Obscured by Clouds

The force that drives human behaviour and progress is imagination. Rationality tests and validates.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Edgar Degas

I find the truth, or maybe it’s reality, of what we want to see is often obscured by clouds. We catch frustrating glimpses and partial views of truth, reality and meaning of the world around us. We create meaning by filling in the gaps with our imagination. We don’t, as is often portrayed, progress through rational thought alone. The force that drives human behaviour and progress is imagination. Rationality tests and validates.  

In theory, I work with others to ‘change’ organisations. I bounce between finding it a perplexing line of work and an absorbing way to spend my time. Questions of cause and effect frequently plague me.

I’m not convinced by the dominant change management theories and ideologies that seem to be embedded in surface-level rationality and the science of management. Yet, an education in the rational techniques of science leads me to fret about cause-and-effect issues. If I was a poet working in change management, would I have the same doubts? Would I be as concerned?

The main problem is that the ideology, tools and techniques offered to inform those engaged in this line of work differ from my organisational change experience.  

Leading and managing change is messy, annoying, frustrating and surprising. It advances on unpredictable paths and quite often retreats into a repackaged sameness that looks different on the surface but not underneath it.

In practice, engaging with organisational change throws up more philosophical questions than technical ones. To address these questions, I rely more on history, philosophy, science and literature than on the collected works of management and leadership ‘gurus’. I have found that the reality of organisational change is always a function of knowing where you are standing while observing it. It is about scale and position.  

At one level, individual behaviour is the key. Organisations change (or don’t change) because of the social web of relationships, interaction and feedback in which the unit of currency is individual behaviour. People provide the energy and momentum for change. People are the equivalent of the electricity that gives life to Frankenstein’s Monster of our organisations.  

But, at another level and in different positions, organisations can only be understood globally and intuitively. There is a need to see past the confusion and complexity of the individual parts and take in the whole. It is not the electricity that interacts with the world; it is not the electricity that confronts the issues of identity, belonging and relationship; and it is not the electricity that must guide the whole through the moral uncertainties of life. It is the magic of how the whole acts together. 

To interact with the reality (and truth) of organisational change, we need the imagination to see beyond the parts—to see the surface but also to grasp the global.

We need a mindset for organisational change that shows us the continuity that arises from regular patterns of human behaviour. (Here, the organisation's history is an important observation deck from which we can see how to lead change.) But we also need the capability to make the leaps that come with imagination. It is imagination that helps us to see the gaps in the whole.  

Engaging with continuity and gaps, the regular and irregular, and the local and global, through imagination has been most important in seeing how change flows. The clouds will always obscure our vision. Assuming the clouds are away doesn’t work. They always reappear. 

We live in a time when organisational change should be front of mind for leaders at all levels. And the changes underway now will likely affect how we work and organise profoundly. Unfortunately, our professional education, our tightly bound work structures, and our own experience of work seem to have chained us into an ever-lasting present that does not provide much room for imagination.  

We continue to see and speak about work and organisation as objects that have permanence through time. As with Degas’ view of Art, maybe we should see organisations as constantly shifting, changing and adapting capabilities. If we did, our focus might be better on the value we would like others to see from our collective efforts.