Peter Sidorko

This chapter

This book has illustrated the manner in which scenario planning can be adopted. We can use it as a decision-making tool, as a strategic planning tool or as a tool for initiating and preparing an organisation for change. While the first two of these include aspects of change, it is primarily the last that this chapter will address. This chapter will highlight some of the issues surrounding organisational change and while recognising that scenario planning encompasses many of these issues, there are still matters that need further attention.

Change, demolition and reconstruction

We live in turbulent times. If I had been sleeping for the past 15 years and awoke to find the world that we inhabit today, I would be astounded by what had occurred during a relatively short period. If I had slept for 25 years I would be simply dumbfounded. The same might be argued for any period of time, yet the degree to which the information world has changed in recent times has been exceptionally transformational. I recently received an e-mail newsletter from my bank urging me to ‘Look beyond the uncertainties’ when it comes to investments. Of course they are referring to the uncertainties that the financial crisis of recent times has brought. They are, in their attention-grabbing way, advising me to undertake some scenario planning. As has been mentioned throughout this book, we undergo planning in our personal lives every day. Encapsulated in this planning is the creation of scenarios which lead us to make certain choices, even though, in some cases, we will not be fully cognizant of the repercussions of making these choices. While a large part of scenario planning is about ‘looking beyond the uncertainties’, imagining a future as it were, these uncertainties cannot be fully neglected as they will be deeply influential in the entire process. And realistically, how often are we even capable of looking beyond uncertainties?

Two of the significant themes recurring within these pages have been the inevitability of change and the ability for all of us to make choices and therefore, insofar as possible, take charge of these and influence changes. Recent global catastrophic events have perhaps challenged that view. To what extent could the devastating effects of the 2004 tsunami or the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile in 2010 have been minimised? Given the extent of these catastrophes, the answer is obviously very small. But even preparing for minor disasters, which most libraries do in the form of disaster preparedness planning, represents some form of scenario planning. Choices are made during such a planning exercise: what type of disasters will we plan for; what degree of damage is to be catered for; how much in the way of resources do we assign? At the annual University of Hong Kong Leadership Institute,¹ change is always a dominating theme. Throughout the four-day residential Institute, participants are assigned a case study, which enables them to work in a small, hopefully cohesive, group and to further explore the themes raised in the formal Institute programme. In recent years the case study has centered on the total destruction of a (fictitious) academic library. Participants are essentially asked to rebuild that library, although not explicitly stated as a physical entity, by responding to a series of questions that challenge their current thoughts on what constitutes an academic library and what the future might hold. Of course, it is relatively simple to devise a plan that simply reconstructs what exists today, and for some participants this is the manner in which they respond. But is planning an academic library today, based on today’s needs, an effective solution? The three or four or even more years that it will take to build the library will render the constructed edifice obsolete. Like these workshop participants, many of us would opt for a scenario that is readily identifiable to us but which may not be the best outcome. Even in an artificial environment such as a workshop, many of us are still reluctant to grasp radical changes that question not only the way we conduct our business but the very business in which we operate.

Why are many people so fundamentally averse, or at least reluctant, to envisioning an alternative future? Is this really something that we should do? Or is it the job of library leaders, and library leaders alone? There are no short answers to these questions, and it must be recognised that introducing scenario planning as a change process may not necessarily guarantee successful change. There are further considerations.

The human side of change

In any organisational change process, the first and foremost consideration for any leader is that of the human condition within the organisation. There are two aspects to this: first, the individual human condition and individual responses to change; and second, the organisational culture. Changing an organisation’s culture is impossible without first defining what the culture is, what aspects you wish to change, understanding how this culture has evolved and how it might be changed. Many definitions abound as to what organisational culture is or is not, and many of these have a reasonable degree of similarity. Edgar Schein provides many useful perspectives in attempting to define culture (Schein, 1985). One most relevant to this discussion, and which will again prove useful when assessing the degree of success of the changes, is that it is the

Let us first address the latter element of the human component in change, the organisational culture. Most scenario planning exercises will be undertaken in groups. The examples used throughout this book have all emphasised group interactivity as a key element to the processes. This is a key element to implementing a scenario planning exercise as the degree of participation will influence the extent of acceptance with the follow-up implementation and the ensuing changes that will be required. As a group participative process, the impact of organisational culture will be inevitable. If we step back to Schein’s definition, which essentially states that it is the set of shared influences that dictates how the organisation views itself and its environment and therefore how it behaves, we can immediately appreciate that any manager using scenario planning should be well aware of these influences.

