In this episode, we’ll discuss a paper from one of the giants of organizational psychology, Edgar Schein. Schein recently passed away at age of 98. His work has influenced not just safety practitioners but also safety academics over the past few years. His approach to organizational leadership intersected with some of the resilience in safety II and safety differently motivated ideas. We first considered discussing his book, Humble Inquiry, (see link in Resources) but instead decided on his 1992 paper, “How can organizations learn faster? The problem of entering the green room”, from the MIT Sloan School of Management. It was delivered as an invited address to the World Economic Forum on February 6th, 1992 in Davos, Switzerland.
You’ll hear a little about Schein’s early career at Harvard and MIT, including his Ph.D. work – a paper on the experience of POWs during wartime contrasted against the indoctrination of individuals joining an organization for employment. Some of Schein’s 30-year-old concepts that are now common practice and theory in organizations, such as “psychological safety”
Discussion Points:
Quotes:
“...a lot of people credit [Schein] with being the granddaddy of organizational culture.” - Drew
“[Schein] says .. in order to learn skills, you've got to be willing to be temporarily incompetent, which is great if you're learning soccer and not so good if you're learning to run a nuclear power plant.” - Drew
“Schein says quite clearly that punishment is very effective in eliminating certain kinds of behavior, but it's also very effective in inducing anxiety when in the presence of the person or the environment that taught you that lesson.” - Drew
“We've said before that we think sometimes in safety, we're about three or four decades behind some of the other fields, and this might be another example of that.” - David
“Though curiosity and innovation are values that are praised in our society, within organizations and particularly large organizations, they're not actually rewarded.” - Drew
Resources:
Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein
The Safety of Work on LinkedIn
David: You're listening to The Safety of Work podcast, episode 105. Today, we're asking the question, how can organizations learn faster? Let's get started.
Hey, everybody, my name is David Provan, and I'm here with Drew Rae. We're from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University. In each episode, we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety, and we examine the evidence surrounding it.
Today's a bit of a special episode. Drew, do you want to introduce what we'll be covering today?
Drew: Sure. At the time you're listening to this episode, this is probably a couple of weeks ago, but on Australia Day this year, Edgar Schein passed away at, I believe, the age of 98.
Schein is one of the giants of organizational psychology who's been quite an influence over a lot of particularly safety practitioners but also safety academics over the past few years as his approach to organizational leadership has started to intersect with some of the resilience in safety and safety differently motivated ideas.
We thought it would be a good opportunity to pick something that Schein has written. David suggested his classic book, Humble Inquiry, at which point I had to admit I haven't actually read all of Humble Inquiry, so we picked one of his papers instead. We'll talk it through.
David: I really liked the paper that you went and found, Drew. That was your penalty or punishment. We'll talk a bit about punishment in this episode, but that was your penalty for not having read the book that I'd read. You had to go and find a good paper.
Drew, before we introduce the paper, it might be nice to just go through a little bit of the career of Edgar Schein and some of the contributions that he made.
Drew: Let's do that. Keep in mind that this is a full career. A lot of people who are early career academics look at the work of giants like Schein, and they think, how could I ever do anything like this? They think they need to set out to write a masterpiece straight off.
Whenever you look at the career of someone like this, you realize just how contingent the opportunities, paths, and topics are. Schein did his Ph.D. at Harvard University and as far as I can tell actually spent the rest of his life in Boston at Harvard and then at Sloan School of Management at MIT.
But his Ph.D. was actually on prisoners of war. He was studying American service people and civilians who were held in Chinese concentration camps during the Korean War. He was looking at the effects of the Chinese-attempted brainwashing. He published lots of different papers about the experiences of these prisoners and then moved from talking about people captured within concentration camps to people experiencing coercive behavior in large organizations. This wasn't an accidental shift. He very explicitly made the link.
David, do you mind if I go into a quote I found from one of his early working papers? He says, “From the point of view of the political prisoner, the dilemma is to resist the all-powerful and alien forces of his capture. From the point of view of the captor, however, the dilemma is how to root out and convert alien elements in his society. That is, after they took over, the Chinese Communists found themselves in the position of having to mold new political beliefs in a large segment of their society and to eliminate all forces which undermined any such effort.”
