Thomas N. Gilmore

Designing the Social Architecture of Participation in Large Groups to Effect Organizational Change

Health care organizations are facing dramatic changes. Given their complexity and the value of autonomy held by many of the key professional groups, much of the adaptation to these changes will require working in large groups with multiple levels and different units present. Yet it is known that leading large groups is difficult. They are either over structured, thereby reducing the learning component, or they are under structured, thereby allowing participants `anxieties to lead to dysfunctional splitting, fight/flight, or dependency. This article addresses the challenge of structuring large groups, what the authors term the social architecture for participation.

Projective Identification in the Consulting Relationship: Exploring the Unconscious Dimensions of a Client System

This paper explores the impact of projective identification on consulting relationships. The concept of projective identification, drawn from psychoanalytic literature, is used to elucidate the ways in which the dynamics within consulting teams comes to mirror important and unconscious aspects of the client system. Attention to this process thus provides opportunities for understanding important dynamics of the client system which are often inaccessible through more traditional modes of social science inquiry. It is often that these unrecognized, implicit forces can emerge in the course of an intervention and undermine attempts at collaborative social change. Three case examples illustrate the operation of this process, and finally a discussion of the practical implications of attending to it is offered.

Clarifying decision making in high-growth ventures: The use of responsibility charting☆

Abstract Many new ventures fail as a result of their inability to navigate successfully through the developmental challenges posed by rapid growth. These issues are particularly salient for founder-owners who often have difficulty in authorizing a more formal structure than the face-to-face, personal mode of operating that led to the organizations initial successes. This article focuses on the developmental transition of decision-making processes when previous strengths, such as informality, may become weaknesses. As the venture becomes more complex, problems are more divergent and less able to be resolved by a single individual or team. The sheer rate of growth can stress the capabilities of the existing structure. The key dilemma for an organization is how to get the necessary clarity and accountability without the rigidity and loss of creativity and motivation that often attends a restructuring. The authors argue that the process and structure of responsibility charting can be a useful tool both to diagnose and to intervene during critical transitions. Through two case examples, the authors assert that the process and results of responsibility charting allow groups to set the rules within which they and others will reach the substantive decisions. One of the most powerful aspects of the process is that it allows a group to discuss the difficult issues of power and authority. Responsibility charting ties discussions about participation and influence to task-related reasons and assures that discussions about who should be involved hinge on the value that their participation would add to the decision. Some caveats to using the process are presented, such as the risk of surfacing latent conflicts before the entrepreneur wants to deal with them or encouraging subordinates to push for delegations that the founder may not be ready to confer. The authors illustrate how responsibility charting can greatly help an organization negotiate the difficult structuring choices during a critical growth slate. As a team-building experience, it clears the air among the original core group and concretely diagnoses difficulties they may be experiencing. Greater clarity on how decisions are to be made and accountability for those decisions result from these discussions. Finally, the decisions are easily communicated to a wider audience—a critical feature given the numbers of new people who join fast-growing new ventures and must learn to operate rapidly and effectively.

Innovation in the public sector: Dilemmas in the use of Ad Hoc processes

Increasingly, public sector executives are using ad hoc groups and processes-what we term “parallel processes”-as a vehicle for innovation. The central question is, however, when parallel processes are developmental and when they are bypasses that avoid critical issues. This paper reviews some potential weaknesses in the use of such groups by examining several cases that show how they can impede the actual implementation of the innovation. We propose a transitional perspective that regards parallel process as scaffolding, enabling new ideas and behaviors to grow strong enough to eventually allow their transfer to the permanent structure.

Organizational learning and the leadership skill of time travel

The turbulence enveloping so many organizations today makes it increasingly likely that learning from one’s experience may be both too slow and too embedded in rapidly obsolescing frameworks. Addresses the dilemmas of learning under such conditions of rapid change. Presents an argument for the need for leaders to time travel, to link the future, past, and present to each other even as those links seem frail, even ruptured. Explicates a technique called “histories of the future” that has people locate themselves at some distance in the future (five to ten years), in a specific context and imaginatively look back over the time period. By having several people improvisationally develop a “history of the future” the organization can often invent options that are a rich mix of serendipity and rational thinking. Vivid histories of the future enable people to construct rich narratives, to look at imaged actions, mistakes, successes, moves and countermoves, threats and opportunities in the wider environment, then to step back and connect current points to these possible futures. Reviews the literature on organizational learning that is relevant to the issue of learning for the future in dramatically different environments and suggests why the time travelling skills of leadership are key to helping people prepare for novel challenges.

The Use of Case Management as a Revitalizing Theme in a Juvenile Justice Agency

Increasingly we are told that organizations and institutions are in crisis. They are less able to meet the expectations which their constitutents and clients place on them. They fail to create conditions for their own staff to do high-quality, productive work and are ill-suited to adapt to rapidly changing environments. Recent best sellers offer both diagnoses and prescriptions for these ills (Peters and Waterman, 1982; Peters and Austin, 1985; Bennis and Nanus, 1985; Kanter, 1983; Iacocca, 1984). In the following paper, we explore in depth one example of the joining of a new leader with a segmented, dispirited organization and look at dynamics of revitalitzation in a public agency. In particular, we examine the interactions between the leader and the staff and the role of a strategic theme as a vehicle for both directing and organizing the turn around. The first author served as a consultant to the Department of Juvenile Justice. The second author had just been appointed commissioner. We begin with a brief description of the agency at the time of the arrival of the new commissioner and explore her first 18 months, looking at the initial shaping of a strategic theme and the difficulties in translating the theme into concrete initiatives to alter the standard operating procedures of the organization. We conclude with a discussion of the learnings from this case.

The Leadership Factor@@@Leadership and Innovation@@@Making a Leadership Change@@@Thriving on Chaos, Handbook for a Management Revolution

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