Whole Scale Change in Complex Organisations with Dr. Paul Tolchinsky

What does it really take to create large-scale organisational change that lasts?

In this episode of the OrgDev Podcast, we speak with Paul Tolchinsky - pioneer of Whole-Scale™ Change, cofounder of the European Organisation Design Forum (EODF) and one of the most influential voices in large-system transformation and organisation design.

Drawing on more than four decades of experience, Paul shares lessons from working with organisations around the world to accelerate change by engaging people at every level of the system. We explore socio-technical systems thinking, participation and engagement, organisation design, and why sustainable transformation depends on involving the whole organisation - not just senior leadership.

From his early work redesigning manufacturing systems at General Foods to shaping the evolution of Whole-Scale Change approaches, Paul reflects on the experiences, ideas and turning points that have influenced his thinking and what still matters most in organisation development today.

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We’re Dani and Garin – Organisation Development (OD) practitioners who help leaders and people professionals tackle the messiness of organisational life. We focus on building leadership capability, strengthening team effectiveness, and designing practical, systemic development programmes that help you deliver on your team and organisational goals. We also offer coaching to support individual growth and change.

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Transcript

(00:00) Hi, welcome to the Org Dev podcast. So, what if the secret to successful transformation isn't found in strategy decks or leadership mandates, but engaging the wisdom of the whole system? In this episode of the Org Dev podcast, we're joined from Arizona by Dr. Paul Tichy and Ski, a pioneer for scale change and one of the most influential voices in large system transformation.
(00:22) With more than four decades of experience, Paul has helped organizations around the world navigate complex change by engaging people at every level. From his early work at General Foods designing work systems that explore the relationship between people and technology to leading study missions to Japan on total quality and manufacturing excellence.
(00:40) Paul's career has shaped how we think about participation, engagement, and sustainable change. His experience spans the full spectrum from new plant design to startups to redesigning unionized manufacturing environments. Paul's particular expertise is in the design of organizations applying socio-technical principles and whole scale approaches to the processes of change in organizations.
(01:02) And he's also shaped the development of the profession with his leadership of the European Organization Design Forum. He's the author of numerous articles and his two books have been read widely by people in the field and his vast experience is underpinned by a PhD in organization behavior and design from Purdue University. So, so welcome Paul.
(01:20) Thank you so much for joining us today all the way from Arizona. Fabulous. We're really excited to have you with us. So, just to kick us off, just bring your work to life a bit for people who are listening. Just tell us a bit more about the work that you do. Well, I mean, I think that I created what I called my mantra many, many years ago.
(01:52) And the mantra was creating places of work that are interesting, meaningful, and fun. Profitable and productive as a consequence. You know, and that's been my life's work. How do you create places of work that people wake up in the morning looking forward to going to, being excited about, being motivated for, as opposed to waking up and thinking about the drudgery of the day, right, in some way.
(02:15) And so, you know, the question was what creates places like that? What is it that people look for and and and want? And how do you design that? And you know, and you said socio-technical systems. And you know, the the reality is every workplace is a constellation of mechanical things, technical things, social thing.
(02:38) And so, it's it's the system understanding of how all these pieces fit together. Many, many years ago, had this question, why do people do what they do at work? I mean, why you know, sometimes it looks very irrational. And you say, I mean, why why do they do that? And then you look below the surface and you find that the rewards incentivize the wrong behavior or the way in which people are organized limits their ability to think independently.
(03:08) And so, so that's been my work. It started out with small groups, General Foods, designing production lines, literally for new product startups, to moving to something more dramatic and bigger, right? That's you know, so if you're curious about, you know, creating places of work that are interesting, meaningful, and fun, and I think everybody sort of got their own hypothesis about what would be the answer to that question.
(03:36) But that's been the essence of my work for the last 45 years. And you've been closely associated with the kind of the idea of whole scale change. So, some of our audience won't be familiar with that. So, how would you explain that approach to people? >> Well, you You it's the term whole scale is actually hyphenated, right? And so, the reason is whole scale, the work is whole system.
