Friday, December 08, 2006

Defensive routines

Out of the blue i received this mail on a post from 2005 from jpaquin-at-ts-center.com. Any comments?

Defensive routines are just that....defensive, meaning they are on
their way out. Change management will ultimately become more
individually tailored to specific cultural environments. "Instruments"
will be acquired and honed during the learning curve relevant to a
specific organization. Each new "engagement" will be a fresh and
unique effort in order to keep the change effort ahead of a particular
organization's learning and adaptation curve and to avoid antiquity by
the time it is implemented.

On Oct 28 2005, 11:44 am, janle...@wxs.nl wrote:
> Dear Abby and other readers,
>
> Chris Argyris wrote a book called 'strategy,changeand defensive
> routines'. He explains how we deploy our defensive routines WITH THE
> BEST INTENTIONS to preventchangeand the implementation of strategies
> we've all committed too. Defensive routines, i think, have been learned
> even before we've learned to speak a language. The are deeply
> paradoxical as they are about controlling behaviour to prevent us from
> learning things that might be harmful. (If you're familiar with HAL from
> '2001 a space odessey': what should you do when you might not be able to
> protect (control) a being from death when this being is going out of
> free will somewhere he might die. The answer HAL figured out was: kill
> him softly but do not tell them you're going to do that.)
>
> I think that defensive routines have evolved to protect our own
> existence, to prevent us from harm. Defensive routines run very deep,
> are undiscussable and the undiscussability is undiscussable too. They
> have been closely linked to emotions and are very hard to overcome. For
> instance: I think thatChangeManagementandChange Management
> Instruments are defensive routines. This, in my view, is a defensive
> tactic called 'easing in': just do some test, show we're all different,
> note that we're all have a different attitude tochangeand that it is
> all right do be defensive againstchangeor that we should apply a
> certain tactic, a certain strategy to controlchangein certain people.
> In the end, nothing has changed (because people are smart enough to play
> the game and resist being controlled), except that we're going to look
> for another instrument. Same shit, differentChangeManagement
> Instrument. This, i think, is why there are so many of these instruments.
>
> I'm not against defensive routines, denying them is not an option. But,
> i think that defensive reasoning is creating most of the problems we as
> a people are facing. Governements have a whole Departments of Defence,
> devoted to defensive routines.
>
> The small path of managingchangeis supporting people to learn about
> their ownchange, manage their own developement (od, not OD) in their
> own way, in their own pace and to learn about their own defensive routines.
>
> Keep this in mind,
>
> Jan
>