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MARK ADDLESON
Associate, The OCL Group
There are three pieces to my professional life: teacher, writer-researcher, and consultant. What connects all three is my deep interest in how organizations work and in different ways of approaching change. My aim is to help people
- understand why there is an unavoidable need to change the way things get done at work,
- see new directions and possibilities for change, and
- develop cooperative work practices, so that, recognizing their collective responsibility for getting things done, they are accountable to one another for meeting commitments.
The transformational change in South Africa during the 1980s and 90s got me started on organizational change, both in theory and practice. The two most important lessons I learned were:
- new possibilities will be realized when people are open to and committed to change and
- the changes that happened then and there were unique in some ways, but not exceptional.
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This is a time of profound change - personal, organizational, as well as social - as we slowly emerge from a way of seeing the world that is five hundred years old and quite incompatible with the circumstances we are dealing with today. For example, while it is increasingly obvious that there are limits to the earth's abundance, economists continue to advocate for more and more production and consumption, arguing that this is necessary and good. "Enough" is still not an option. And, while you cannot escape the complexity, or 'wickedness,' of the problems we face (such as climate change), the methods we use to deal with them treat the problems as if they were 'tame'. While solutions call for collective action by those most closely involved, we expect individual 'experts,' with little or no stake in the issues at hand, to solve them for us.
Change is not an option, but, influencing the direction of change - what, when, and how it happens - people can determine whether it is effective. In a complex, networked world, where the issues we deal with at work are ill-defined and fluid, agility is important. You get this when people have the means, ability, and authority to organize themselves. To accomplish this kind of change, we want action that is practical and piece-meal, gradual and localized; in other words, the opposite of 'whole systems change'. This takes leaders who are interested in collaborating, are intimately involved in taking on the work of change, and who aim for realistic outcomes that matter to them, not for designing systems and structures for others to adopt.
I am an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University with Bachelors, Honors, and Masters Degrees in Economics and a PhD in Management from the Graduate School of Business, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
I have written a lot of articles and a few books in the course of my career. My latest book, Beyond Management: Taking Charge at Work, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in fall of 2011. I specialize in understanding how organizations work, when and why they don't work, in the limitations of management, and in what to do about all this. Since the mid-1990s I've worked and taught in the area of knowledge management, which includes using technologies to support knowledge sharing and communities of practice. My consulting experience ranges from management development to regional development. I have been involved in large-scale privatization initiatives as well as integrating the treatment of women prisoners with co-occurring disorders (emphasizing collaboration among treatment providers) and I have developed new approaches to leadership, learning, and problem-solving in organizations.
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