When you care about Business School External Engagement you have to care about LinkedIn.\u00a0 After the painful takeover of Twitter, the ruthless replacement of a cute, blue bird by the authoritarian and despotic letter \u2018X\u2019, LinkedIn seems to have massively upped its game, where I now actually enjoy interacting with it and I\u2019m not just using it to post our activities \u2018outwards\u2019 to the world. I\u2019m getting a lot from following some great leadership thinkers who share ideas and papers that are really interesting and useful.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0\ud83d\ude01<\/p>\n
One such trigger is when people declare an improvement methodology \u201cto be dead\u201d.<\/p>\n
Yawn!<\/p>\n
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 \u201cclick baity\u201d to proclaim that a methodology is \u2018over\u2019.\u00a0 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 \u2018less popular\u2019, it still would have had a profound influence on the next methodology that supersedes it.<\/p>\n
Recently, I saw a post of an (AI generated) picture of two tombstones with \u201cChange Management 1991-2024\u201d written on one and \u201cAgile 2001-2024\u201d written on the other.<\/p>\n
\u201cLE SIGH!\u201d I despaired.<\/p>\n
The post went on to list all of the reasons why Agile doesn\u2019t work, I went through each point, largely sympathised, but then reflected\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cPoor Agile\u2026. It thought it was going to deliver everything that Lean couldn\u2019t (aside: it\u2019s completely built from a lean approach but hey ho!), but now it seems like it\u2019s Agile\u2019s turn to be derided and reviled\u201d.\u00a0 A thought tinged with a tiny amount of schadenfreudian glee born from the residual hurt of many conversations that I\u2019ve had where people happily declare to me that:<\/p>\n
Them: \u201cOh we don\u2019t do lean anymore, it didn\u2019t work, agile is proving to be much more relevant for us\u201d.<\/p>\n
Me: *Deep breath* followed by *raised eyebrow of intense scepticism*<\/p>\n
But I then thought some more – if Agile is getting it in the neck now, when do we reach the conclusion that it\u2019s not all of these, very well meaning and completely grounded in common sense, inanimate methodologies fault that they \u201cdon\u2019t work\u201d.<\/p>\n
What if something more human is at play?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Someone I rate highly and follow intensively on LinkedIN, Gianpiero Petriglieri<\/a> 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 \u201cDefensive Organising\u201d.<\/p>\n From his LinkedIn post<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Defensive organizing’ is what we called the process of organizing to diffuse, deflect, and displace anxiety and bolster the status quo.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Declan Fitzsimons<\/a>, Jennifer Louise Petriglieri\u00a0<\/a>and Gianpiero Petriglieri\u2019s paper \u201cThe Fury Beneath the Morphing: A Theory of Defensive Organizing\u201d <\/a>\u00a0is a very powerful read. I\u2019m afraid that you\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n They theorise that the anxiety that the leaders experience in such times unconsciously triggers some counterproductive behaviours and actions.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Individuals were blamed, teams disbanded, regardless of their actual culpability in the organisation\u2019s distress, and energy consuming restructuring was then embarked upon, for little material benefit.\u00a0 In fact, on closer inspection, not much ever really changed. Thus, they continued to lose market share.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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 na\u00efve, but I genuinely had never considered that this type of \u2018defensive organising\u2019 might happen before?!\u00a0 The discovery of it as an observable and identifiable \u2018thing\u2019 feels huge to me and I want to play my part in popularising the term.<\/p>\n