(04:03) And so, the whole is about whole system and and engaging the whole, {quote} {unquote}. Right? Whether that's physically face-to-face or in some deliberative conversations. And so, the whole is whole system. However one defines that. And the scale is sometimes in working with the whole system, you work small scale. And sometimes in small groups.
(04:26) And sometimes you work with as many people as you can engage. Right? However that physically or emotionally might look. You know, and so, when we were trying to put a label to what we were creating, the term whole scale was the closest we could come to finding something that would describe what we really mean. Right? And it comes from two questions, Danny, that I was asked by client at the time.
(04:55) And and he he said over coffee one evening, he said, "Why does change have to take so long? Why does it have You know, we've been preaching transformation changes 2 3 years kind of thing. And I think it's more of a consulting sell than a reality from an empirical point of view. We hadn't really no idea. But we just made it up. Well, it's going to take a couple of years, right? Took a long time to get to where we are.
(05:18) Don't expect to get something immediately. But this question really popped cuz I thought, he's being asked to do things faster. He's being asked to do things more efficiently. He's being asked to increase his cycle time. Well, you know, change is a process. Why can't we improve that process in the same way that we're improving production process.
(05:38) And so, I started looking for how do we go faster? And and what are the tension points? And what does does look like? The second question was related, which was, "Why do the few have to decide for the many? Why can't the many decide for themselves?" It seems like a part of the answer to the first question is we spend half our lives trying to solve a solution we created, right, which takes too long.
(06:04) If we had ownership and commitment from day one versus day 100, wouldn't it go a lot quicker? And so, these two questions were interrelated. And Whole Scale comes as a consequence of looking at those two So, in in turn in practice, what does that look like? What have you learned about kind of making change go faster and >> [laughter] >> That's a good question, right? I mean, the first thing I said to that is Whole Scale presumes that the wisdom is in the system.
(06:31) If you don't believe you have smart people, really good people, people who are maybe smarter than you and I, right, it's if, you know, underlying Whole Scale, I said there's sort of like two parts to it. One is what are the conditions that make it worthwhile to do and what are the beliefs that make it necessary that are necessary in order to do it, right? And the first belief is that the wisdom is in the system.
(06:55) If you don't believe that, Whole Scale's not the way to go, right? Hire McKinsey or pick your five up-and-coming brightest stars and have them decide it for you or tell you what you should do. Um, you know, so it it in every change project that we did, we affirmed the importance of that question. If you believe the wisdom is in the system, you're going to act and behave from a leadership management point of view in a very different way.
(07:23) If you don't, right, then asking them their opinion will only make it worse, not better. The second belief is ownership and commitment only comes from involvement. You can't sell people on your idea. It it you can, but it takes too long. Uh, you have to convince them to it. And then in convincing them, convincing isn't committing, not necessarily. These words are different.
(07:45) Uh, You know, and so if you believe ownership and commitment comes from engagement, then you will find a different way of exploring the change and the transformation. If if you don't, then you're just going to lock five people in a room, have them give you an answer, and be done with it. So, those are the probably the two most important lessons that we learned that continually get reaffirmed.
(08:09) You know, there are conditions there are conditions where whole scale is probably more powerful. If you need to move fast, it works beautifully. Because it engages a critical mass of the system to build momentum towards the change. And there are tools and techniques in for for doing that. If you need to move fast, it works.
(08:32) If acceptance of the answer people feeling a sense of ownership and commitment to it is what will put it over the finish line, then it works. Because it it it asks it gives people voice. Right? It asks them their opinion. It values their ideas. And so, speed acceptance The third is information. If people have the information necessary to make a good decision, then you should be fine.
(08:57) If they don't, then it's not going to work very well. And so, quality and and last is the quality of the decision. How good does it have to be? Does it have to be perfect? Thousand people aren't going to create something that's perfect. They might create something they all can support, but it's not likely to be the most optimal.
