Are You Sure You Want a Small Church?

Book excerpt: In Participative Transformation Roger Klev and Morten Levin insist that orchestrating participative learning and developmental processes are essential in organizational change. Drawing on pragmatic philosophy and the authors' experience of organizational development initiatives and action research, this book connects practical change-related activity with a broader critical and theoretical perspective. The book is divided into two parts. The first provides an introduction to participative change management and particularly to the concept of co-generative learning inherited from action research in which change becomes a joint management and employee learning, development, and knowledge creating process. In the second part, the focus of each chapter is on an aspect of the practice of change management, but in each case, still linked to a critical reflective discussion of the core issues. Anybody finding themselves involved in organizational change, either as a change leader, internal problem owner, or as an external change agent or action researcher, will learn much about how planning the process is not about attempting to pre-program or engineer results. It is about introducing the kind of learning and development that shapes a self-sustaining developmental process that becomes an integral part of the daily activities of an organisation. This process is essentially one of collective reflection in order to develop alternatives for action, experimentation to achieve desired goals, then collective reflection on the results achieved. The process is cyclical. Reflection on own practice can contribute to direct improvements of own practice, but it may also contribute to new practices, new frameworks of understanding, and processes involving other participants and other fields of interaction. Practical guidance in the book includes advice on starting up an organisational development process and dealing with situations where years of experience of being controlled by others needs challenging to actively engage employees in shaping their own work conditions. Readers will learn how experiencing negative results may well be a very good basis for continued development. It is through systematic experiments that one can develop the organization, and this entails the possibility of making mistakes. There is even guidance on how to handle an organisational development process when it is in terminal trouble, to ensure there is still learning from it. Participative Transformation is essential reading for anyone involved or interested in organisational development, wanting to focus on a perspective from which participative change activities are seen as needing to be a part of everyday practice in any work situation.