Excellent change management text book by Mark Hughes

"... please tell me you all - why does good change take so long?" - Greg Brown

Projects are synonymous with change. Hence the project management community has learnt that managing a significant project entails managing concomitant change on behalf of the project team and the stakeholders. Problematically, however, the rational and teleological approaches that dominate project management (Pollack, 2007) are more suited to directing technical processes and logistics than to the subtleties of wrangling complex emotions and politics. Worse, the change dimension of significant projects is inherently ‘wicked’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973). This means that identifying and characterising the potential change issues, selecting approaches to ameliorate them and identifying metrics to evaluate progress are irreducible parts of each particular project. Consequently project managers must accept the lack of steadfast algorithms for planning, implementing or evaluating change. Hence, when managing change hard nosed, logical positivist project managers need to learn how to interweave softer, less deterministic mindsets into their professional practice. Realising this, as a working project manager, I decided to update my skills and sought a course that would address the non-algorithmic people side of projects and change.

So I recently completed a two year part time M.A. in Change Management at the University of Brighton taught by Mark Hughes and Steve Reeve. The course was great as it used action learning/research to share experiances between experianced managers. A perfect learning design for the target group. Mark has now published the excellent text book 'Change Management: a Critical Perspective'. Mark's text is a blessing to educators because it presents rigorous arguments against reifying positivist approaches to change, together with sober alternatives, and contextualizes these arguments within a first rate evidence-base. This approach sets a radical agenda squarely within the workplace while opening the floodgates for critical and reflective debate in the classroom. I am currently reviewing the book and hope to publish the review in the journal Project Management in Business.

Mark also recently published ‘When Faculties Merge: Communicating Change’ in the recent special issue of Organizational Transformation and Social Change that Tom Browne and I edited. In the paper he brought his extensive subject knowledge of change management to bear in the context of his personal experience of a radical change to his faculty. Mark suggested that ‘the storytelling approach may be regarded as an antidote to the often prescriptive/normative nature of the change literature’. This provided a worked example to back up the assertions in this book. Anyone interested in change management in higher education would be advised to read the paper and the book.

Mark is also interested in 'Encouraging and Supporting Postgraduates Who Wish to Publish Work from Their Studies'. I think his approach works well with enquiry based learning, mode 2 and could be adapted to web 2.0.

References

• Pollack, J. (2007). The Changing Paradigms of Project Management. International Journal of Project Management. Volume 25, Issue 3 pp 266-274.
• Rittel, H.W.J. and Webber, M.M. (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, Policy Sciences, Vol. 4, pp. 155-69.

Special issues of Organizational Transformation and Social Change on ICT-Driven Change in Higher Education

".... and you can't see tomorrow with yesterday's eyes" - Ryan Adams

Dr Tom Browne and I have co-edited two special issues of the Journal Organizational Transformation and Social Change. Early in 2006, drawing greatly upon personal experience, we identified the need for the Higher Education (HE) community to identify and share much more transparently the growth pains of developing institutional e-learning cultures, with all the concomitant challenges of managing consequential organisational transformation. A proposal for a special issue was made to the editors of OTSC, which was enthusiastically accepted.

The special issues, which have now been published, contain twelve papers:

• In ‘Technology Supported Learning – Tensions between Innovation, and Control’, Stiles and Yorke apply the longitudinal perspective gained through early adoption of e-learning at Staffordshire University to explore ways to overcome the barriers of introducing new technologies and maintaining innovation thereafter.
• In ‘Implementing Web-Assisted Learning and Engaging Academic Staff in the Change Process’, Marek, Sibbald and Bagher present a change narrative based around the ‘fast and forced’ introduction of an MLE/VLE to facilitate blended learning at Napier University.
• In ‘Effecting Institutional Change Through E-Learning: An Implementation Model for VLE Deployment at the University of York’, Beastall and Walker report a flexible approach to change management that varied in pace to suite the needs of individual staff, students and departments during the introduction of a VLE.
• In ‘The Cultural Impact of an In-Depth Consultation on the University of Nottingham: A Bottom-Up Approach’ Wilson, and Grimshaw focus upon the details of designing an effective consultation exercise with stakeholders in research at the University of Nottingham as a precursor to establishing a virtual research environment.
• ‘Initiating E-Learning by Stealth, Participation and Consultation in a Late Majority Institution’ by Luckin, Shurville and Browne recounts how a grass roots initiative was effectively transformed into a top down programme. The extent to which opportunities afforded by e-learning are embraced by an institution can depend in large measure on whether it is perceived as enabling and transformative or as a major and disruptive distraction. Most case studies focus on the former. This paper describes how e-learning was introduced into the latter environment. The sensitivity of competing pressures in a research intensive university substantially influenced the manner in which e-learning was promoted. This paper tells that story, from initial stealth to eventual university acknowledgement of the relevance of e-learning specifically to its own context.
• In ‘Facilitating Organizational Change: Some Sociocybernetic Principles’, Scott reflects on the role of a senior learning technologist as change agent.
• In ‘When Faculties Merge: Communicating Change’, Hughes brings his extensive subject knowledge of change management to bear in the context of his personal experience of a radical change to his faculty. He suggests that ‘the storytelling approach may be regarded as an antidote to the often prescriptive/normative nature of the change literature’ and provides us with a highly emotional worked example to back up the assertions in his recent text book.
• In ‘Laptops For Students: Understanding And Evaluating The Drivers For Change’ Coen et al apply the MIT90s Model for Institutional Change to evaluate a project to provide students at the University of Strathclyde with personal laptops.
• In ‘Implementations, Change Management and Evaluation: A Case Study of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Reusable Learning Objects’ Cook et al evaluate a large scale project involving three institutions with very different organizational structures and cultures: the University of Cambridge (an ancient university), London Metropolitan University (a new university), and the University of Nottingham (a member of the Russell Group).
• In ‘Technology at the planning table: Activity theory, Negotiation and Course Management Systems’, Benson and Whitworth apply a blend of Cervero and Wilson’s (1994) negotiation of power and interests model and activity theory to compare approaches to negotiation during innovation in HE in the UK and the US.
• In ‘Whither E-Learning? Conceptions of Change and Innovation in Higher Education’ Rossiter widens her lens further to evaluate change management practices across the Australian HE system. Rossiter shows that substantial development of capabilities for change and innovation is still required across the sector.
  

In the first editorial Tom and I introduced these papers. In the second editorial, 'Educating Minds for the Knowledge Economy', we argued that while e-learning can support mass education, it can also replicate existing HE systems that are over reliant upon teaching which aims to transmit knowledge. This approach risks failing to equip graduates with the requisite skills to solve novel problems set by fast moving knowledge-based economies. Although approaches to redress this balance by incorporating research have long been available, for example action research and mode two, so far their impact in mainstream undergraduate teaching has been rather marginal. Recently, however, the family of ‘enquiry- and research-based’ approaches is starting to unify under the banner of enquiry-based learning (EBL), which is starting to gain traction in HE. We acknowledged that the e-learning community have already played a substantial role in the seeding of EBL. However, we suggested that, as part of a sector-wide transformation, e-learning now needs to generate radical innovations in process and technology and thereby develop capacities for affordable, high-quality mass EBL.

You can find the special issues online:

• Volume 3, Issue 3 (2006)


• Volume 4, Issue 4 (2007)