(09:19) It is the one easiest to embrace. So, I guess the question just to for people that are just being introduced, so what practical steps can leaders take to surface and harness that wisdom? Because I think it is I love the distinction you're making. Look, you know, if you if you genuinely believe that it's in there, how do you extract it? How do you create those spaces where people are able to share it? You know, we're we're asking Whole Scale Change is asking leaders to lead differently.
(09:42) Not, you know, I mean the the term that one of my colleagues uses is heroic. The old business model of leaders is to be the hero, right? Knight in shining armor with the right answer, on the white horse, and the little silver bullet, and things like that. And so, we're asking we're we're asking leaders to demonstrate a different set of behavior, and to trust us that if they do that, they'll get to the outcome that they want in a good way.
(10:11) I just did a large group meeting 3 weeks ago, and the leader's expectations were not high. They were trusting, but and hopeful, but they'd never experienced it before. And at the end of the 2-day workshop, she came up to me, and she was like, "This is is amazing. This is the most This exceeded my expectations beyond all get out." She knew she had smart people.
(10:37) She wasn't sure if they would show up in a way that would challenge their thinking and push everybody. And in Whole Scale, you create safe space. You create the environment in which people can express their opinions and not have to be judged for them, or not to be judged for them, or to be argued with about them, right? Just to understand them as a different point of view.
(11:02) And so, she was blown away by it. She never She said, "I I This so far exceeds my expectation." And I thought, you know, and so she's so the light bulbs are are going off for her. But, it's behaving as a leader in a different kind of way. It's asking good questions rather than pulling out answers. It's convening the right constellation of people with the right mix.
(11:26) People who have the same ideas, people who have very different ideas, right? And it's bringing all these different points of view and perspectives together, right? To help inform the decisions. That's that's different. So, we're teaching leaders to behave differently while we're in the middle of the process. We're not teaching them and then doing something.
(11:47) We're teaching them by doing something, right? And I love one of the things you said. You said sometimes it makes more sense to engage a few to generate possibilities that the many can choose from. Um you can't create what you can't imagine. So, it's almost like in a way the skill is engaging people in the process and skillfully choosing who needs to be where and when and how to involve them.
(12:07) >> Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, you know, when you bring people together, the the the fear was the term is regression to the mean. Which essentially means when you bring everybody together, the common denominator's going to be something less than what you would really synergistically hope for. That's the fear, right? And and so, in doing whole scale change, the question is how do you stretch people's thinking? How do you push them You know, you I mean, you just said going Breakthroughs come at the edge of your thinking, not in your
(12:39) comfort zone, right? And so, how do you move people to the edges of their thinking in a way that expands their brains? I call it the rubber bands of people's minds, right? And so, cuz you can't create what you can't imagine. You you just said. And so, you need to give people imagination, but you can't push them over the edge where they'll shut down, right? The The fear, the anxiety, the natural reluctance and issues that we have as humans to protect ourselves will kick in.
(13:12) And so, it's an exploration. You know, in whole scale change is more about conversations and dialogue, seeing the world each other sees, understanding different points of view and perspectives. And in in understanding different points of view perspectives, we become more informed, we become more enlightened, we see things that maybe we never saw before and appreciate them in a different kind of way.
(13:39) That's whole scale change at its basic simplest level is nothing more than a series of discussions and deliberations that help people move to something different. >> And I I really like that because in a way it's quite emergent, isn't it? One of the things that you sort of said is that um there's a lot [snorts] of preaching, particularly from our about how things should be and I think you sort of said that you know, there's corporate rebels in teal which kind of sort of paints a picture with great excitement.
(14:04) This is what we want it to be, but you sort of talk talk about helping organizations work out what it needs to be for them in their context, in their particular way, which which is is quite liberating in a way, isn't it? In the '80s, 40 years ago, we were practicing socio-technical systems design, which was a highly participative way of helping people rethink their rust bucket organizations.