Later on, he goes, “If we maintain the perspective of the organization or society, we see that the need to convert members to a new ideology and to root out resistance or sabotage is a problem which many organizations face including industrial organizations.”
“You're particularly recruiting new members coming in. They need to be taught the organizational goals, values, and preferred ways of dealing with problems,” he goes on. He's made this very explicit link from a prisoner of war in a concentration camp being converted to the new ideology to a person coming into an organization who also needs to be converted.
He was concerned about questions like what's okay for an organization to try to influence. Obviously, it's okay to try to get people to follow organizational procedures, but how about other beliefs around trade unions, how the market works, or what a good company looks like?
From asking those questions, Schein got more and more interested in organizational leadership and particularly how managers are educated and developed. A continuing strain through all of this was the idea that organizations demand subordination, demand loyalty, and look for what he called ideological alignment. I think more positively, people call it things like cultural fit. He said that this directly stifles the personal growth of a leader. Trying to get someone to fit in is the exact opposite of trying to get someone to grow as an individual and as a change-maker.
All of this eventually led into always the foundation of the field of organizational psychology growing out of social psychology, and a lot of people credit him with being the granddaddy of organizational culture. Probably his best-known book is just called Organizational Psychology, and it was eventually renamed Organizational Culture and Leadership.
In safety, I think he's probably best known for his much more recent work which is a lot more personal and a lot more his ideas, whereas the textbook was very much trying to capture the entire field. That's his book, Humble Inquiry.
I was actually talking this morning to Rosa Carrillo who is a long, long time [...] of Edgar Schein. The first adjective she picked to talk about him was humble. This approach that he's espousing is something that he's sought to do himself throughout his work, just someone with a deep, deep personal curiosity. Even though he's a management consultant and a business development best-selling author, his commitment to academic rigor and to thinking about methods and the limitation of those methods as well as all of these big, famous books and papers he's published lots of just talk about how he does his research and consulting. He's deeply reflective about his personal approach to these things.
That's a bit about Edgar Schein. David, obviously, you've read Humble Inquiry. I think it's probably influenced some of your own thinking. Do you want to talk about it?
David: Yeah. And his work on organizational culture and leadership. I think there has been a strong intersection into safety not just in the more (what we call) new-view ideas but also through safety culture over the last two decades. He took quite an active interest in the safety field, spoke at lots and lots of safety conferences, and was a guest on lots and lots of safety podcasts.
The Humble Inquiry book would have been published when he was in his mid-80s. It was interesting to then go back, read this paper that I'll introduce shortly from 1992, and see some of the early formations of the ideas which were then published what became 20 years later in that book.
Drew: David, would you like to take us into the paper?
David: Drew found this paper. For regular listeners of the podcast, you'll know how excited we get by paper titles. Drew actually came to me and said, I found two papers. Let's do the first one because I liked the title better. The title of this paper is How Can Organizations Learn Faster? The Problem of Entering the Green Room.
That title will make a bit more sense by the time we get to the end but a cool title nonetheless. This was actually a publication based on a script that he delivered as an invited address to the World Economic Forum on February 6th, 1992 in Davos, Switzerland. Like Drew mentioned, he was at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
He starts this paper by talking about the importance or necessity for academics and organizational leaders to figure out how organizations can learn and change, particularly as it relates to making transformation projects faster and faster.
This was at a time in the early '90s. After the '80s, we saw Xerox go out of business, these rapid technological advances, organizations either rapidly change and transform, or what he said in the paper, basically, the economic churn will send these companies out of business.
At the time, organizational transformation became a very important topic and obviously an important topic to invite him to speak about at the World Economic Forum.
Drew: In 1992, the Internet was just about to hit. It already exists but hasn't really entered public awareness yet. Particularly, the opportunities for business haven't yet become evident, let alone how much it was going to transform the business landscape.
You've got to admire someone who goes to Davos, and essentially, the first thing he tells people is you're all frightened puppies.