Just like any other organisation, libraries too perpetuate their own organisational culture. While there may be a degree of similarity in organisational culture across libraries, and more specifically across libraries from the same sector, it would be foolish to assume that these similarities are deep or deeply rooted. Similarities across libraries’ organisational cultures occur because all librarians are trained in library and information science. Most librarians are also members of professional library bodies and associations. Many of these associations provide standards for librarians to adopt, including aspects of quality service, equity of access and ethical practices. Additionally, librarians share a unique nomenclature and jargon. It can be readily discerned how such commonalities may affect organisational culture to some degree. However, other factors that contribute to organisational culture should immediately dispel any notion that all libraries enjoy the same organisational culture. The basic assumptions and beliefs that form the culture are accrued and refined over a sometimes very long period of time. These basic building blocks may have been initiated at the highest level of the organisation but would have evolved quite significantly. Similarly, most organisations have people in power, i.e. management, as well as people with ‘informal’ power. In other words there are those who are not necessarily in management positions but who hold a strong influence over activities of the organisation as well as the behaviour of staff. That is not to say that the influences of organisational culture and the informal power brokers should be eradicated, even if that were naively considered remotely possible, but that there needs to be awareness of them and they should be harnessed for their ability, if at all possible, to enhance the process or to at least minimise their likely negative impact. Given this, it is obviously necessary that a leader in an organisation is cognizant of the culture that exists within the organisation and that a new recruit to the position, for example, would do well to develop this familiarity before embarking on a lengthy change process, be it initiated through scenario planning or some other mechanism.

At an individual level, the response to change is a highly personal experience. While an experienced leader well attuned to staff idiosyncrasies may feel confident in predicting how an individual may react to a change process, the reality is that previous responses to change may have little bearing on how that individual reacts in the future. So while responses to change are unique to individuals they will not be consistent with every individual over time. Chapter 5 presented a classic organisational change progression that most organisations will experience. To recap, these four stages consisted of complacency, denial, chaos, then transformation. These four stages are recognizable to most managers and leaders as periods that the organisation endures (or enjoys, depending on one’s perspective) during periods of change. At a more personal and individual level, these stages can be reinterpreted into more human responses to change, which will obviously then inform the organisational stages. Many authors (e.g. Elrod and Tippett, 2002; Zell, 2003) have likened individual and organisational responses to change with those identified by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her famous work, On Death and Dying (1969). Obviously organisational change cannot be likened to death, yet the five stages identified by Kübler-Ross will be readily identifiable with any experienced manager who has encountered difficulties implementing change. These five stages are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance. It is interesting to note that while Kübler-Ross documented these five stages in her landmark 1969 work, Mwalimu Imara (1975: 163) recognised the same change process in the sixth chapter of the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament, where the prophet Isaiah experiences these same five stages as he faces his task. While the difficulty in the change process can be documented dating back to 700 BC, some 2,700 years before Kübler-Ross, it provides little solace for today’s manager in knowing that human reactions to change date back as far as they appear to.

By placing these five expected stages within the context of a scenario planning exercise, it is conceivable that several of them could be potentially disruptive to the process. Beginning with denial, it is instantly recognisable by managers that a certain number of staff will fail to appreciate the necessity for change and therefore see no value whatsoever in undertaking a scenario planning exercise. One of the critical phases of introducing change, be it through a scenario planning exercise or otherwise, is to create an environment where it can be recognised by all in the organisation (an overly ambitious task, perhaps) that change simply must occur. The livelihood of the organisation, the continuity of employment or other risks must be stressed as a means of garnering support for the exercise. Kotter (1996) is a particularly strong advocate of this. While change models should be adopted and followed with a degree of caution, there is much merit in Kotter’s work, particularly his first three preparation phases, a critical stage that many change initiators fail to fully exploit. The first step of the preparation phase of Kotter’s model is to establish a sense of urgency. The sense of urgency is created from the factor or factors that are necessitating the change. These could have arisen from internal or external pressures or problems that have been identified with the existing organisation. It is the responsibility of organisational leaders to ensure that these pressures or problems are well communicated to members of the organisation. As such, the urgency is communicated and established. Sheltering staff from such pressures will only lead to rejection, or at best suspicion of related change processes, including the initial and subsequent stages of scenario planning.

While I have indicated that the pace of change in the information and library sector has been transformational in recent years, this is really only the case relative to the earlier history of the information professions. This is certainly the case when we compare ourselves with other professions where changes have had immediate and devastating impacts. Consider, for example, the business and finance sectors, where currency fluctuations and share market prices can have an instantly dramatic impact resulting in corporate closure and extinction. It is very rare that libraries face such immediate threats. As such it can be difficult to develop this need for urgency with people who can see change but who also realise that tomorrow will be another day and the library will continue. In other words, due to our previous, relatively stable and continuous existence a certain degree of complacency that may have crept in could lead to difficulty in establishing the sense of urgency, so this part of the process is extremely important in libraries. It is also a part of the change process that scenario planning manages very effectively.

