Defensive Organising

When you care about Business School External Engagement you have to care about LinkedIn.  After the painful takeover of Twitter, the ruthless replacement of a cute, blue bird by the authoritarian and despotic letter ‘X’, LinkedIn seems to have massively upped its game, where I now actually enjoy interacting with it and I’m not just using it to post our activities ‘outwards’ to the world. I’m getting a lot from following some great leadership thinkers who share ideas and papers that are really interesting and useful.

Like any social media channel, there are inevitably irritating things about it, one of the most annoying aspects is when people post things that I fundamentally disagree with.  😁

One such trigger is when people declare an improvement methodology “to be dead”.

Yawn!

As someone who has devoted time to understanding multiple improvement methodologies, how these evolve over time, interact, complement and contradict each other, it feels far too simplistic and well “click baity” to proclaim that a methodology is ‘over’.  To declare a methodology as such, and this phenomenon happens to them all at some point or another, fails to give credence to how, even if one methodology becomes ‘less popular’, it still would have had a profound influence on the next methodology that supersedes it.

Recently, I saw a post of an (AI generated) picture of two tombstones with “Change Management 1991-2024” written on one and “Agile 2001-2024” written on the other.

“LE SIGH!” I despaired.

The post went on to list all of the reasons why Agile doesn’t work, I went through each point, largely sympathised, but then reflected…

“Poor Agile…. It thought it was going to deliver everything that Lean couldn’t (aside: it’s completely built from a lean approach but hey ho!), but now it seems like it’s Agile’s turn to be derided and reviled”.  A thought tinged with a tiny amount of schadenfreudian glee born from the residual hurt of many conversations that I’ve had where people happily declare to me that:

Them: “Oh we don’t do lean anymore, it didn’t work, agile is proving to be much more relevant for us”.

Me: *Deep breath* followed by *raised eyebrow of intense scepticism*

But I then thought some more – if Agile is getting it in the neck now, when do we reach the conclusion that it’s not all of these, very well meaning and completely grounded in common sense, inanimate methodologies fault that they “don’t work”.

What if something more human is at play?

Well recently I was introduced to a concept which has made me better appreciate what the implementation of things like lean and agile are up against.

Someone I rate highly and follow intensively on LinkedIN, Gianpiero Petriglieri an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, shared a paper he and colleagues have recently published in the Academy of Management which discusses the concept of “Defensive Organising”.

From his LinkedIn post:

“‘Defensive organizing’ is what we called the process of organizing to diffuse, deflect, and displace anxiety and bolster the status quo.”

Declan Fitzsimons, Jennifer Louise Petriglieri and Gianpiero Petriglieri’s paper “The Fury Beneath the Morphing: A Theory of Defensive Organizing”  is a very powerful read. I’m afraid that you’ll need to pay to download it unless you have access to an amazing library service such our Cardiff University one, but in a nutshell, it describes a case of a consultancy firm that is losing market share that the team studied in intense ethnographic detail for 42 months, and how the leadership team dealt with that crisis.

They theorise that the anxiety that the leaders experience in such times unconsciously triggers some counterproductive behaviours and actions.  They describe how the leadership team moved through a series of collaborative activities to help them counteract their anxiety, all of which were ultimately about protecting their power by orchestrating the expansion of it.

Individuals were blamed, teams disbanded, regardless of their actual culpability in the organisation’s distress, and energy consuming restructuring was then embarked upon, for little material benefit.  In fact, on closer inspection, not much ever really changed. Thus, they continued to lose market share.  Shareholders divested and the consultancy was sold. The whole paper makes for a very disconcerting read, but one that, weirdly, gave me a lot of hope.

Recognising that this type of orchestration might happen will help an improvement agent to better prepare for the, hugely rooted in psychology, activity that is change. Call me naïve, but I genuinely had never considered that this type of ‘defensive organising’ might happen before?!  The discovery of it as an observable and identifiable ‘thing’ feels huge to me and I want to play my part in popularising the term.

I know the “Top Ten Reasons for Lean Failure” of John Lucey, Nicola Bateman and Peter Hines like the back of my hand, I’ve respected them and diligently worked to counteract them, adding my own element of ‘dedicate time to improvement’ as I share them with teams. But yet tackling everything on that list is still not enough.

When you are conducting improvement, you aren’t attempting change within a static environment, ever.  You’re often trying to create change upon shifting sands, immensely political and powerful ones at that, so as a change agent, you really do need to keep your wits about you.

Success in organisational change depends largely on your ability to build meaningful relationships with key stakeholders. The bigger the organisation, the more of these there are.  When you’ve worked out who the key stakeholders are, you need to know what drives them and have an appreciation of what they might be prepared to do and how far they are prepared to go.  You need to preempt their moves at every turn, and critically, I’d advise, be on full ‘defensive organising’ alert.