Case: Real and lasting change in the Swedish public sector - with the real stakeholders
- and Kotter’s 8-step model
In the public sector, to be able to implement successful and powerful change according to Kotter's commonly used 8-step change model, a group of the real stakeholders surrounding the issue have to be the ones to do the work in order for people in the organisation to feel that they own the process and the end result. An outsider, an organisational consultant, may facilitate and support the process but shouldn't be the one responsible for the expertise or to deliver solutions. Only then can the change make a profound and lasting impact to support the overall purpose of the organisation. Tobias Tagesson shares his experiences from working with a change process in collaboration with a municipality organisation in Sweden.
“It feels different this time, it’s like we already are the ones who own the result of this investigation, it's just not something that is presented to us”; the statement came from one of the top managers at a municipality in Sweden during the finishing workshop I had after a six-month long process together. I was approached by the organisation in the winter of 2020, after having done an assignment for them earlier during the year. This time they wanted my support to create a process on behalf of the municipal board where they wanted an investigation to be made into how three different organisations within the municipality could better come together and create a centre for learning where there could be a synergy effect between their respective responsibilities. The end result should be a written report that would give the municipal board enough facts and ideas to be able to make a decision whether to create a learning centre or not.
I have personal experience and competence within the responsibilities of all three concerned organisations, but I strongly believe that any change must come from the stakeholders within the organisation and from the stakeholders that surround it. A stakeholder has a vested interest in an organisation and can either affect or be affected by the organisations' operations and performance. Here the stakeholders are, for example, citizens in the municipality, employees, local business communities, the government and trade unions. This view is influenced by my Gestalt approach, a humanistic view on people’s ability, with their knowledge and expertise, to create meaning through exploring the present and making new choices which leads to change, and from that work the future will present itself.
So, in dialogue with my client’s representatives, a group of four top managers in the steering group that I would report to, I designed a process where I acted as a facilitator and gave support but left all the answers to how change could be made to a group of people who were the real stakeholders in the process.
The stakeholder group, of about ten people, selected by the steering group because of their authority, competence or willingness to contribute, consisted of a mix of people from the three organisations, such as managers, teachers, student counsellors, process managers as well as representatives from the local business community. The process included me facilitating a startup- and concluding workshop with everybody in the client system present, work meetings over a six month period with the stakeholder group and monthly group coaching sessions for the three managers in the stakeholder group. The reason for the support to the managers involved was twofold; for them to gain new insights about their own leadership role and for them to get to know each other and each other’s organisations. Lastly, I also introduced Kotter's widely used 8-step change model to the client system to add a theoretical back-drop to the process. In this process we were enabling awareness for change, climbing the first three steps in the model, to create a sense of urgency, form a powerful coalition and to co-create a vision for change.
One complicating factor was of course the Covid-19 pandemic, which resulted in the whole process, with the exception of the concluding workshop, being held online on Zoom. The fact that the whole process was conducted online made it both more difficult and easier in other ways. One negative effect, that also was raised by the participants, was the lack of informal social interaction between people in the group, since a lot of them didn’t know each other from the beginning. My efforts as a facilitator to support social interaction in the Zoom-room couldn’t quite make up for that. There were some positive points though, my experience was that meeting online helped with the process of sharing and working digitally in documents together and with personal time management for the people in the group.
The work in the stakeholder group was a challenge for some people because of the fact that it was a mixed group with managers and people who report to them in the same group. There were concerns raised about the question of how open group participants could be about information, ideas and suggestions during the process within the group, with their colleagues in their own organisation and with the outside world. For managers it was about budgets and staffing issues and for non-managers what ideas and opinions they felt comfortable to share openly. To try to alleviate this, it was important for me as a facilitator to start from day one to design experiences, in meetings, workshops and coaching, for the whole client system to be able to build trust amongst themselves and an environment where it was okay to speak your mind.
Only when people feel a certain level of trust can there be openness in a group, and the other way around. In a change process like this one it's vital that everybody’s ability to see the whole picture together, and their competence and expertise is fully used, in order to get the best possible result.
The part of the process where I am involved will be finished in September of 2021 with the last group coaching session for the managers and of course the very end result is the final version of the investigation that will be put forward to the municipal board. Later in the autumn of 2021 the municipal board will use the result of the investigation as a basis for their decision if they will go ahead and create a new learning centre to better meet the needs for learning and future employment for the citizens of the municipality.
I have yet to meet up with my clients in the steering group to make a final evaluation of the whole process but after having listened to the feedback from the people in the client system, I can tell that they feel a sense of ownership of the process and generally that everybody's knowledge and experience really has been used and brought into the final result of the investigation. I fully believe that when the work for change is made by a group of the real stakeholders surrounding the issue, only then can the change make a profound and lasting impact to support the overall purpose of the organisation.
Tobias Tagesson - co-founder Transponder, Gestalt Organisational Development Practitioner