The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture - Hardcover

Gibbons, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0134000331 ISBN 13: 9780134000336

Publisher: Ft Pr, 2015

Synopsis

Why most of what you read about change management is nonsense...Is it time to euthanize Change Management, and replace the concept with Change-Agile Businesses and Change Leadership?  Why? More importantly, how?Turbulent environments demand constant change, but the mindset, skills, and behaviors taught to business leaders are unhelpful and sometimes flatly misleading. What is more, many high-profile approaches to change do not help: they are based on untested belief systems, unreliable methods, and psychological myth.  In The Science of Successful Organizational Change, Paul Gibbons offers the first blueprint for change for that fully reflects the newest advances in mindfulness, behavioral economics, sociology, and complexity theory.

The Science of Organizational Change identifies dozens of change management myths, bad models, and unhelpful metaphors, replacing some with twenty-first century research and revealing gaps where research needs to be done. Paul Gibbons links the origins of theories about change to the history of ideas and suggests that the human sciences will provide real breakthroughs in our understanding of people in the twenty-first century. For example, change fundamentally entails risk, yet little is written for business people about how breakthroughs in the psychology of risk can help change leaders. Change fundamentally involves changing people's minds, yet the most recent research shows that provision of facts may strengthen resistance.
 
Starting with a rigorous and evidence-based understanding of what makes people in organizations tick, he presents a complete framework for organizing your company around successful change.  With case studies from Google, IBM, Shell, British Airways, British Petroleum, HSBC, and Morgan Stanley,  Gibbons goes deeper and broader than any previous discussion of the subject.In this multi-disciplinary treatment of change leadership, you will learn: 

• How a deeper understanding of flaws in human decision-making can help you make far better choices when the stakes are largest
• How new advances in neuroscience have altered best practices in influencing colleagues, negotiating with partners, engaging followers' hearts, minds, and behaviors, and managing resistance
• How to bring greater meaning and mindfulness to your organization - and reap their benefits
• How new ideas from analytics, forecasting, and risk are humbling those who thought they knew the future - and how the human side of analytics, and the psychology of risk are paradoxcially more important in this technologically enabled world
• How to improve your boardroom, promoting more effective conversations about strategy, ethics, and decision-making
• What chaos and complexity theories mean in the context of your own business
• How to create resilient and agile business cultures, and anti-fragile, dynamic business structures

To link science with your "on-the-ground" reality, Gibbons interviews top CEOs who are applying its principles. You'll find case studies from well-known companies like IBM and Shell; and deeply relevant quotations from history's greatest leaders and thinkers.
 
Change will never be easy. To systematically improve your odds, you need science, a framework built on science, and actionable lessons from leaders who've made change work. You need Paul Gibbons' The Science of Organizational Change .

About this title

From the Back Cover:

The VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) World Demands Change-Agile Businesses

Turbulent environments demand constant change, but the mindset, skills, and behaviors taught to business leaders are unhelpful and sometimes flatly misleading. What is more, many high-profile approaches to change do not help: they are based on untested belief systems, unreliable methods, and psychological myth.

The Science of Organizational Chang e identifies dozens of myths, bad models, and unhelpful metaphors, replacing some with twenty-first century research and revealing gaps where research needs to be done. Paul Gibbons links the origins of theories about change to the history of ideas and suggests that the human sciences will provide real breakthroughs in our understanding of people in the twenty-first century. For example, change fundamentally entails risk, yet little is written for business people about how breakthroughs in the psychology of risk can help change leaders. Change fundamentally involves changing people’s minds, yet the most recent research shows that provision of facts may strengthen resistance.

Gibbons’ explorations of the frontiers of twenty-first century behavioral science will help you build influence, improve communication, optimize decision making, and sustain change.

In complex organizations and systems, there are no silver bullets. But you can shift away from techniques that are harmful or that science says do not work and toward techniques supported by solid evidence.

• Leading people through change: Tactics from 21st century human sciences
  Getting beyond flawed “pop psychology”–and failed “pop leadership”
• New ways to change behavior–without coercion (carrots and sticks)
  Preserving dignity and autonomy, avoiding coercion or paternalism–and succeeding
• A new science of changing hearts and minds
  Reconceiving resistance, handling social complexity, using facts, and leveraging metacognition
• Leading with science: The emergence of evidence-based management
  From “anti-scientific” management to experiment, hypothesis testing, and analytics

RETHINK EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT CHANGE

• Discard metaphors such as “carrots and sticks,” “burning platforms,” the “soft side” of business, and “resistance,” all of which destroy effectiveness
• Think about the risk, the true costs, and the results of change programs in a completely new way
• Turn new insights from mindfulness, behavioral economics, complexity theory, and analytics into practical tools
• Discard pseudoscience, and pop psychology as guides for how people in business behave
• Make the shift towards greater accountability, scientific validity, and measurement
• Replace change management with change agility and change leadership

To make change work, you need to base it on science, not intuition or myth. In this book, Paul Gibbons offers the first blueprint for change that integrates recent advances in neuroscience, mindfulness, behavioral economics, sociology, complexity theory, and analytics.

Rigorously grounded in evidence, this multi-disciplinary approach fully reflects the realities of change in today’s complex organizations. Gibbons offers actionable guidance for every facet of your change initiative–from strategy and planning, through the tactics of changing hearts minds and behaviors, to creating change-agile organizations.

You’ll gain a more mature understanding of how people and systems change. And you’ll learn to apply these insights–increasing resilience, agility, and innovation throughout your organization.

About the Author:

PAUL GIBBONS (from London, England) is passionate about science, and how science can be used to improve human flourishing. His writing and teaching "at the nexus of science, philosophy, and business" focuses on the application of the wider human sciences (not just psychology but philosophy, medicine, public health, mathematics, behavioral economics, and sociology) to business and business leadership.

He began his career in neurochemistry, followed by Masters-level study in International Economics and Finance. At 20, he moved to London as a "quant" derivatives trader, working at Salomon Brothers and Morgan Stanley. He eventually became Director of Eurobond Trading for the world's third largest bank. At 28, he resumed doctoral study in neuroscience, and then joined PwC as a strategist and expert on derivatives, advising on trading disasters such as Barings and Long-Term Capital. He then joined PwC's "Strategy, Innovation and Change" think-tank, helping develop the firm's methodologies in change management, innovation and corporate transformation. He ran many of PwC's board-level leadership programs, as well as change management on a $1 billion program for the UK government. 

In 2001, Gibbons then founded his own firm, Future Considerations, which grew at 60% per annum under his leadership and still delivers flagship programs in many of the top fifty European companies. After selling that firm, he joined the University of Wisconsin, Madison as a lecturer, while continuing to coach senior executives worldwide. He has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, the Guardian, and Times newspapers, and in 2008, CEO Magazine named him one of two "CEO Super Coaches." He recently published a small self-coaching workbook entitled Reboot Your Life: A 12-day Program for Ending Stress, Realizing Your Goals, and Being More Productive.

He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his two sons, Conor and Luca and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Denver. 

About this edition

• Publisher: Ft Pr
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0134000331
• ISBN 13: 9780134000336
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 308