Dr David Shaw joined us at a lunchtime talk to argue that project management and change management methods form a complex duality, sometimes complementing but often also conflicting with each other.
When managers want to change their organisation they often use project management methods to do it, in the belief that this simplifies and focuses the change initiative and brings greater assurance of success. ‘Toolkits’ for managing organisational change often incorporate project management methods, as if project and change management methods could be integrated in a seamless whole.
Drawing on evidence from case studies of three organisational change projects in Arts Council England, David argues that project management and change management methods form a complex duality, sometimes complementing but often also conflicting with each other. The linear, rational view of change underlying traditional project management methods is compared with the perspectives of change management scholars who emphasise its complexities and uncertainties.
Recording of the talk
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The research on which this talk is based was published in the latest edition of the Journal of Change Management: Shaw, D. (2016). ‘Managing Dualities in Organisational Change Projects’. Journal of Change Management, 16(3), 201-222.
David’s aim is to publish a series of articles on factors that influence the outcomes of organisational change projects, and hopes to explore with participants some themes to be developed in future research during the discussion.
Dr David Shaw is a Visiting Lecturer in the Human Resources and Organisational Behaviour Department of the University of Greenwich Business School. Before joining the University of Greenwich Business School he was a management consultant for over 20 years, specialising in the management of organisational change.
‘Managing Dualities in Organisational Change Projects’ was presented by Dr David Shaw as part of the Tavistock Institute’s Food For Thought series.
One Response to Managing Dualities in Organisational Change Projects
Dear Dr Shaw,
I have copied in below a comment to Elena Carter about the TIHR Archives project by the Wellcome foundation.
You may find it relevant to your own concept of duality in managing change through projects.
Yours sincerely
Alan Wild
Dear Elena Carter,
I have just blundered onto the TIHR Archive project at Wellcome while reading Crombie’s obituary on Fred Emery.
My interest lies in my research on the Building Industry Communications Research Project of 1962 – 1966 (BICRP) by TIHR. (See the attached paper). I explored the archives of this inquiry at RIBA and elsewhere and published Re-interpreting the Building Industry Communications Research Project.’ Construction Management and Economics. Volume 22, no.3. pp. 303 – 310, March 2004. The article synthesises Schon’s concept of the Situation into the processes of the BICRP and as a characteristic of ‘construction as an industry’. This demonstrates how the characteristics of a fragmented social field may undermine attempts to grasp, through Action Research, the sort of policy initiatives required for the development of a particularly problematical social field within the processes of the inquiry itself.
As a project BICRP is infrequently referenced in TIHR work. However it is an early characterisation of our current projects society. Emery’s concern with fragmentation as a maladaptive process is exemplary for the sort of analysis offered by the TIHR researchers of the BICRP.
It seems to me that TIHR papers following the termination of the BICRP significantly understate the significance of the necessarily transitional outcomes of this particular inquiry as well as the difficulties of the AR processes involved in the inquiry itself.
It may be that TIHR action based inquiry reached their limits in the inner and outer contexts of this particular project at this specific juncture. But my current students of construction find this inquiry and its implications to have relevance to their practitioner-research 60 years on from its collapse. This collapse reflects the reality of TIHR inquiry processes becoming casualties of the sort of turbulent social field identified by Emery and Trist in their crucial and still highly relevant 1965 paper.
For your information I have attached the final draft of the paper, which is the actual published version. However what may also interest you as an archivist are the notes I derived from the conference held in Cambridge prior to commencement of the inquiry and recorded in the BICRP archive itself.
Finally it may well be the case that there are within the archives papers which would further clarify the BICRP as a consulting process. I would be interested in viewing these. Dr Gurth Higgin, the TIHR lead researcher must have been involved in some way in the discussions which lead to the 1965 Causal Texture paper.
I hope you find this to be a useful contribution to the sort of work you are undertaking and I am available to assist with this particular aspect of it.
Yours faithfully
Alan Wild