A glossary of contemporary management terms II – transformation(al)

Transformation, a marked change in form or appearance, is one of the most widely used words in contemporary management vocabulary after leadership and delivery (future posts). Quite often it is used in conjunction with leadership: everybody knows since Burns and Bass that leaders are transformational and managers are transactional. It goes without saying. Linking transformation to leadership is another blast of air into the already over-inflated concept of leadership given that most leadership activity involves humdrum, every day tasks and conversations. It creates anxiety for leaders and unrealistic expectations from those they lead.

The idea of transformation is part of the charismatic tendency in management thinking and talking and fits well with other alluring, quasi-religious ideas such as vision and passion. It is no longer enough just to change something, or even to try and keep things the same, forgetting that there are many social traditions and practices which persist because they serve us well, there must be a commitment to transform them. The promise of transformation feeds into what one might think of as the anxiety narrative about change, which we can’t achieve completely enough or quickly enough, as other competitors catch us up and pass us by, particularly the Indians and the Chinese.

Implied in the rush to transform things are a number of assumptions about the role and capabilities of leaders and managers, time, and valuations of the good.

Firstly, if whatever happens, happens simply and only because of what everyone is doing together (as a brief distillation of complexity thinking) then leaders and managers won’t get to decide on their own whether things will be transformed or not, nor how they are transformed, nor will they be in control of the process. Of course they will be highly influential in any change programme, but they won’t always get what they want. They too are caught up in broader processes of change over which they have little control. They might even get the opposite of what they want, depending how the warp and weft of human interdependence plays out, who wins and who loses by the changes. You could draw either on the non-linear complexity sciences, or on the sociologist Norbert Elias to argue that because of a particular figuration of events and circumstances a big change programme can bring about very little change, or even resistance to change, whilst a small initiative could bring about a population-wide transformation.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, as a counter-intuitive thinker, said he was much more interested in why things stayed the same, rather than why they changed. So despite decades of anti-discrimination legislation minority groups still face discrimination as do half the population (women). In fact, it would be possible to argue that just recently in the Northern hemisphere, things have got worse for minority groups and women. There is a constant churn in the dynamic of stability and change, and ‘progress’ whatever we might mean by that, is not linear and can also go ‘backwards’. The counter-narrative to Elias’ major work The Civilising Process, which is an evolutionary account of how interdependence leads generally to more civilised behaviour towards each other (although at the expense of internalising our guilt, shame and violent feelings) is The Germans, which sets out how the civilising process can go into reverse and lead to barbarism.

On timing and valuations of the good, when will we know when something has been transformed, and how will we know that it is good? Good for whom? From the late 90s to about 2007 and apart from a handful of commentators, it was generally accepted that parcelling up debt into collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and other highly complex abstract debt vehicles was a transformation for the finance sector for the good, because it distributed risk. From 2007 exactly the same phenomenon was regarded as a catastrophe because no one knew who had ‘good’ debt and who ‘bad’. As another example, in a piece of research I carried out last year with colleagues at the university inquiring into ‘transformational change’ in the Higher Education sector, senior managers and leaders in UK universities were ambivalent about whether the process of marketisation was a benefit for the sector or not, and perhaps it was a mixture of both. For some respondents, marketisation was a much-needed fillip to a sclerotic sector which ignored the needs of students and business. For others, the changes meant a hollowing out of the higher education sector and undermining the very nature and purpose of a university. Only time will tell the degree to which either of their concerns are warranted.

It is not so obvious, then, that we can transform things the way we want them, that we will know when the transformation will have been achieved, and that even if we do transform, it will lead to an unalloyed good. There will always be winners and losers, and who gets to describe this process as transformation for the good is in a very powerful position. The current crisis over Brexit in the UK is a very good example of the dilemmas of transformation. One senior pro-Brexit politician said that he couldn’t think of a single downside to Brexit, which may be an indication of his limited imagination, or a limited understanding of the complexities of change. But in appealing to imagination and complexity we might also conclude that there must also be upsides, even if they are not immediately obvious from a pro-Remain position.

It is worth thinking about our current obsession with transforming things, and who decides whether transformation is ‘good for us’.