In order to establish the need for change as a precursor to any planning, the message must be delivered and must be delivered using language that is understandable by all involved in the process. Understandable language is language that is appropriate to the people receiving the message and to the content of the message that is being transmitted. For example, in a large organisation it may be necessary to relay the same message using different approaches and different vocabularies. Think of large academic libraries, for example, and the diversity of staff that work in them, with skill sets and educational backgrounds as varied as the number of people employed. In other words, one message may need to be relayed in multiple ways. The need for communication does not end once the urgency for change has been established. Many authors note that change processes fail due to a paucity of ongoing communication, communication that is disingenuous and the lack of meaningful two-way communication. This also rings true during a scenario planning stage of change. There are, however, some notable peculiarities regarding communication and in particular the style of language that should be used in scenario planning. While much scenario planning is undertaken in the corporate world, the language of the corporate world is incongruous to what is trying to be realised through the scenario planning exercises. The corporate world’s language is littered with formality and jargon, abbreviations and acronyms, and is normally complicated, proper and rigid. None of these are characteristics that would strongly help us to engender our ‘perceptions about alternative future environments in which [our] decisions might be played out’ (Schwartz, 1996, p.4) or facilitate our ability to ‘dream about our own future’ (ibid.) and create alternative views of the future that enable us to be receptive and amenable to not only the probable but the possible. The language that is needed is the language of myths and stories, of visions and extremes, of fluidity and openness.

The significance of communication that is appropriate, consistent and continuous cannot be underestimated during any change process, and this is especially true of a change process utilising scenario planning. As scenario planning encompasses the envisioning of futures and usually includes a wide range of participation from staff with varying communication skills, these envisioned futures need to be communicated effectively so that a consistent understanding of them is possible. This requires sound communication skills from not only the leaders and facilitators of the process but all participants. While noting that communication skills vary significantly among workers, including library employees, patience and practical listening skills are also required.

Getting involved and involvement

Chapter 5 of this book set out the need to incorporate the involvement and views of ‘as many people as possible’ when it comes to developing possible future directions of the organisation. The degree of employee participation in any library’s scenario planning process will depend on the purpose which the process is striving towards, the type of organisation and its leadership. In current management philosophy, the benefits behind a participative management approach also apply to scenario planning. Perhaps first among these is that choices made (decisions) through a participative process are more likely to enjoy greater ownership and acceptance which can lead to increased productivity, quality and employee satisfaction. Additionally, greater participation should lead to a wider range of ideas and solutions as more brainpower is available. In a scenario planning context this is especially important as the need to envision futures will derive more possibilities with greater participation. At this point it is worth returning to Howard Gardner’s The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, as discussed in Chapter 5, in order to highlight the further potential advantages of greater participation. When brought to the scenario planning process, Gardner’s seven intelligences (Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, Bodily/Kinesthetic, Musical, Spatial, Logical/Mathematical and Linguistic) could well serve to enrich the process by providing a wider array of future possibilities as exemplified through these intelligences. There are also potential benefits, as noted previously, through greater employee acceptance of scenarios and the preferred scenario, as well as any consequent changes, when employees feel they have participated in the process that arrived at these. There are also longer term benefits for employees resulting from their participation in the scenario planning exercises. For example, Chermack and Nimon (2008) also found that those who participated in scenario planning exercises subsequently demonstrated a more intuitive-based decision-making style than those who did not.

Finally, with the appropriate environment and scene setting by a facilitator, encouraging active participation in scenario planning processes can often be a rewarding experience as participants may tend to open up and be more responsive in terms of using their imagination as they may deem the process less threatening than working on some more immediate change-related activities. Chapter 6 provided a strategic breakdown of how a preferred scenario can be devised. These seven steps form a logical and systematic process that most should find unintimidating. The exception, as noted in Chapter 6, may be that some library staff feel affronted through the imagining of possibilities that serve to dismantle the very environment to which they had grown comfortably accustomed. To some extent this affront is allayed by the fact that the process is future-focused and driven, and these staff may well soon recognise that there is a certain safety in this distance in time. This of course is a positive thing and will help the seven-step process to arrive at a participative and future-focused preferred scenario. The downside of this is that when it does come time to implement the changes to help arrive at the preferred scenario, certain staff may – indeed some most likely will – feel somewhat cheated by the process. The future, after all, is intended to happen.

Following through and embedding the change

The process of getting people involved in developing the preferred scenario that actually does result in a satisfactory outcome and a sense of ownership by participants is not the end of the journey. While this part of the journey will undoubtedly serve to facilitate many of the resultant changes, there will still be those unwilling, or at least concerned, to bring these changes to fruition. These will include staff who did not participate in the process, but as I have noted above, it will also include staff who had participated, imagined the future and seen it as a distant possibility, but who now face the reality and implications of that process.

