Consulting: Coaching The Whole Organisation

Richard Bolstad

Change In Business

Most people who work in a large organisation have seen the puzzling difficulties, and even the bewildering pain, that organisational change can bring. NLP offers specific skills to deal with such change, and many of us are in situations (inside an organisation or as outside consultants) to deliver these specific skills. We’d love to be able to help, and we have the technology that needs delivering (NLP). This article is about the delivery system. It offers a road map for delivering change either from inside an organisation or as an external consultant. This road map is the RESOLVE model, which I have presented elsewhere as a framework for assisting individual clients to change (eg Hall, Bodenhammer, Bolstad and Hamblett, 2001).

Firstly I’ll explain how this model provides a road map for the process of change inside an organisation. I’ll use examples from two organisations whose change process I observed. One, which I’ll call “Technican”, had been installing a new computer system for managing client data. The other, “Multisite” had adopted a new staff management system to cope with a market demanding more flexibility and faster response. In the second part of the chapter, I’ll explain how I use the RESOLVE model to keep track of where I am in my work as a consultant with such groups.

Resourceful Response To Challenge

Paradoxically, part of starting resourcefully in the situation of business change involves enabling the organisation to face the need for change. As the old system within an organisation adapts to cope with increasing pressures, people avoid change by doing more and more work to “rescue” their team from the real-life consequences of the old system.

In “Technican“, the large organisation which installed a new computer system, the old database required workers to do a lot of manual reorganising of data so that it was available in the form it could be used in. Each year, new office staff had been hired to manage this hand-processing of information. These new people, understandably, were not committed to the proposed changes in the computer system; changes which put their jobs at risk. And middle management were tempted to keep adding to the ranks of these workers to stave off a crisis where they would not have the information needed to respond to clients.

Frequently, data about customer dissatisfaction, failing financial performance and inefficiency needs to be circulated to staff so that they understand the need for change. On the other hand, this needs to be done in such a way that it doesn’t panic people into short term “band-aid” solutions. John Kotter, of the Harvard Business School (1996), talks about this stage as “Creating a sense of urgency”.

Establish A Team Focused on Change

At the beginning, each person in the organisation has a responsibility within the old system. It helps to create a “new” work team which takes responsibility for co-ordinating the process of change. If only one individual (such as the CEO) is planning the changes, this person will be easily misunderstood as pushing a personal agenda. Change is most likely to be accepted when the group planning it includes both experts in the particular changes desired and key line managers who will be involved in implementing the new system eventually. A group consisting only of experts may not have the authority to initiate decisions, and can be sidelined.

At Technican, a group including line managers and computer systems experts was set up, but line managers gradually began to avoid meeting with it because they had “too much to do”. The team of experts hired to design and set up the new computer system was left in sole charge. This group could then be seen as being self-interested, and staff complained “conspiratorially” to line managers about it. A second problem occurred because the organisation did not provide enough extra time for implementation of the new system. The change team found that they were doing their old jobs at the same time as creating a new system.

In NLP terms, the solution to this is for the organisation to invest time and energy in creating a strong sense of rapport within the full new team, setting goals and clarifying values as a group. The normal friendships which build up over time working in a department need to be created in an accelerated way by the change team. The team at Technican found that they needed to learn a whole new set of people skills to manage their new roles -skills in presentation, project management and so on. They also needed a new level of assertiveness, to be able to say “No, I can’t manage that task.” when it was important. This was something that they supported each other to develop, enhancing the sense of rapport and group strength.

Specify Goals

This team can then present its goals as part of a shared vision for the organisation. Creating these goals successfully involves being able to start at the generalised creative “vision” of how the organisation will improve, and move to the specific detailed steps which will create that vision. It involves having the group use the 3 step “Walt Disney creativity strategy” (Dilts, Epstein and Dilts, 1991) beginning with dreaming up an inspiring vision, then planning realistic actions, and only then then critiquing those action plans. John Kotter notes that if this vision is to be communicated within a large organisation, it needs to be able to be described inspiringly within five minutes. A successful change team needs to be able to tell staff in sensory specific terms exactly what benefits they will experience in their day to day work.

In NLP terms, this requires great flexibility in “chunking” -shifting from large scale vision to immediate detailed results and back.

