About the author

“It is my passion to, together with clients, explore new ways, make change inspirational, and set things in motion. I believe that innovation is achieved only through innovative methods and that inspiration is created only through inspiring interventions. We have some fine challenges ahead of us!”

Dr. Arend J. Ardon (1967) has a degree in both social psychology and business administration. He has been a partner at Holland Consulting Group since 2001. It is his passion to, together with clients, make change inspirational, set things in motion, and explore new ways. This sometimes involves exposing and breaking out of well-worn patterns to be able to pick up the pace of change. Arend likes to be closely involved in innovation processes, often supported by his team of highly experienced change coaches.

Common requests that he gets from clients include:

• ‘Help us shape a beautiful and inspiring change process.’

• ‘Help us understand why we are having so much trouble getting change off the ground; help us break out of the cycle.’

• ‘Help us bolster our people’s entrepreneurial spirit or customer focus.’

• ‘How can we as a company up our game when it comes to innovation?’

• ‘Help us bring to life our strategy.’

• ‘We want to launch a leadership process to learn together with our managers how to support the new course with our behavior.’

• ‘Design and facilitate a memorable leadership journey for us.’

Arend teaches at various business schools, including Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics, where he holds a senior lectureship. Besides being a sought-after conference and seminar speaker, he also gives presentations as part of in-company programs on a regular basis.

Ardon has published dozens of articles and several books, including Klantgestuurde teams, Veranderen spiegelen aan anderen, Klantleren, Duurzaam veranderen (co-author) and Essentie van leiderschap (co-author). His strong desire to understand ‘what is really happening here’ was the driving force behind his doctoral thesis entitled Moving Moments; Leadership and Interventions in Dynamically Complex Change Processes, which earned him a doctorate from VU University Amsterdam in 2009.

He does not only work in the Netherlands, but is also invited by companies in other countries, such as the Netherlands Antilles, Great Britain, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Sweden, Oman, Singapore, and Suriname.

Break the Cycle!

Other books by Arend Ardon (in Dutch):

Klantgestuurde teams

Veranderen spiegelen aan anderen

Ontketen vernieuwing

Arend Ardon

Break the Cycle!

How managers block change without realizing it

To Bram and Ruth

© 2018 Arend Ardon

ISBN:

Paperback: 978-94-92004-62-8

E-book (Epub): 978-94-92004-63-5

E-book (Kindle): 978-94-92004-64-2

Original title: Doorbreek de cirkel! Hoe managers onbewust verandering blokkeren (Amsterdam: Business Contact, 2011 / 2017 [18th edition]). Translated from the Dutch by Erwin Postma.

Cover design: Studio Kers, Rotterdam

Interior design and lay-out: Bert Holtkamp, Groningen

Photo author: Frank Groeliken, Zaandam

This edition published by Warden Press, Amsterdam

Ebook production: booqlab.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher.

wardenpress.com

Preface

You’ll only see it when you get it

Ever been on a winter driving course where you were taught skid recovery techniques? The number one rule in a skid: lay off the brakes! Hitting the brakes will only make the skid worse. I remember one conversation I had with my instructor about that big red light on the dashboard.

Me: ‘What’s that red light for?’ Instructor: ‘It will light up when you hit the brakes.’

Me: ‘But surely I’ll know when I’ve hit the brakes?’ Instructor: ‘You probably won’t.’

Me: ‘I find that hard to believe. Besides, I won’t be applying the brakes anyway, you’ve just taught me not to.’

Instructor: ‘Just drive...’

I remember I got into a skid and made two 360-degree turns. The red light came on ...

Me: ‘But I didn’t even brake.’

Instructor: ‘You thought you weren’t going to and you think you didn’t. That’s what the red light is for.’

I found this absolutely fascinating. I had basically hit the brakes unknowingly. And that while I had so firmly resolved not to. It was a reflex: I saw danger, so I applied the brakes. Instead of keeping me safe, my subconscious self-preservation ended up putting me in danger...

Years later, I would regularly encounter similar situations in the corporate world. At many companies and organizations that engaged me as a consultant, I would find a typical manager who wanted an open and honest culture at his department, where people can speak their minds, where every opinion counts, and where managers therefore must show an interest and ask questions. And this manager would really mean all of this. But whenever discussions at a meeting would get heated, he would still go out of his way to convince others they were wrong. Result: others would just give in to be done with it and think twice about expressing their opinion next time. The manager was not aware of his behavior. If only there had been a big red light on the meeting room table...

The more I was asked to breathe new life into change processes that had gone stale, the more examples I encountered of these kinds of fascinating situations. Managers with top-notch change management expertise who knew exactly how managers should act, but who still saw their change processes come to nothing. They would all work with the best of intentions to steer the process in the right direction but end up with unwanted outcomes. This was because they would, without realizing it, do exactly those things that cause change processes to fail.

Given that we are not aware of how our actions lead to change processes grinding to a halt, we do not address them at management meetings. Instead, we talk about milestone plans and change strategies that will help us change the process and the employees. But as we discuss plans, we do things that have the power to make or break the change process. And we do them without realizing it.

Wanting to get to the bottom of this, I dedicated four years of postgraduate research to this phenomenon, attending around 100 meetings, ranging from board meetings to management team meetings and regular team meetings, and keeping an accurate log of what was said and what happened at those meetings, ultimately totaling around 1,700 pages of notes. I also spoke to managers personally to tune in to their thinking. The next step was to analyze all my notes, tracking down recurring patterns, identifying thought processes, and studying management behavior. It opened up a whole new world to me!

