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TB871: Responding to change (and junking a lot of perfectly good habits in favor of awkward new ones)

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category. 

Systems Thinking, to me at least, is about making strategy to change something within an organisation, or in an environment that contains organisations. As such, the fact that something is going to change is a given.

The received wisdom is that “people don’t like change.” But that’s not necessarily true, especially given what I’ve discussed in previous posts about personality and personality differences in teams. The module materials (The Open University, 2020) discuss Oreg’s Resistance to Change Scale and the four factors defining a disposition towards change:

  • Routine seeking
  • Emotional reaction to imposed change
  • Short-term focus
  • Cognitive rigidity.

Plotting these against the ‘Big Five’ personality traits leads to some interesting findings:

Table showing correlations between 'The Big Five' personality dimensions and resistance to change.
Table taken from module materials (The Open University, 2020)

As you can see, the table indicates that the strongest correlations are observed with extraversion and neuroticism. It suggests that individuals with a tendency towards neuroticism are more inclined to resist change, demonstrating positive correlations with routine seeking, emotional reaction, and short-term focus. On the other hand, those with a tendency towards extraversion show negative correlations with these factors, indicating they are less prone to resistance to change behaviours.

Beyond these strong correlations, the relationships between the Big Five dimensions and resistance to change factors are perhaps more nuanced. For instance, conscientiousness is positively correlated with routine seeking but negatively correlated with short-term focus, suggesting a complex interplay between an individual’s drive for order and their capacity for long-term planning. Openness, meanwhile, shows no significant correlation with any resistance to change factors, indicating that those who are open to new experiences do not necessarily exhibit higher or lower levels of resistance to change.

Resistance to change, though varying in intensity based on circumstances, is a natural trait to some extent in everyone. It includes scepticism, inertia, and ‘reactance’, which is a term borrowed from electronics, and defined as an immediate and unpleasant emotional response to perceived threats to freedom.

While resistance may be more pronounced in some individuals, possibly due to learned behaviours from childhood, studies show that there is no significant gender difference. However, greater resistance to change is more commonly found in younger people compared to older individuals, which I find interesting (and certainly backed up by my experiences as a parent). I think this is probably to do with people who have less knowledge of the world seeking reassurance through routines. But I’m speculating.

Reflecting on my own life, as someone who is apparently open, conscientious, introverted, strong-minded, and moderate, I have a complex relationship with change. In both my personal and professional life I enjoy strict routines but understand that these are temporary constructs. Regular readers of my blog will be unsurprised to see me reference once again Clay Shirky’s reflection that “current optimization is long-term anachronism” (Uses This, 2014). I’ve been validated and inspired over the last decade by his casual mention that how, “at the end of every year” he “junk[s]” a lot of perfectly good habits in favor of awkward new ones” (Ibid.).

References

TB871: Managing personality differences in teams (Belbin & Six Thinking Hats)

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category. 

As I hinted at in my last post, the value of knowing how people think and work is that it’s easier to put together high-performing teams and make better strategy. The Belbin Team Roles test I did 13 years ago had me almost off the scale as a ‘Plant’:

Belbin Team Roles: Plant description with strengths, allowable weaknesses, and concluding note.

Activity 4.4 in the module materials (The Open University, 2020) asks us:

Do you think that this definition of the activities/behaviours required in an effective team has survived the test of time? Does it have the same meaning and significance in our hyper-connected, global world where climate catastrophe is around the corner?

I think the answer is in the question(s): the world has changed, and therefore the roles we need to play have changed too. Meredith Belbin came up with these team roles in the 1980s before the Web was invented. We live in a much different world to even the one I inhabited as a child.

The module materials (Ibid.) introduce another list of behaviours important to team effectiveness, taken from Pedler, Burgoyne and Boydell (1994):

  • Proposing – a new concept, suggestion or course of action
  • Giving information – offering facts, opinions or clarification
  • Seeking information – seeking facts, opinions or clarification
  • Supporting/building – declaring support or agreement with another, or extends another’s proposal
  • Disagreeing – direct criticism, difference of opinion or disagreement with another’s ideas
  • Defending/attacking – attacking another or defending own position – an emotional response
  • Blocking/difficulty stating – blocking a proposal without offering alternatives, or even reasons
  • Testing understanding – checking the meaning or understanding of another’s contribution
  • Summarising – summarising and restating concisely the content of a previous discussion.

What I like about this is that, in a similar way to Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, it focuses on roles that people can play rather than typecasting people.

Illustration of Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats, showing white, red, green, yellow, blue, and black hats, each associated with a different type of thinking.
Image via Vecteezy

For example, I’m currently ‘project lead’ for some work that WAO is doing. That means that I’m doing a lot more attention-to-detail, planning, and box-ticking kind of work than I would usually. I’m playing a role, just as I do in meetings where I may play devil’s advocate, or a workshop where I ask the stupid question to get the conversation flowing.