Open Up Model Of The World

Inspiring others in the organisation to co-operate in the process of change is an easily under-estimated process. It involves opening up people’s sense of what is possible. The team itself needs to plan how to effectively communicate their understanding congruently. Rather than choosing one channel to convey information, the team will use multiple forums, will choose specific examples and explain these to people they will affect, and will model the new methods in the very way that they operate.

In the situation at “Multisite“, change had been initiated by a management committee, and staff felt strongly that they had not been adequately involved of decisions or of the reasons for decisions. Communicating the committee’s vision was our first task. We generated a list of twenty new ways to increase communication at Multisite. These included providing physical suggestion boxes, creating weekly newsletters, sending minutes from staff meetings to all who were not able to attend them, providing clear information and contact details about the committee members to all staff, and using phone links to create virtual meetings connecting people from the various sites of the organisation.

In a large organisation, individuals will detect apparent “inconsistencies” in the new plans. It’s useful for the change team to value these challenges and consider how to adjust their planning so that the new vision is not only “congruent” but is “seen to be congruent”. At Multisite, many staff had the belief that committee members had talked insultingly about other staff behind their backs. They felt that the committee’s way of behaving was “disloyal” and did not fit with the vision that it espoused of a progressive and cohesive company. Presumably, these impressions had arisen from committee discussions about the challenges of convincing staff to let go of old systems and expectations. They agreed to set up mediation processes which would both deal with these issues and model the new vision of co-operative management.

Leading Change

At Multisite, the group also decided that training sessions in which the committee explained its new expectations could help to recreate the sense of trust and corporate “loyalty” they wanted. At the Leading stage of change, new systems are put in place and people begin to use them. Training is an essential element in this shift.

Another element of leading change is dealing with “resistance”, in the form of specific individuals (often line managers) who do not believe in the changes, obstruct their application, continuously look for evidence of the failure of new systems, and encourage others to resist similarly. It is useful for the change team to identify these specific people and talk directly with them, because until their higher outcomes are met they are an active danger to success. If we discover their intention, they may be enabled to notice that anything less than fully supporting the change is not totally delivering them the benefits they hope to achieve. On the other hand, without the insights that these people have, important organisational needs may not be met by the new system.

In the case of Technican, there were at least three people who complained to others at staff gatherings about the new computer system, who took any bug in the new program as evidence that the old manual methods of processing information were safer, and who encouraged their office staff to continue using the older system even as the new one came online. Because the change team had lost its own line management representatives, they had no-one with the authority to challenge these people directly. This made for an exhausting year, as the three “saboteurs” tried to hold back the tide of change, for their own (no doubt well intended) reasons.

Many systems which are not obviously affected by the change will need to change to support its success. In Technican, hiring systems needed to be re-evaluated. Office staff were being chosen and promoted for their usefulness in the old set-up. Appraisal systems reinforced and encouraged coping with difficulties heroically instead of exploring more basic solutions. Money was allocated to departments based partially on their use of office staff, who were now being repositioned or made redundant, and the resulting changes in funding were seen as inequitable. All these systems needed to be redesigned to support the changes.

At the International NLP Conference in Helsinki, Finland, in 2000, Dr John Grinder gave an interesting example of the need to adjust appraisal systems to support change. He described his work with an airline company. On long flights, the airline noted that pilot errors increased, due to boredom and inattention. The job of the co-pilot included monitoring the pilot’s decisions and detecting such errors, but co-pilots often failed to do so. Firstly, they looked up to the pilot and assumed that the pilot knew best. Secondly, their own performance appraisals were done by those pilots, and they wanted to keep in rapport with them. Although everyone agreed that pilot errors needed to be reduced and co-pilots needed to be more active in their monitoring, the actual appraisal systems in place acted against this change.

John’s solution was simple. Pilots were told that they were to make a set number of deliberate errors in each long flight. These errors were to be detected by the co-pilots, whose performance evaluation would now include an assessment of the number of errors detected. With this simple change in the appraisal system, a feedback loop was set up that reinforced, rather then discouraging, co-pilot identification of errors. The intended change in co-pilot and pilot behaviour was then achieved.

Verifying Change

New systems often take several years to deliver the anticipated results fully. But the people involved in setting them up cannot usually sustain their enthusiasm over that length of time without direct evidence that the change is working. What John Kotter calls “Short term wins” are experiences that confirm for people that change is successful. They reassure them that any apparent sacrifices they have made are worth it, they offer a counter to those who have been reluctant to support change, they encourage the redirection of funds and resources to the change team, and they nourish and re-inspire those who have been actively working to achieve results.