David: Absolutely. He said, we're going to talk about the learning process and how at an organizational level that can be speeded up. His introduction also went on to say that he was struck by how little we really know about the dynamics of organizations and social systems and how little we know about the learning process.
He goes on to introduce at least three different types of learning. Should we go through how he lays it out?
Drew: Let's briefly talk about these because this is setting the background for his main message. He says the first type of learning is the one that we all think of as common learning, which is knowledge acquisition and insight learning. He says that this is the thing that people mostly focus explicitly on when they think about learning.
That is the learner knows that they've got a problem and they're motivated to learn, so they set out to learn something. He said that knowledge and insight don't necessarily change your behavior or approach to the particular problem you're trying to solve. You having extra knowledge in your head doesn't actually change what you're doing.
That leads naturally to the second type of learning which is about learning habits and skills. That's how you actually respond to things and what your behaviors are. He links this quite explicitly to Skinner and behaviorism. He's going to come back to this behaviorist view of learning in a minute.
He says this is fairly slow because in order to learn skills, you've got to be willing to be temporarily incompetent, which is great if you're learning soccer and not so good if you're learning to run a nuclear power plant. He says because we're incompetent, we're very uncomfortable with feeling the anxiety, and we're desperate to try to get the correct behavior.
There's a fair bit here, David. Do you want to go any deeper into this habit and skill learning?
David: The only thing that I want to say is when he talked about this need to form habits and skills through practice, he said a couple of things will be quite familiar to many of our listeners. He really caught out the need for organizations to be okay with people making mistakes and making lots of mistakes.
I guess we know the popular interpretation of human organizational performance. One of those principles is that errors or mistakes are normal.
I guess he is saying that lots of leaders in organizations and lots of organizations don't accept that it's okay for people to just make mistakes. Even if they accept that it's okay for them to make one mistake, they're not really that tolerant of a second similar mistake. He said that if you really want to form habits and skills, you need practice fields and playing fields.
Interesting term, Drew. I read the term. He said we need a psychologically safe environment. That really struck me given that this was 1992. I actually went ahead to dig because the term psychologically safe environment was originally a term introduced apparently by Carl Rogers in relation to some of his work on how to facilitate creativity. Then, in the '80s, it was associated with William Deming. He had 14 points for management, and he termed interpersonal safety. But more recently, I guess, since 1999, it's been associated with Amy Edmondson's work.
Just to show the importance of going to the source, the number one result when I searched the origin of the word psychological safety—just because you had a go last episode at management consultants—was a McKinsey article saying that Amy Edmondson came up with the term. It just goes to show that we do emphasize here in the podcast to do a little bit more research. It was really cool to read that sentence in a paper 30 years ago.
Drew: Thanks for doing our homework on that one, David. What struck me is that it's not just that the term has been around that long. When Schein uses it, he means exactly what people mean today about psychological safety.
We talked in the last episode about jingle-jangles fallacies—using the same word for two different concepts. This is the same word for the exact same concept that has really been around that long, this precise idea about the freedom to make mistakes safe to fail in order to facilitate conversation and learning.
David: The third one, Drew, do you want to introduce that? Because he goes on to introduce that this is one that we don't talk about very much.
Drew: Yes. This is interesting because this also comes out of behavioral safety. But he says this is the next layer you got to think about. It's not just learning skills and habits from actions and feedback. It's that you get emotionally conditioned by that environment as well. If you're in a behaviorist environment, you don't just learn the skill. You also learn to be really anxious.
Lots of people have probably heard the idea of Pavlov's dog and ringing the bell, but I don't think this second deeper message is communicated nearly enough. It just looks like the idea of Pavlov's conditioning. I'll use Schein's explanation here because he's going to continue the metaphor throughout the paper.
He says if you put a dog in a green room, ring a bell, and 10 seconds later, give the dog a painful electric shock, the dog will very quickly learn to avoid green rooms, not just that but learn that if they hear the bell to try to run away. Even after you've turned the shocks off, the dog still won't go into the green room because he's learned to avoid it.
The classic idea of Pavlov's conditioning is you create a stimulus, you create a response, and then you get the person to learn. Just in response to the stimulus, they give a response rather than needing the actual pain.