That being said, I think it’s fair to say we have our ‘default’ behaviours and positions to which we naturally return. I think these can change over the course of our lifetimes, with a thread nevertheless running through them. For example, I’ve never been afraid of the consequences of speaking my mind, and have lived by the mantra that “people can only treat you the way you let them treat you.” That’s meant I’ve pissed off a lot of people and burned a fair few bridges. But, hey, my principles keep me warm at night 😉

References

The Open University (2020) ‘P4.1.2 Managing personality differences in teams’, TB871 Block 4 People stream [Online]. Available at https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=2261494&section=2.2 (Accessed 23 July 2024).

TB871: Working with individual differences (MBTI & OCEAN)

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category. 

I’m moving into the Block 4 People Stream for this module, with the focus on working with individual differences. Systems Thinking involves, at the very least, defining a boundary, thinking holistically, and considering multiple perspectives, and so this part of the module is dealing with the latter.

When making strategy, rather than sitting individually in a darkened room with a wet towel over our head thinking deeply, we need to work together. That means considering other people’s preferences. I confess right off the bat that I’m not great at doing this, so I’m looking forward to getting into it.

The ‘headline issues’ for this part of the module (The Open University, 2020) are:

  • What patterns are there in my own personality and personal style and how might they affect my practices around making strategy?
  • What might be the impact of others’ individual variations of personality and personal style when applying systems tools for thinking strategically about situations?
  • What could I do to support individuals involved in making strategy, to take account of individual differences?

Thinking about personality is fascinating to me, mainly due to reflecting on my own and how I feel like it’s changed over the years. Other people believe that personality is something that is relatively fixed, while others think it’s more determined by one’s environment, especially when growing up. This is usually referred to as the ‘nature vs nurture’ debate.

16 Personalities

Last year, while we were out for coffee and cake, one of our two teenagers asked about something related to personality. One thing led to another, and we ended up doing the 16 Personalities test. This is based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which, I have to say, I’ve always been skeptical about.

Myers-Briggs personality types divided into Analysts, Diplomats, Sentinels, and Explorers categories, each with respective personality type names and abbreviations in colored boxes.

The data with Myers-Briggs is entirely self-reported, which means that it’s all about how you see yourself, rather than being corroborated with how others see you. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that I think that my ‘personality type’ (INTJ) sounds a lot like me:

People with the INTJ personality type (Architects) are intellectually curious individuals with a deep-seated thirst for knowledge. INTJs tend to value creative ingenuity, straightforward rationality, and self-improvement. They consistently work toward enhancing intellectual abilities and are often driven by an intense desire to master any and every topic that piques their interest.

That being said, the results of the rest of my family (ENTP, ESFJ, and ISFJ) did seem to reflect how I would see them, and they certainly agreed with the description of me as an INTJ. I suppose it’s a bit like learning styles, there’s something in the idea that people learn in different ways, and it’s worth accommodating preferences, but it’s unlikely to be helpful in the long term to put people in a single box.

OCEAN ‘big five’ personality traits

Another approach to defining personality is the OCEAN test which is based on degrees of:

  • Openness
  • Conscientiousness
  • Extraversion
  • Agreeableness
  • Neuroticism

I did the PRISM-OCEAN free online test, with PRISM standing for the other end of the spectrum:

  • Practical
  • Responsive
  • Introverted
  • Strong-minded
  • Mellow

My result was OCISZ which apparently means that I’m:

  • Open (curious, creative)
  • Conscientious (organised, disciplined)
  • Introverted (low key, reserved)
  • Strong-minded (competitive, skeptical)
  • Moderate (mellow, nervous)

The module materials link to this website which has a battery of various personality tests. I think this kind of thing is best done in a team situation. I think we’ll get on to the Belbin Team Roles test later, which I found pretty enlightening when I did it with the rest of the Jisc infoNet team 13 years ago. I’ve also done work around management style in ‘normal’ and ‘stressful’ situations with the senior management team when I was over in Australia with Moodle. That was also interesting, although mainly in terms of understanding my colleagues rather than myself.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, I think personality tests describe a construct based on data that you and/or other people enter into some kind of model. As a result, the model may be more or less valid. In addition, the context surrounding the data entry matters: am I doing this test on a day when I have high self-esteem, when I’ve just received fantastic feedback or validation? Has someone else entered data knowing that I will be able to identify what they have entered?

Either way, finding ways to know what’s going on inside other people’s heads is valuable. It’s not just the content of our ideas that is useful, but how we came by them, and the assumptions we’ve made along the way.

References

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