Change agility: growing the capacity for creative adjustment in ‘the global field’

Recent research by the United Nations Overseas Development Institute has underlined the criticality of ‘change readiness’ for a country’s ability to ‘manage change and cultivate opportunity’ (see 2012 Change Readiness Index), relating this closely to governance, ethical leadership and institutional agility. My submission is about the process of change in human systems. I share my learning from the perspective of practice as an organisational psychologist supporting my client systems through periods of transformational change. The practitioner doctorate reveals very intimate aspects of my own life, motivation, identity and professional experiences adopting a psychotherapeutic orientation coupled with a reflexive audit methodology, in order to demonstrate proficiency at a doctoral level of reflective practice in organisational settings. The doctoral standard is defined in p 31-33, Doctorate in Psychotherapy by Public Works Handbook 2013/14, ‘Assessment and Progression’. This work is not an academic research report using a standardized structure for reporting scientific research findings. It is certainly not a descriptive list of career achievements or publications. I have learned that the spirit of this doctoral programme is to bring into awareness the true nature of my work, to demonstrate how a corporate career and private practice can be defined and differentiated in publically meaningful, empirical ways. I share the professional products of experiential learning, a series of reflexive case studies of my experience and a resultant body of work on ‘change agility’. Change agility can be interpreted as the capacity for creative adjustment in individuals and in human systems, a functional response to a high level of continuous uncertainty. This also leads to exploration of tensions arising in organisation consulting and my integration of contrasting research paradigms. I make reference to a wide research literature, drawing on several different academic traditions, connecting Gestalt models to a broad base of organisational theory and psychological research. I seek to contribute to and stimulate the inter-disciplinary science and art of organisational change, putting this into its broader socio-economic context. I connect the role change plays in institutional health with what Parlett calls a ‘unified’ and a ‘global’ field, using a Gestalt field perspective on human capacities (Parlett 1997, 2000). Overall my work supports and further develops various recent Gestalt models promoting relational practices which support healthy responses to field complexity within institutions. In corporate settings, my work suggests these abilities can be translated into metacompetences and capabilities commensurate with ‘change agility’. Through a business relevant model of change agile practices which I have developed, I am promoting a relational and Gestalt oriented form of change management. My overarching mission is to put the ‘human’ back into the at times dystopian field of ‘human resource management’, particularly where mechanistic change management efforts are concerned.