He says if you teach your dog to avoid the green room, he goes into the red room. But what if you give him shocks in the red room as well? Then the dog doesn't know what to believe. He knows that the green room is unsafe, and he knows that the red room is unsafe. He just jumps back and forth between the rooms. Even after you've turned off the shock, he's learned to be anxious and that nowhere is safe.
The side effect of any behavioral conditioning is it doesn't just teach you the behavior. It also teaches the anxiety associated with getting the behavior right and the fear of what's going to happen if you don't get the behavior right.
You can't just learn what not to do, you also need to know that the alternative is safe because if you don't trust that the alternative is safe, then both conditions are going to create anxiety. It's not just enough to learn that the green room gives you an electric shock. You got to know that the red room is a safe place to go to avoid the shock.
This is the big concern with learning based on negative consequences. Schein says quite clearly that punishment is very effective in eliminating certain kinds of behavior, but it's also very effective in inducing anxiety when in the presence of the person or the environment that taught you that lesson.
That anxiety is not really what we want. Particularly, if all we've been taught is what not to do, that anxiety is going to carry over and we're not going to feel safe to try anything or take risks. We're going to limit ourselves to very narrow ranges of behaviors that we know haven't given us the electric shock, and we're going to be afraid not just of the green room but of anything that might be the green room.
David, I got fairly deep into the metaphor. Is there anything important that I missed there?
David: I'm just wondering from a political correctness point of view because we hear a lot about Pavlov's dog and ringing the bell and the stimulus-response of salivation and food. Even with no food there, you ring the bell, and the dog still salivates.
But maybe it's not politically correct to talk about these experiments. It's probably not okay to talk about the Milgram experiments either. I actually wasn't aware of the details of these behavioral studies, but I guess this has a practical example in safety. It's just a really simple practical example, and it might become more relevant as we go through it.
If you invite an operational manager to the boardroom to present an incident that they've had in their part of the business and their experience of that is that the directors on that board give them an absolute grilling and berate them for having the incident, then they know that that's not a safe place. They're going to do anything to avoid ever having to be back in that room again. Your boardroom might not be painted green, but the principle is still the same. They're going to do anything they can to not report something, downplay something, or avoid something because that's not a safe space to be in.
At the same time, the organization hasn't told them anywhere that is actually a safe place or what to do. As you were talking, it was just a practical example I was trying to think of.
Drew: David, there's one more part of the metaphor we need to introduce before we can go further into the paper. That's the black platform. The black platform is where the dog gets fed. Metaphorically, you can happily live out your life on the black platform. It can be quite comfortable, it can be quite productive, and you're doing fine. You're just afraid to hop off because as soon as you hop off the back platform, you risk being in the green room.
What can happen is even if someone comes along to the organization—a new leader, new vision, or new change—if the organization recognizes that new vision as potentially a green room, then the thought of stepping off the black platform into the unknown induces anxiety and dread effect.
A very fun thing I should point out here is that I actually think it's okay to talk about those things so long as we recognize that Pavlov was evil. You don't do this to dogs. You don't even do this to undergraduates. These are metaphors, but they're important metaphors because we recognize today that we wouldn't do this even to a dog. But we do it not just to our organizations. We do it to ourselves.
The message that Schein is trying to get across is not that managers do this to other people but that managers themselves are trapped in this exact same situation. It's the managers who also are afraid. It's the leaders and CEOs who are afraid of stepping off that black platform. Just because you happen to be in senior leadership doesn't at all make you immune from your fundamental human fears, behaviors, and anxieties when it comes to change.
David: You're absolutely right. Extending the metaphor to the practical management of safety in organizations, I think there's a very strong message here for middle management in organizations and also safety professionals.
If you read about what would it take to change your vision to something like some people who might want to do a new-view type of vision or some other type of vision in that if you're in an organization that's had negative consequences or a lack of psychological safety around things, no amount of visioning can actually make it not anxiety provoking for people to want to do something new. I think that's the point of this part of the paper.