A plethora of literature exists on managing and leading change in organisations; one of the very best, Kotter (1996), has been referred to already. In the library and information service environment, there is also a significant body of literature related to successful change. Ian Smith (2006, 2008) echoes many of Kotter’s strategies and sentiments, yet provides a uniquely library-centric approach to these. Many change strategists advocate a multi-step approach to implementing change. These steps are broadly arranged under three phases in the process, namely preparation, action and grounding. Some authors of change literature, Kotter and Smith included, argue that too much attention is focused on the middle stage, leaving the preparation and grounding phases as afterthoughts.

In a scenario planning situation it can be generally accepted that, if the process has been managed effectively, then the preparatory phase should be well covered as by its very nature this is part of what scenario planning is intended to achieve. The ‘action’ phase is when the changes are implemented and, as many managers are keen to see these happen, it is the phase where most attention is aimed. Outlined above are some of the strategies employed that can assist with the organisational change process. Once again, many of these are also already embedded in the scenario planning process but will require additional energy and resources beyond that process in order to effect the change. Most notable among these are: (i) providing extensive communication that is appropriate, targeted and consistent; as well as (ii) ensuring that participation is also as extensive as possible. Participation at this stage, however, is quite different to the scenario planning phase where the futures were imagined. During this phase the future is realised! Participation, therefore, comes in the form of decision-making on how best to effect the necessary changes, how to decide on the particular timeframe for each of these changes, the identification of different roles for individuals and so on. This will serve to further engender a sense of ownership achieved during the process of creating the preferred scenario.

The final phase of the change process, or cycle as many authors choose to define it, is the grounding or embedding phase. Like the preparation phase, this final phase is often ignored by managers or at least under-represented in the overall change process. The reasons for this can be instantly recognisable to any manager. Change takes time and during the initial phases, or the action phase alone if that has been the approach, a degree of tiredness, perhaps even boredom, may creep into the manager’s psyche. When the change has been made a sense of achievement is realised. A long, sometimes hard-fought, battle has ended. Things are now different and as they were seemingly intended. It must be recognised that the stage that appears to be the end of the change process, when ‘the most visible parts of a change program have been completed’ (Smith, 2008: p. 27), then the ‘process of change does not stop’ (ibid.). As Smith notes, the reason that this is necessary is that a certain ‘organisational inertia’ may soon creep into the process or a desire by some key players in the process to return to the old ways of doing things. It must be kept in mind that these attitudes are made possible as a result of the release of focus from the manager/management who chooses to relish what appears to be successful change and therefore is self-rewarded by keeping a distance from the end result. This loss of focus can – although not always, as the significance of the change will be one factor here – lead to a rapid dismantling of all the good that had been achieved.

In order to overcome the effects of stopping too early there are two possible approaches. The first of these is to persevere, maintain focus and keep a watchful eye over the changes. The reality of this, however, is that library managers are busy people and this may not fit within already tight schedules. Additionally, how does one know when the watchful eye can be relaxed? The second of these is to undertake an ‘honest evaluation’ (Smith, 2008). As Smith notes, some difficult questions must be asked, including: ‘Have the expected benefits been achieved?’; ‘What can be learned from how the change was handled?’; ‘What might have been done better?’; and ‘What remains to be done?’ (Smith, 2008, p. 27). The emphasis here must be on providing an ‘honest’ assessment. While it may be rewarding for a manager to enjoy what appears to be a successful change, a failure to fully embed that change through careful observation and evaluation may lead to a dismantling that would have wasted a large amount of time, energy and resources of, not only the manager, but all the staff involved in the process. Finally, for those staff in the process who were inspired by the changes and keen for them to occur, significant resentment will encroach, as will a loss of respect for the manager who was unable to fully see the change through to successful completion.

Change and scenario planning

While it has been said in this book and elsewhere that change is a given, there is general consensus that the change that is taking place is quite irregular, or discontinuous. In other words, there are incidents when the change is quite dramatic (disruptive change) and there are other times when the change is almost trivial or incremental. The difficulty this presents for organisations, and especially managers, is that it is a struggle to anticipate the degree of impending change as we cannot rely on the past as our guide, given the irregularity and discontinuity of previous change. This book has in many ways provided a blueprint for change, quite irrespective of whether the change is likely to be trivial or transformational. Embarking on a scenario planning process represents one of the more forward-looking, yet energy and resource consuming, change tools that a library or other organisation can adopt. As such, investing in scenario planning as a change process cannot be done in isolation from other change practices and principles. The investment is far too great for it to be done in isolation. Yet the rewards that await the leaders of change who adopt these practices in unison are far too great to be neglected.