to aspects of the world we actively recognize. Through this communicative patterning, continuity and change are emerging simultaneously because the relating is always the relating of difference, of bodies with different histories of relating (p. 120). She builds her discussion in Chapters 7 and 8 on the nature and implications of that difference when working with organisational continuity and change. She comes up with some policy implications for the organisational practitioners. The policy implications, which seem to be of a particular value in the current age of knowledge economy, include the following: involving diverse and sometimes large numbers of people in intensive, “whole system” events around initiatives of concern to all involved, moving towards a practice of managing organisations as living systems, educating people in the art of dialogue and designing the social infrastructure to identify and nurture communities of practice. Taking further these themes of “getting the whole system in the room”, “organisations as living systems” and “the art of dialogue” in the last chapter she discusses what seems very similar in the kind of concerns and issues that practitioners advocating these approaches take up. At the same time, she draws a particular attention to how these practitioners account for or explain what they are doing in different ways.

In her concluding coda, she takes us through the underlying ideas of the book: the movement of sense‐making as an inevitable conflictual move emerging in webs of interconnected relating, the patterning of interaction, the strategic work as the living craft of participating and the notion of organisational practitioners as fellow improvisers in ensemble work, constantly constructing the future and our past in the daily activities as we join conversations. By describing her own work in terms of a different account of process consultation, she encourages anyone wanting to think about their participation in organisational life to draw some lessons from her story.

This is an interesting book that contributes to our understanding of change in organisations. A particular strength is its questioning and challenging engagement with simplified typologies that characterise much of the literature on organisational change. My reading of her book is that she suggests we should focus on the situational, historical and political qualities of conversational processes of human organising in exploring change. I believe that her work relates to the emerging stream of what is called narrative knowledge in organisational theory (Czarniawska, 1998, 1999; O'Connor, 2000; Watson, 1997, 2001a, b, 2002), though she does not have any references to that particular literature. Shaw's book highlights the need for more work in this important area. Such works searching for ways to develop effective communication between organisational practitioners, consultants and academics would have much to offer both to industry and to academia and would be a welcome addition to the literature.