We've got three ways of learning. We can learn by building out our cognitive knowledge and skill base, developing habits and skills, or this third learning that goes on inside organizations, which is this emotional conditioning and learned anxiety to basically resist change because we seek comfort in the certainty of outcomes and work.
I guess the last thing I want to say before we move on to the next section of the paper was this is another example of me not being surprised at what was already theorized in the management literature. When this was written, it was at the same time as this massive rise in the behavioral safety movement for safety. We've got a presentation at the World Economic Forum that says you need to focus on psychological safety to learn and improve your organization, and you really need to not have punishment for mistakes or change.
This is at a time when safety has run off and done something that was based on the 1950s’ and 1960s’ behavioral psychology as opposed to management and organizational science at the time.
We've said before that we think sometimes in safety, we're about three or four decades behind some of the other fields, and this might be another example of that.
Drew: Before we move on, there's one other thing that Schein says in the introduction that I think is directly relevant to why safety maybe hasn't been so receptive to some of the management stuff. It's one of those things where being contained within the message is itself the reason why the message is hard to be accepted.
Schein says that just having a new vision or a new idea—your classic example of safety differently or adopting management science into safety—can't overcome the feelings because the human mind is able to defend itself against things that make us anxious. He says the three most common defenses are firstly not to hear the message in the first place.
Secondly, to deny that the message applies. I love these new ideas, but your organization's not ready for them. Those don't really fit our organization. We still need to work on the basics.
Or to rationalize that our leaders don't understand the situation. These safety differently people are just academics. They've got no idea what it's like to work in a real organization.
He says you can't talk people out of the learned anxiety because learned anxiety is directly pushing them to reject the message. David, I just wanted to acknowledge that this is a really unfair message. I think it's true, but telling someone else that the reason why they're not listening to you is because they're anxious is also just not going to work. It's fair because there's no evidence they can offer that can refute this accusation.
It's an important insight, but it's an insight that's actually not that useful when it's directly talking to other people. You can't tell someone you're ignoring me because you're anxious, you're not listening, or you're rejecting the message out of anxiety. They're going to deny it, and it's entirely fair for them to deny it. It's like telling someone they've got an unconscious bias. There's no way to defend against that accusation.
David: I was going to say it just might be slightly nicer than telling them they're just resistant to change.
Drew: Also, I think that what's sympathetic to do with this understanding is not to tell people that they're anxious but to have sympathy and empathy for the anxiety that they're experiencing and to recognize that they're not resisting the message because they're bad people and they don't like the message. They're resisting the message because they have legitimate anxiety based on their previous experiences. If we want to help them, then we can't just try to push a message onto them. We need to be empathetic to that anxiety and have approaches that are sensitive to the anxiety.
David: Managing these anxieties of change is the next section of the paper. Schein didn't suggest that we should directly confront people in that way. He said the answer to managing these anxieties is paradoxical, so we must create a new anxiety.
All the way through the paper up until now, whenever he's mentioned anxiety, he's called it Anxiety 1. Now, he said, we must make a new anxiety. Let's call it Anxiety 2. Anxiety 2 must be greater than Anxiety 1, so the anxiety of the change must be superseded by making people anxious not to change, yet it must not be so great as to cause defensiveness and paralysis.
He's saying that if you know that people are going to be anxious about change—entering the green room—then you've got to make them a little bit more anxious about staying on the black platform but not so anxious that they jump off the building type of thing.
This is an interesting point. Schein does talk about this in the first chapter or so of the Humble Inquiry book about any cause of the anxieties of learning. You need to introduce a healthy level of anxiety and discomfort about people not learning to actually really promote the learning process. Any thoughts, Drew?
Drew: One of the things I think is interesting is that you would normally expect there to be lots of motives for people to step off the black platform. People are very naturally curious and innovative. Though curiosity and innovation are values that are praised in our society, within organizations and particularly large organizations, they're not actually rewarded.
We talk about valuing innovation and curiosity, but we basically teach people within organizations that curiosity and innovation are dangerous because we judge people not by the display of curiosity but by the result. If the result is making trouble or making a mistake, then we punish people for the trouble or the mistake. We don't reward them for showing curiosity or innovation.