Without realizing it:

• we have counterproductive assumptions about change processes

• we don’t do as we say

• we display behavior that makes employees dependent and reactive

• we undermine employees’ entrepreneurial spirit and sense of responsibility

• we tackle recurring problems with the same approach every time, and

• we try to block discussion of our own ineffectiveness.

If you listen closely and look at what is going on in the here and now, you will obtain a wealth of information about how change processes end up stagnating. It is a learning curve. You will not see it right away, because all those ‘suspicious’ comments and behaviors initially seem so logical and familiar. And because we view them through the same glasses that caused the problems in the first place.

This book will help you understand why change processes stagnate. And, even more importantly, how you are one of the main reasons why they stagnate. This book will help you become aware of your subconscious assumptions and behavior, and make you see the unwanted effects. It will show you how you are keeping the vicious cycle going and how the same problems keep coming back. The emphasis in this book is not on providing tips and tricks, but rather on helping you understand how you are the one perpetuating difficult situations. By analyzing your own behavior and approach, you will learn to breathe new life into your stale change processes.

This book is structured along the lines of the six basic principles of breaking the cycle and achieving real change.

Break the Cycle! - The Six Principles

1. Recognize persistent situations
Sometimes the problem and the solution are crystal clear. When that happens, you ‘only’ have to intervene. But in sticky situations, intervening often only makes things worse. That is when you need an understanding of how you are perpetuating the problem through the way you think and act. The question is how to recognize these kinds of situations.

2. Be aware of your thinking about change
Without realizing it, you have all kinds of assumptions about how change processes work. These assumptions are often based on the idea that you, as the manager, can simply ‘implement’ change. Your choices are based on these assumptions, and so they can get you into serious trouble. You can, however, breathe new life into change processes by rethinking your assumptions.

3. See what you do when the going gets tough
The key to successful change lies in the here and now, in what happens between you and others in day-to-day interactions. You know how important it is to get your employees involved in the decision-making process, how important it is to listen to them, and how important it is to get to the bottom of their concerns. But chances are that, when push comes to shove, you lose sight of all that. This is because when the going gets tough, our autopilot tends to take over. Without realizing it, we unilaterally try to stay in control of the situation, thus undermining the change process. If you are aware of this happening, you can override your autopilot and switch back to manual mode.

4. Understand how you are perpetuating the situation
Whenever changes are not going smoothly, you sometimes feel you are going around in circles. And you probably are. It is very likely that you and your people have indeed ended up in a vicious cycle that has you all running in a kind of hamster wheel. All you are doing is perpetuating the current situation. But you can stop the hamster wheel.

5. Dare to discuss the undiscussable
Learning happens when you openly address the effectiveness of your actions. The thing is, however, that we are not very good at that. We often try to sweep information about our own ineffectiveness under the rug, using so-called defensive strategies, which are very logical and inconspicuous. This is how we ultimately block learning and change. Talking about it and getting it out in the open has turned out to be a very effective way of unblocking it.

6. Start small
We talk about change a lot, and we are quick to set up all kinds of projects. But real change is realized only when you manage to create an open communication climate in which everyone, including you, learns from the things that happen. A transparent guideline will give you something to go by in putting this into practice.

Every chapter is structured in the same way.

• Real-life example
An explicit fragment of a management team discussion or a conversation between a manager and their staff is used to illustrate the subject covered in the chapter. These exchanges are taken from a company where management wants to realize culture change to make employees more enterprising and more result-driven. At first glance, the exchanges may seem very normal. It all seems so logical...

• What is actually happening?
The chapter will help you understand what is actually happening. And how those seemingly logical exchanges show how we, without realizing it, are making change processes grind to a halt, undermining people’s sense of responsibility, and causing recurring problems. A combination of real-life examples and new insights.

• How to breathe new life into a situation
Targeted suggestions will help you break deadlocks, generally by openly discussing the situation, openly addressing your own role, and exploring new ways together.

• Breakthroughs
In every chapter, you will find ‘breakthroughs’, which are exercises for you to do in your own day-to-day work to put insights from this book into practice. The emphasis of these exercises is often on boosting your understanding of your own role in any sticky situations that you may find yourself in at work. These interventions have all been tried and tested in real-life environments, and they have proven their effectiveness.

• The essence
Every chapter closes with a brief recap of the essence of what was covered in the chapter in four or five bullet points.

The headers in the chapters are not exact copies of those listed above, as that would make things boring. But you will instantly recognize the line of thought they represent in each chapter.

This book is based on my PhD thesis entitled Moving Moments. In working on my thesis and this book, I have drawn inspiration from a number of authors, with Chris Argyris being my main source of inspiration. He has written a great deal about the inconsistency between what managers say and what they do. Peter Senge’s work shows beautifully how we inadvertently perpetuate problems. Bill Noonan and Diana McLain Smith have managed to make Argyris’ often difficult-to-read works more accessible. Check the back of this book for a list of books worth reading by these and several other authors. What all these books have in common is that they do not try to present change processes as customizable step-by-step plans. Instead, they all try to get to the bottom of what really happens. Although that is indeed a more complex undertaking, it is ten times more exciting than the misleading simplicity of ‘do it this way and it will all work out fine.’