Such verification of success is too important to leave to chance. It is worth planning from the start of the change process to ensure that small successes are time-tabled to occur within the first year. For the team at Technican, such successes included the move into a new computer centre, the official launch of the new system onto the internet, and the day-long review, of which my training session was part.

Ecological Exit

It is important to distinguish these early indicators of success from “completion”. The “short term wins” are encouraging evidence that change can work. For change to be secure in an organisation, two other types of ongoing action are needed. Firstly, waves of change will spread out through the organisation as a result of the initial alterations. The experts hired or assigned the task to guide the organisation through the change need to continue to observe the system after their initial changes have succeeded, so as to observe these ongoing changes.

For example, at Technican, once the new computer system was running, departments found that files giving them information about suppliers and clients were now presented in a new format. Across the organisation, planning teams who set goals for the next year now wanted to specify their goals so that they were more easily measured in the new data layout. They needed to learn more about the new system in order to do that effectively. The team who had guided the changes realised that it had been more isolated from the rest of the organisation than was expected. They wanted to create better links with other departments on an ongoing basis; for example by having representatives from their team attend other department meetings. Initially, such meetings would discuss the establishment of the new computer system, but longer term these meetings would integrate the computer systems team into a number of other teams.

The second type of ongoing action is more subtle. Not only do organisational structures, communication formats and other concrete processes need to happen differently. For any major change to succeed, there will be new attitudes required; a new “corporate culture” must be built to nourish the systems now in place. The change team needs to be clear that the “values” behind their inspiring new vision will now be integrated into the values of the organisation. When new staff are hired, they will be chosen based on those values. New expectations and norms of behaviour will be assessed, supported and explicitly taught.

In Technican, the changes led to an increased expectation that all staff would be able to access internet and intranet sources. At Multisite, the committee already had an increased expectation that staff would be more flexibly tenured and able to move from one site to another. This change in turn required a greater directness of discussion between staff, and the willingness to state one’s own concerns, while being less attached to particular career endpoints. At the time I met with them, staff had not understood this change in expectation, let alone learned the assertive skills to live with it.

Consulting With The Change Team

To assess how effectively the teams at Technican had managed each step of their own RESOLVE process, I asked them the following questions based the above model:

• Do you have a sense of shared values in this team?
• Can you communicate the value of the changes in less than 5 minutes?
• To what extent do your own actions model and support the changes?
• To what extent do structures such as appraisal, decision-making and resource allocation support the changes?
• To what extent do attitudes, values and norms in the organisation support the changes?
• Have you planned and experienced any short term wins from the changes yet?
• What other sections of the organisational system could change to improve the effectiveness of the changes you have made?

In this way, I help the organisation to make sense of their progress through the RESOLVE model, which I explicitly teach. This review enabled the team to identify their own successes and areas for future improvement. It also gave them a number of insights into the challenges they had been facing and the needed improvements. It is important to notice that my own consulting work with them was based on the same model. I demonstrate the process I am teaching.

Resourceful State: As the change agent who will assist an organisation to flow through the RESOLVE process, I myself need to begin in a resourceful state. Consultant Peter Block (1981) emphasises that the success of consulting depends firstly on the consultant being “authentic”, meaning being willing to tell the client what you are experiencing as you work with them. This authentic state is expressed in the sort of communication skills described in my book Transforming Communication (1998), including I messages, reflective listening and conflict resolution/influencing skills. These skills were discussed in chapter two.

Establish Rapport: The first place this authentic state becomes important is in openly clarifying who is my client. Often, one person within an organisation contacts me because they believe that NLP skills will be useful for their team or the organisation as a whole. This person may or may not have the authority to actually hire me. Whoever hires me is the person whose outcomes I need to elicit and meet –they are the person I am working for. The sooner I find out their identity, the sooner I can begin. It is their commitment that I need most of all.

At this stage I explain to this person that I can work anywhere along the continuum from expert (someone who gives advice which the client commits themselves to follow) through collaborator (someone who works with the client to find solutions and design mutually agreed actions) to assistant (someone who has my skills available as a support for the client as they plan their own change process). I prefer to work near the centre of this continuum, so that we become a model of a change team too. Misunderstandings about which role each of us has would be likely to be reflected in conflicts at the Leading phase later.