David: Schein links this work back to the work of Kurt Lewin. I think it was episode 98 where we talked about a Harwood study. We introduced Kurt Lewin's work and his original theory that organizations change by going through a process of unfreezing, changing, and then refreezing.
Schein agrees that we must first destabilize the organization, Lewin's unfreezing phase. To speed things up, the first thing we need to do is speed up this process of unfreezing, which is people letting go of their current situation and taking on the desire to move, learn, and change.
He says this happens through three processes, Drew. Do you want to talk about those?
Drew: The first one is disconfirmation. Disconfirmation is basically just leading people to perceive that the current status quo is not working, making them feel that the black platform is not actually a good place to be. He says that one of the ways to do this is to make disconfirming data highly visible to all members of the organization, and such data must be convincing.
One of the strategies that I think is very common in safety is this discussion of a plateau and incidents of a plateau in fatality rates. That's an example of disconfirmation. That's people trying to put data in front of other people to say, look, the status quo is not acceptable.
People are uncomfortable with the idea that we're not getting better for safety. People need to believe we're constantly reducing the number of fatalities, so show people that there's a plateau, and they are no longer comfortable with the status quo. That's disconfirmation.
The second one is the creation of guilt or anxiety. I immediately flinched. That sounds a little bit evil.
David: That word is a little bit evil. The explanation isn't quite as evil. He goes on to say that even if you give people disconfirming data and they believe that it's true like maybe the plateau in safety performance or something, they may not be motivated by it because they don't connect that information to something that they care about. The data relating to parts of the black platform might not be the part that they're living in. It might be another part of the business, and their part of the business might be okay.
We need to, I guess, create an environment where people actually feel that no, this does relate to me, and what we're at at the moment is not where we need to be. You've got my attention now. He actually referred to creating anxiety as getting someone's attention. You've got my attention now, let's do this.
Drew: Two particular ways of thinking about that. One of them is certainly what one of my students actually said to me this week. She said, in this course, I'm out of my comfort zone, which means I'm in my learning zone. Something that we're familiar with in education is we try to get people to recognize that their existing knowledge is not quite enough, which creates a space for people to seek out and learn new things. Discomfort is probably better than anxiety.
The other thing he points to which I find interesting is if people feel a bit personally threatened, ashamed, or guilty because they're not living up to their own ideals and aspirations. That's anxiety related to personal identity.
For example, if you want to get me to read a book, I'll often procrastinate when I'm reading nonfiction, but it makes me feel a little bit personally threatened that there's something other people are talking about that I haven't read. I’m a little bit ashamed and guilty that I'm cribbing rather than having studied something in depth. That challenges my own ideal of myself, which is someone who goes to the original sources and reads them. If you make me feel guilty or a little bit ashamed, I'll go and read something.
Getting people into that space where they don't feel good about themselves sitting in the status quo. They feel the need to live up to their own identity, own values, and own aspirations. They need to be part of that change.
David: The third process for this unfreezing of an organization is the creation of psychological safety. We still need to have an environment like we've spoken about that is safe to experiment, explore, be curious, and make mistakes. That speeds up this process of unfreezing. Do you want to say any more about psychological safety that we haven't said yet?
Drew: There are a few particular things he calls out because people overgeneralize psychological safety, and there are some specific things that matter.
The first one that he said is the learner has to feel that new habits are possible. They have to feel that that new state is somewhere where they can get and are capable of. In an organization, there need to be opportunities for training and practice and coaching and reward for efforts in the right direction. I think the efforts there are important. We need to be noticing when people are trying, not noticing the outcomes, norms that legitimize the making of errors, and norms that reward innovative thinking and experimentation.
David, I'd suggest that the norms there is the important bit. You can't just be like a program. We put a suggestion in a box and pick one out, and you give an innovation prize. That's not a norm. That's a special event. It's got to be just normal that people make errors and you try things out, they don't work, and you try again.
