Identifying Technical and Social Change Methodologies to Close the Gap

Organizational systems have interdependent elements that interact with each other to achieve a purpose. Two critical systems in organizational change are the technical and the social systems of an organization. Synergy is the ability for two or more systems to work together to achieve more success than when they work alone. Early research by professors Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth provided evidence of technical and social system synergy in their research on the effects of technological innovations within a British coal-mining operation.³ Trist and Bamforth studied why performance in coal mines significantly varied when the mines had similar new technological improvements. They discovered that performance was the highest when the social systems (e.g., how the men organized, made decisions regarding the work, and interacted with their supervisor) also changed to accommodate the new technology in the mines. Nearly 20 years later, General Motors unintentionally repeated these experiments by updating its auto-manufacturing facilities with the latest technological innovations that they had seen in Japan without changing its social systems, which were not as visible on their visits to Japan. The General Motors facilities were unable to compete with the Toyota Production System, which had changed both technical and social systems in Toyota’s automobile production facilities in America.

Knowing where you want to go and where you are is not enough to get you there. Every year people make New Year’s resolutions to change—save more, lose weight, spend more time with friends and family, stop smoking, and so forth. Athletic clubs are packed with new members the first few months of a new year. By the end of spring, attendance has dropped back to pre–New Year levels. Many methodologies for losing weight are easily available, such as the Atkins diet, the South Beach diet, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, and many others. Experience shows that the majority of individuals who lose weight via these methodologies gain it back again if they do not have a long-term plan to maintain their new, lower weight.

Similarly, organizations also have many improvement methodologies to select from: Six Sigma, Total Quality Management (TQM), Team Building, Empowerment, Lean, Reengineering, Management by Objectives (MBO), High-Performance Work Teams, and the latest new technology. Respected management author and scholar John Kotter asserts that, based on the evidence, most change efforts fail.⁴ Similar to weight loss, organizations often experience a brief period of improved performance only to return to the status quo, creating more skepticism about future change efforts. Focusing change methodologies on both technical and social systems has been shown in social-technical systems research to be effective in creating sustainable change. TQM from the 1980s is a change methodology that focused on both technical systems (e.g., data analysis, plan-do-study-act improvement process) and social systems (e.g., leadership engagement, employee empowerment). The issue with TQM, however, is that by design it was at least a 10-year process, and in today’s competitive environment, the organization doesn’t have that kind of time. The technology explosion took off in the 1980s, and reengineering became the methodology of choice because it delivered performance improvements faster. The problem with reengineering was that it focused heavily on the technical side of change. The social side of the organization was minimized and consequently was not engaged in the change efforts, leading to issues in implementation. So here we have come full circle with findings from the 1950s in the coal mines of Great Britain that show synergy is created by concurrently integrating technical- and social-system improvement efforts, which has been shown to lead to higher overall performance for the organization.

The technical system of an organization consists of not only the hardware, equipment, and technology but also the techniques, methods, configurations, procedures, and improvement methodologies used to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the operation. The specific improvement methodology selected considers the KRA and characteristics of the change effort (e.g., magnitude, priority, and stakeholder impact). There are many improvement methodologies, including TQM, Six Sigma, Lean, Restructuring, and Reengineering, that deal with the technical system. However, initiating only a technical system change may lead to improved performance, but just as was experienced in the coal mines and at General Motors, performance is not optimized without a concurrent focus on social systems. The famous Hawthorne studies, conducted by Elton Mayo and his team in the late 1920s and early 1930s, showed us how a Hawthorne effect can be present when you focus on one performance area alone.⁵ In these studies, light levels were changed to determine the lighting’s effect on productivity. No matter how the light levels were changed, performance improved.

The social system must always be evaluated when making technical changes to gain the most from the technical change. A recent example of suboptimization occurred in a large government agency in which the primary work was accomplished through projects. The agency chose as their improvement methodology a project management initiative to be accomplished by training all employees in project management tools and techniques. When the organization was surveyed near the end of the initiative to determine what was working and what was not working in the change effort, the responses indicated that leadership behaviors were barriers to fully achieving the results expected from the initiative. Leaders were still interacting in the old ways and had not embraced the new behaviors needed for the technical system changes.

The social system pervades an organization and includes the processes people use to communicate and interact with each other. The goal of social-system interventions is often to empower the workforce, the purpose being that empowered employees can be given more autonomy in their jobs so that decisions can be made closer to the actual work, thus allowing employees to make the decisions better and faster. During change efforts, the social system can become a significant barrier to change. The natural tendency of the system is to remain the same, which is experienced by the organization as resistance to change.

How do you know which of the many improvement methodologies is most appropriate for your organization? Organizations make these types of decisions all the time when making choices between multiple alternatives. Individuals make these same decisions when choosing between various weight-loss methods. There is not a single answer here. Organizational leaders must study the different methodologies and adopt or adapt the most appropriate methodology for their situation. The key takeaway that our research about systems and history in general has told us is that both the technical side and the social side of change efforts must be addressed simultaneously for best, long-term results.