Informal Coalitions in Principle (2/2)

Everyday conversations and interactions are central to this sense-making and coalition-building process:

• Outcomes from these conversations are co-created by participants and emerge from the self-organising process - they cannot be handed down by management.
• Even where managers exercise their formal authority to impose a particular change, they cannot predetermine - or even predict with any degree of certainty - how people will perceive, interpret, evaluate and act upon it locally.
• These interactions are unavoidably political, in the sense that participants 'bring with them' interests that they are seeking to satisfy in relation to their perceived organisational roles and unique personal circumstances.
• Formal policies, strategies, statements etc can be seen as ideal expressions of what 'management' wants; but these necessarily have to be made real by people during their local interactions, in the light of the particular circumstances that they face, in that relationship and that situation at that time.
• Managers are therefore, at one and the same time, both 'in control' of certain elements of organisation and 'not in control' of other - equally significant - aspects. Simply performing better in the formal, rational and 'legitimate' functions of management will not make the hidden, messier and informal dynamics go away.
• Patterns of taken-for-granted, cultural assumptions are also formed and re-formed through this conversational process, and these tend to channel ongoing conversations imperceptibly down culturally familiar pathways.
• At the same time, the process retains the capacity for novelty to emerge, patterns of assumptions to shift and change to take place.

We all recognise these dynamics because we participate in them on a daily basis. But, conventional, so-called "common-sense" management sees such things as power, politics, mess and unresolved tensions as signs of organisational dysfunction, rather than as keys to effective organisational performance.

In contrast, the informal coalitions perspective values these hidden, messy and informal dynamics of organisations and seeks to engage with them to achieve progress in the desired direction. It echoes many of the themes embodied in Ralph Stacey's Complex Responsive Processes view of organisational dynamics and reflects the notion of Relational Leadership and Consulting, which is informing much of the latest thinking and practice at Ashridge Business School.

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