You've already mentioned it, David, but I really love the idea that it's not about just tolerating mistakes. It's about tolerating the second mistake as well. When it's normal to make mistakes, you have to let people fail multiple times and not get really annoyed the moment they've failed because otherwise, the lesson they learned from the first mistake is that it was dangerous to try, so they don't try at all. What we want is for them to recognize the mistake, try again, and risk another mistake. That second mistake we've got to tolerate as well.
David: Throughout this paper, Edgar Schein makes some really pointed descriptions of organizational life where he talks about what it's like to manage complex operations and the expectations of leaders. They're not supposed to admit that they don't understand the problem. They're not supposed to admit that they're not in complete control of a situation. They're not supposed to make mistakes and have workers see them making mistakes.
As you mentioned earlier, Drew, one of the things about Edgar Schein's work is when we do these papers, this is a 20-page paper, and we're trying to summarize it. It's one of those things where we could literally just jump on this podcast and read it out. It's all really useful stuff. This paper is worth reading just for the way that Schein describes the current norms and expectations of organizations and how different they are from the norms and expectations that you just mentioned there, Drew.
Drew: David, if it suits you, let's move on to the particular solution that he lays out in the rest of the paper. Just as a preface, I'll say that I never knew that this was actually what was meant by these ideas about change teams. I always just saw it as a very management, faddish type of thing.
The spin he puts on these teams is just so different from the way I think they've often been framed in management. I guess I'm using that as an excuse for my own previous misunderstanding. As we go through this, you're going to recognize the structure of what he's proposing, but the spirit, I think, is what's most important.
David: This work is off the back of Cooperrider's work on appreciative inquiry, so a lot of these change teams are very similar to the way that Cooperrider framed that work in the '80s. Also, when people go through here, you might think that three years after this speech, Kotter released in 1995 this eight-step change management process. There's a lot going on around the time in relation to organizational change, and it's hard to know who was the first to raise some of these ideas.
Drew: The fundamental idea is to create this change team, but the reason for the team is not really to drive the change. It's because you can't ask other people to learn something if you yourself aren't embodying, displaying, and being that learning person yourself. You need to be in an environment as a leader where you are safe.
He basically says that needs a support group. This change team is basically an anxiety support group for senior leaders in the organization where everyone is anxious, admits that they're anxious, shares their anxieties, owns up with them, and helps each other deal with their anxieties. It's not about leading and driving change. It's mutual support to basically stand up and say, hi, my name is Mike. I'm a leader. I'm an anxious person. It's been two days since my last panic attack at the thought of change.
David: Drew, it's interesting that he uses the specific language of the steering committee. I don't know how many steering committees I've been in my career or how many steering committees you've been in your career, but they do not operate like how Schein describes the way that they should operate.
Drew: I think we should just re-label them anxiety support groups and management anxiety support groups.
David: He says that this is a small group that needs to role model, establish, and develop these norms that are favorable to innovation and learning. Basically, the whole rest of the organizational change will then radiate out from this group.
Drew: Just to be explicit, he's saying we are trying to manage the anxiety that the organization itself has had bad experiences before in trying to change. The people involved have learned lessons from those previous bad experiences of the organization themselves, so what we're doing is we are sharing and jointly managing the anxiety in a group that knows that its mission is ultimately the welfare of the organization. In that group, people own up and deal with their own anxieties. That's the first and main step in leading them toward planning for change.
David: He goes on to talk about these first-party steering committees, but then he goes on to label them as task forces. But the steering committee basically establishes several task forces that in turn have these rapid, intensive learning experiences to plan effectively for the whole organization. They're meant to also then have this experience of learning what it is to be in the changed state and then start to design the programs for the rest of the organization to do this.
Drew: David, why don't you take us right through the seven steps that he lays out?
David: The final step then is throughout this process, all of the members of the steering committee communicate extensively and intensively to the whole organization to keep everyone apprised of what's happening and to continue this unfreezing process with particular attention to creating psychological safety as the pressures for change mount.
I think this is a little bit of a convoluted second-step process. If people read this paper, it's open access. We'll put it in the link on LinkedIn and in the show notes. People will say, oh, gee, I can see how that might be the way that this needs to happen, but that's not the way that we manage change in my organization.