SPECIFY Outcome: My contact includes

• Clarity about our roles
• Time scheduling for the project
• Arrangements about intra-organisational and external confidentiality
• Payment
• Sensory specific and measurable outcomes of the project, able to be stated coherently in a couple of sentences.

Dana and James Robinson (1995) identify four different types of outcome in an organisation. There are organisational outcomes (eg “The company will increase profits by 10%” or “The organisation will reduce staff turnover by 50%” might be organisational outcomes). In order to achieve these main outcomes, there are performance outcomes (eg “Salespeople will sell ten new units each week” might be a performance outcome supporting increased profit;  and “Managers will receive and respond to written feedback from their team on a weekly basis.” might feed into an organisational outcome reducing staff turnover). To reach these performance outcomes, a consultant may design certain interventions. For example, to help managers receive feedback they might design a training in feedback for staff, or set up a suggestion box in each work area. In the past, many consultants have confused the outcomes of these actions with performance or even organisational outcomes. Asking “Did the training enable staff to write clear feedback statements?” checks the training outcome, but may not tell you anything about whether they actually ever write any feedback on the job, let alone whether they feel more committed to staying with the company as a result.

The danger of focusing only on training outcomes parallels the risk in individual client work, where counsellors are tempted to measure success by hours of therapy done, rather than life changes. When John Grinder assesses his intervention in the airline company, it is clearly the organisational outcome that counts (eg “Were all flights completed safely and errors corrected within the established safety margins?”). This is the level I am usually interested in setting outcomes on. The need for improved clarity about levels of outcome is not confined to consultants. Frequently, the person who contacts me from an organisation simply asks me to “run an NLP training” to solve their problem. They hope that the training will meet some organisational outcome, but may not have considered the need to monitor this basic outcome. In that context, it seems puzzling to them that I need to discuss the situation with them and even with other people in their organisation. They wish I would just “do my job”. At times I find it useful to explain this model to a client.

Open Up Model Of World: With an individual client, this is the stage when I elicit and experimentally alter the person’s strategy for their problem, demonstrating that they could reach their outcome if they ran a different strategy. To do the same thing with my client in an organisation, I need to collect information about how the problem occurs from a number of sources. Because an organisation is a system, each person may have knowledge of one segment of an interaction. For example, in John Grinder’s scenario, the pilots knew something of how flight errors happened, but little of why co-pilots did not detect them.

Questions I ask myself about the information I get may include

• What strategies does the client run which feed into the situation?
• What strategies do others run which feed into the situation?
• In what way do current systems and arrangements (including attempts to solve the problems) feed into the situation?
• What actions actually assist in solving the problems, and how can these be supported?
• Who is skilled in this situation and can be modelled, and what do they do that works?

Leading: If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. As a trainer, it helps me to remember that training is not the only way to solve an organisational challenge. Choices include but are not limited to:

• Training
• Performance support systems
• Multi-disciplinary teams to deal with the issues
• Redesigning of job descriptions and work processes
• Changing the physical environment or work systems

Verify change: The results of these interventions are checked against the higher level organisational and performance outcomes, and the results confirmed by the client.

Exit and Futurepace: As a result of checking these outcomes, new outcomes may emerge, new interventions may be developed, or longer term plans may be made to deal with similar situations in future more proactively.

Concluding

The RESOLVE model is a road map both for checking the steps of change within an organisation, and for guiding change as an outside consultant. Its steps are summarized in the following table:

Bibliography:

• Block, P. Flawless Consulting:A Guide To Getting Your Expertise Used Pfeiffer & Co., San Diego, 1981
• Bolstad, R. and Hamblett, M.,  Transforming Communication, Addison-Wesley-Longman, Auckland, 1998
• Dilts, R.B., Epstein, T. and Dilts, R.W. Tools For Dreamers, Meta Publications, Capitola, 1991
• Hall, L.M., Bodenhammer, B., Bolstad, R.D. and Hamblett, M.H. The Structure of Personality Anglo American Book Company, Bancyfelin, Wales, 1997
• Kotter, J.P. Leading Change, Harvard Business School, Boston, 1996
• Robinson, D.Gaines and Robinson, J.C. Performance Consulting: Moving Beyond Training Berret-Koehler, San Francisco, 1995