‘Continuing to do what we are currently doing but doing it harder or smarter is not likely to produce very different outcomes. Real change starts with recognizing that we are part of the systems we seek to change. The fear and distrust we seek to remedy also exist within us – as do the anger, sorrow, doubt, and frustration. Our actions will not become more effective until we shift the nature of the awareness and thinking behind the actions.’
— Senge, Hamilton and Kania
Systems change is inherently an “inner” and “outer” process or journey. This work involves deep shifts in mental models, relationships, and taken-for-granted ways of operating as much as it involves shifts in organisational roles and formal structures, metrics and performance management, and goals and policies. Because of this, we believe that the development of self is foundational.
This inner work – which involves developing awareness, compassion, understanding, and wisdom – is part of what you have been working on in the early parts of the programme when you reflected on your Personal Leadership Compass, Transactional Analysis, Strengths and the interview with your line manager. This section of the toolbox extends that thinking to how to create the conditions for successful systems change.
Inner Change Journey
William Bridges spent his life helping people and organisations to ‘transition’ through change. The fundamentals of his thinking are laid out below.
Change is the external event or situation that takes place: a new business strategy, a turn of leadership, a merger or a new product. The organisation focuses on the desired outcome that the change will produce, which is generally in response to external events. Change can happen very quickly.
Transition is the inner psychological process that people go through as they internalise and come to terms with the new situation that the change brings about. Empathetic leaders recognise that change can put people in crisis. The starting point for dealing with transition is not the outcome but the endings that people have in leaving the old situation behind.
Change will only be successful if leaders and organisations address the transition that people experience during change. Supporting people through transition, rather than pushing forward, is essential if the change is to work as planned. This is key to capitalising on opportunities for innovation and creating organisational resilience.
From a systems perspective, it makes sense that the system is also transitioning. Endings may be traditional and conventional processes being changed, hierarchies being flattened, and budgets being reduced. Beginnings may be new ways of working, more enabling structures and a complete rethinking of how we do things around here.
Personal Transitions Reflective Practice
Download and print the image of Change Transitions.
You should do this with your Thinking Partner. You will need about 90 minutes per person. This does not need to be at the same time.
Resource: Change Transitions
A Systems Focus: Theory U
Theory U is change philosophy and process co-created by Otto Scharmer and his colleagues at the Presencing Institute https://www.presencing.org and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Building upon two decades of action research at MIT, the process shows how individuals, teams, organisations and large systems can build the essential leadership capacities needed to address the root causes of today’s social, environmental, and spiritual challenges. It differs from most change methodologies because it does not predetermine the endpoint.
It uses a human-centred approach to letting go of ego and embracing eco. This just means making it about the whole system and not just about you or your part of the system. This way of engaging with change considers disconnects and blind spots across the system as well as mining potential and opportunity.
Everything we have learnt with Covid 19 is reinforcing just how critical this kind of approach is and what can happen when we forget about the wider, bigger impact.
The journey through the U requires leadership from everyone. Not just hierarchical leaders, everyone acting as a leader for the whole system.
This requires specific leadership behaviours, which Otto describes as 7 Leadership Capacities:
- Holding the Space of Listening: to self and to others, suspending judgment and the call to action
- Observing: looking with fresh eyes
- Sensing: seeing the system from the edges by seeking out the views and experiences you don’t have
- Presencing: connecting deeply to self and the system
- Crystallising: creating shared purpose, energy and intention
- Prototyping: manifesting all of the thinking, emotion and ideas visibly, testing change
- Co-evolving: a roadmap to scaling change and embedding new thinking and behaving
Reflective Practice
- Planning a different and more integrated approach to change
- Challenging everyone to be engaged in conversations about letting go and letting come
- Using as a framework for leadership conversations
Resource: Seeing Systems
Helpful additional information
Watch a simple animated introduction to Theory U.