Drew: I think a lot of change processes recognize resistance to change, laxness to change, and change anxiety, but they always seem to treat it as something that is external from the leading of the change as if the leaders are fully motivated and fully brought into the change, and then you just need to reduce the resistance from other people.
I think the key message that he's saying here is that leaders don't sit above the change anxiety. Leaders are part of it, and unless they own up to it, then basically, they're going to be unconsciously exhibiting that anxiety and causing anxiety for other people. The way they react to early missteps, mistakes, and suggestions that are put up as part of the change or in contradiction of the change is going to just perpetuate the anxiety down through the organization, so facing it at the top level is what supports the change process.
David, there's a hidden assumption here which I only just noticed because it’s so embedded in the paper. Schein sees change and learning to be basically the same thing. Change isn't something where you know what you're going to do. Change is all about a learning process for the leaders as well as for the organization. You don't go into a change knowing what the change is. You go into a change with a need or desire to learn yourself, and you come out of the change process knowing the direction you're going.
David: Absolutely right, Drew. I think the words are almost used interchangeably in this paper. I also somewhat agree with change being a learning strategy. If we see change as being different, then it's not one of those things. The ideas that cause the problem aren't the same ideas to solve the problem. To think that you've got all of this knowledge, skill, and capability to do what the organization wants you to do, but instead, the whole organization is working in its current state. I'm not sure that's the case. I think change has to be about learning.
Drew, there are a couple of practical takeaways. You just mentioned that overarching thing. I'll put a couple of points there. Can we maybe run through those?
Drew: In our notes, I've got this little introduction to the takeaways, but I think I've already made those points, so let's dive right into the number of suggestions you've got, David.
David: For organizations to change, you need to overcome the negative past effects of other change processes that may not have worked, particularly the effects of carrots and sticks, especially the sticks.
How your organization deals with mistakes is going to say a lot about whether people are prepared to try new things and change with you or not. I absolutely need to deal with that. To make people feel safe in this learning, they need to have a motive, a sense of direction, and an opportunity to try new things without fear. You need to be motivated, know where you're headed, need to engage with that, and really have this environment of psychological safety.
If you want to speed up the learning process, the last point here is in your organization, start with an analysis of what anxieties and cultural assumptions might stand in your way. If you read through this paper, I'm not aware of any work or have never been involved in any of it to do this, but it'd be like some kind of readiness for change assessment like what is the current levels of anxiety, what is the current levels of fear, what are our current levels of psychological safety in the organization, and all the things that we've spoken about in this podcast.
One of the other practical takeaways that Schein suggests is to know what stands in your way if you want to go fast.
Drew: It's not directly in this paper, David, but one of the recurring themes throughout Schein's work is that the real trouble with culture as a concept is you don't see your own culture. It's really very hard for an organization to know what assumptions they're making and the schemas and patterns that are driving the organization because the people inside the organization are living within them.
Basically, what Schein has held up as the ideal of organizational development, coaching, and consulting is the ability of an organization to work effectively with consultants. Not for consultants to create, lead, or manage the change but for consultants to help the organization recognize its own culture, assumptions, values, and patterns of behavior so that those can be taken into account and so that the consultant then heads back to the organization to lead the change with that self-awareness necessary to do it.
David: You're right. Like Gidden's work on structuration in social psychology that the people in a system are at the same time creating and being influenced by the system in real time. It's very hard to see your contribution to creating it but also just to actually be aware of how exactly it might be influencing you.
I guess even though Schein's book is called Organizational Culture and Leadership, I think that might have just been to sell more copies of the book because the content of that book is very much a social and organizational psychology book and very true to the parent discipline. It doesn't really talk about culture and leadership in those generic industry ways.
Drew: David, the question for this week was, how can organizations learn faster?
David: Drew, don't make people afraid to enter the green room.
Drew: Or make them more afraid to stand on the black platform.
David: Perfect. Bow to the life and work of Edgar Schein. That's it for this week. We hope you found this episode thought-provoking and ultimately useful in shaping the safety of work in your own organization.
Send any comments, questions, or ideas for future episodes to us at feedback@safetyofwork.com.