Ask an Expert: Creativity and Leadership

This is maybe THE big leadership issue for me. Johnnie Moore, who joined The Hub recently, put me onto a paper by a guy called Dave Snowden, that compares Top-down (idealistic) change with Bottom-up (naturalistic) change, and comes down in favour of the latter. Here's a quote from it:

"In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it.

This is common not only to process-based theory but also to practice that follows the general heading of the learning organization.

Naturalistic approaches, by contrast, seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system.

Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted. The organization thus evolves to a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate when discovered."

It's a bit mind-boggling because, as Johnnie points out, Dave and his co-author, Cynthia, have unfeasibly large brains. It does take me a while to work my way through what they are saying. But, it's usually worth it and I feel it's stretched my own brain in a way that means I might understand how change can be led a little better.

Here's Johnnie's original post if you want to trace it back to the paper itself, which is called Bramble Bushes In a Thicket (Be warned: it hurt my head to read it).

On a lighter note, Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Riddersrale say both approaches are wrong and what works best is 'middle-up-down' change, driven by much-maligned middle managers, who are in touch enough with the front line to really know what's going on in the market and whose job involves reporting upwards to the 'bosses'.

Having been criticised and down-sized for the past two decades as getting in the way of change (unfairly in many cases, in my view, since de-layering was about saving money more than anything) it's refreshing to see middle management suddenly being made heroes of change "translating vision into action and action into vision". Let's hope so...(That's from Funky Business and their source is Sloan Management Review, Spring 1988, 'Towards Middle-Up-Down Management: accelerating information creation', by I. Nonaka, which looks at Japanese middle-up-down change)

Reading the comments so far it is interesting for me to see this subject given that I find myself in the middle of a massive period of change between 2 multinational and culturally diverse companies.

In my case the change is being driven top down with a very clear and compelling vision of the future. However, the message is clear - buy in or be gone!

This, as you would expect, is causing lots of friction within the companies and as a result a mass defensive operation is in place. It seems though that the management are accepting collateral damage with the envisaged result of a focused workforce at the end.

The ability to change the company is actively encouraged at all levels of hierarchy, again top down supporting the initiaitives to change anything which makes no sense. A clear message then "this is what we want to achieve and you can make it happen, but we will achieve it regardless".

Interested to hear your experiences.

Thanx

Jason.