TOPIC 3.1: Turbulent times – changing situations

As government organisations continue to evolve from centralised functional hierarchies of the 70 and 80s, through to decentralised regionalized structures of the 90s, to matrix structures of the early 2000s and to increasingly networked and ‘starburst’ arrangements towards 2030, citizens, customers and partners of government and managers within government continue to experience unpredictable turbulence and turmoil. The triggers for these changes in public management have been discussed in Module 1 and include; the new digital economy, increased competition, global operating environments, and emphases on contestability, partnerships and customer service.

Managers are chartered with the responsibility of building adaptive and co-operative capability within, across and beyond traditional functions towards networked, cross-functional, ‘just-in-time’ team arrangements to get work done. Whilst corporate rhetoric about new directions, compelling visions, common values and improved operating systems is relentless, the hearts and minds of participants in change processes frequently remain unengaged, non-committed and, at best, compliant.

The challenge is to reconnect people to organisational strategy, to recapture their imaginations, to respect their contributions and to energise and sustain the process.  A new philosophy, an innovative and inclusive approach to change is warranted, particularly as government seeks new ways to do business with the private and the non-government sector.

One of the challenges is to take the best of the past into the future and to encourage people to do the same when overwhelming feelings of hopelessness, ‘change for change sake’, fatigue, cynicism etc set in. The underlying assumption, which has spawned many intervention processes (such as gap analysis, SWOT, benchmarking, performance indicators, process re-engineering), is that organisations are problems to be solved.

Language to describe deficient and inadequate performance has evolved to define for example these ‘problems’ for organisations:

• Organisational stress
• Turfism, silo mentality
• Bureaucratic red tape

And for people in organisations:

• Depressed
• Obsessive-compulsive
• Anti-social personality
• Paranoid
• Post-traumatic stress
• Psychopathic co-dependent

The need to reinvent or regenerate participative processes is clear. The choices appear to be:

1. to stay in the incremental problem-based, diagnosis/treatment frame, or
2. to move on to a fresh perspective which simultaneously addresses the compelling triad of strategy (direction), structure (organisation) and culture (people) in change.

Appreciative inquiry provides managers with an opportunity to reframe their philosophical stance i.e. to choose a positive mindset, to be deliberately hopeful, to work with optimism, to create opportunity, to celebrate the human spirit in change.

A key idea in this module is to leverage the communicative power of Appreciative Inquiry with the computational power of Artificial Intelligence to enable ‘AI²’ practice!