8. Change management

The change management practice

The heart of change management is people committed to leading or catalysing change.

Most of the tools we use can be used for other purposes. But they can be used in helping organisations to change their urban water management.

Using these tools to facilitate change is a matter of keeping your eye on whether helpful change is occurring, and shifting how you work, as needed, so that the situations you are working in continue to carry forward.

Adapting how you work to keep things moving is not a matter of following recipes. Its a matter of sensitivity ... Recipes - explict tools - are important: they are guides and can be used as rules of thumb. But a pragmatic approach - being focused on learning what helps in your actual situations - is fundamental. In skillful practice we shift from one set of tools to another, combine tools in different ways, and adapt how we use each tool, to suit each particular case.

The 'feedback' side of pragmatic practice is harder to describe than the tools. A helpful way to look at it is as a matter of listening:

listening acutely to the people you are working with, so that you take in what they warm to and what they find off-putting, and, (to what we might describe as)
'listening to yourself': listening to your intuitions, inklings, leanings, uneases, so that you make the most of your ability to 'feel' or 'read' or 'sense' what is going on in a situation.

When its useful
More about the practice
Why it makes sense
Further information

When its useful

A change management approach makes sense when:

we want our organisation to take a different approach, and
we are prepared to take responsibility (in some measure) for bringing about the change.

More about the practice

A pragmatic definition

Any effort to catalyse change could be counted as 'change management' ... The differentiating factors are:

Do we happen to call what we are doing 'change management' or not? We may well not use this language and yet still be working intentionally to catalyse change.
Whether we track what is occurring in our organisation, and re-engage when further input is needed to keep things moving. (If we don't do this we're not 'managing'. On the other hand, the measure of whether we are 'managing' is certainly not whether we are 'in control': in this context managing is 'influencing'.)
Whether what we do is a good fit to the needs of our situation. It may be that an informal, low key influencing approach is all that's needed or all that's possible. On the other hand, an engaged internal advocacy may be both possible and needed. If we ask what our options are, and choose an influencing option that is a good fit to our current situation, then we are acting as 'change managers'.

Change processes are usually not linear, and often not cyclic, notwithstanding the usual ways in which procedures and management systems are presented. Change management is necessarily exploratory and adaptive. We work from a rich repertoire of practices, exploring what fits our particular situation. Change management is more of a craft or an art than a science.

Entrepreneurial approaches to management

A more entrepreneurial approach to management sits well with a commitment to change management. Classically bureaucratic and classically entrepreneurial approaches can be contrasted by the questions which drive a managers' thinking: do we shape our action from what our resources and our current organisational structure enable?, or, from what the opportunities are what ways of capitalising on them we can conceive?

Because the ecological unsustainability of ordinary socio-economic life is so profound, we have a great need for entrepreneurial management in the ecologically influential areas of the public sector.

Alternative orderings of strategic questions

Bureaucratic	Entrepreneurial
What resources do I control?	Where is the opportunity?
What structure defines our options?	How do I capitalise on it?
How can I minimise the impact of	What resources do I need?
others on my performance?	How do I gain control over them?
What opportunity is appropriate?	What structure is best?

Source: Stevenson, HH and Gumpert, DE (1985). The Heart of Entrepreneurship, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 63, No. 2, pp. 85-94

Toolkits

The People's Network Change Management Toolkit
"The process of managing change is concerned with how people can be encouraged and empowered to work in new ways; what support strategies are needed to help overcome resistance to change; methods of consultation; the roles of managers at different points in the change process; and the influence of organisational climate, structures, and ways of working on how well change is managed."

Catalysing change in natural resource management: nrm-changelinks.net (Lincoln University, NZ)
"Links for developing change in Natural Resource Management"

Changemakers.net: "open sourcing social solutions"

online journal
online library
multimedia presentations

ChangingMinds.org: principles and techniques for influencing people
A directory of approaches to influencing people.

Why it makes sense

If change occurred primarily in a logically patterned way, a 'change management' practice would not be needed. We would simply decide how an institution or a community should change, and change (or direct others to change).

In practice, change in organisations and communities is relatively decentered: no one person is ‘in control’ in the strict sense, notwithstanding what organisational diagrams suggest. Each person in an organisation makes decisions about how they should do their job, and in many circumstances (e.g. professional work generally, and professional work in multi-disciplinary teams particularly), the 'checking and correction' that occurs leaves considerable freedom of movement to the employee.

This 'freedom of movement' plays a particularly large role in environmental management, and specifically in urban water management. Environmental outcomes are commonly only one amongst many kinds of outcomes that professionals with a large influence on ecological dynamics are accountable for. Land use planners and engineers, for example, are responsive to many socio-economic drivers, to various financial accountabilities, and to political agendas. Within this context, it is quite common for an organisation's 'checking and correction' processes to control ecological outcomes quite weakly.

Because decision-making is quite decentered in practice - much more decentered than much traditional organisational theory suggests - when we wish to catalyse improvements in an organisation's environmental management, we need to work with people at all levels to help them understand the need for change, to help them learn how to change, and we need to build and support networks that reinforce commitments to better environmental management.

Developing a change management practice makes sense when we wish to improve environmental outcomes.

Further information