(14:28) And the answers were almost always the same across every industry. They would they became cookie-cutters, again. It you know, socio-technical systems became an answer as opposed to an exploration. Right? And and so it got routinized, it got, you know, it became a checklist. You have self-managed teams, you have autonomous work systems, you have committee structures, you have pay for skills, pay for knowledge.
(14:56) Check, check, check, check, check. You have a socio-technically designed system. And I thought, that's if we're doing something that is emergent and organic, why are they always coming out looking exactly the same? Right? And so it is about how do you engage them in a conversation that has them deciding for themselves what makes the most sense.
(15:19) I I'm very biased like the corporate rebels guys. I believe that what they're preaching has an end is a beautiful end. I share that bias. I don't I impose that bias on my clients. They have to figure out for themselves where they need to go and what they need to be and how to do it. You know, and so it's a very emergent it's very Kurt Lewinish.
(15:40) It's action research, it's action learning, right? It's it's Edward Deming PDCA, right? You know, it it's more about the conversation and the journey that enables you to find a solution that wows everybody. And the moment that you find that, you know, you've got something. But it only lasts for a moment cuz as soon as you do it, something else happens.
(16:03) I always tell the story of we did a a project years ago where we were asked to come in and help fix a situation that was at 1 year behind schedule with an opening it was a new facility that had an opening date of I'll make it up for the moment 1 June. And here we are 1 June a year earlier and they're two and they're 1 year behind schedule.
(16:28) So we have 1 year to do 2 years worth of work. The and the only and the reason why they were behind is cuz nobody talked to anybody. They didn't talk to each other. They were each trying to do their own thing and this tension was continuing to keep it slow and keep it behind. And so we taught them how to use whole system thinking, how to bring people together in the room, how to engage them in a conversation that has them creating their own solutions.
(16:54) And over the course of the year the people working on it got pretty good at managing it. 1 June came the next year, opened on time. The first product that they were supposed to make was supposed to take The goal for the overall project was to get what they used to do in 15 days down to 3 days. The first products that came off the production line took 7 days.
(17:18) After day three, which was the goal, they were ready to kill each other because they were they hadn't lived up to their dream. But, they went from 15 to 7, which in and of itself was a paradigm shift. And and so, the first set of products went out the door. We had to shut the place down for a day and talk about what happened.
(17:39) In the first hour, they were screaming at each other, finger pointing at one another. And one of the workers got up and said, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. We know how to manage this. We've learned from Paul and my partner Kathy Dannemiller at the time. We've learned how to do this. We just need to stop fighting with each other and start talking to each other about what happened and why did it happen and what do we need to do?" The 450 people there literally self-organized themselves for the next rest of the day and the next day to figure out what they needed to do to get
(18:10) up from 7 to 3. So, it became their way of working. They understood that. And the the second set of products came in and they went from 7 to 4. Right? Which in and of itself was an amazing win. Right? Um I think it took them three iterations before they actually got the first one out in three. You know, but it became their way of working because it engaged everyone in a way that built ownership and commitment.
(18:35) If the plan fell apart, it wasn't somebody else's idea, it was mine. Feel accountable and responsible to fix it. So, it becomes a way of working in today's, you know, adaptive work system world. Whole scale change makes perfect sense. It underlies the best way to do the work. Hi, we're just pausing this interview for a moment.
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(19:30) live to get the latest from pod to practice in your inbox. And let us know what you think. We'd love to get your feedback. You've opened up a whole interesting range of questions there. But I guess one of the things I was just wondering is how do you manage and contract with clients? You know, they're living in a world of hopeful certainty.
(19:44) You know, they're saying, "Well, I just don't know." >> [laughter] >> There's a certain irony in that, isn't there? No, no, no, it's a great question. Right. I mean, it's I mean, [clears throat] the my example a minute ago is she hired us and she wasn't even exactly sure what she was getting. Right? In in that moment.
(20:02) Um you know, I mean, I start with whole scale change works when the following things happen or when you believe the following things. If you don't believe these things, you probably should interview a different consultancy. The you know, I I have four or five beliefs. Wisdom is in the system. Ownership and commitment only comes from engagement.
(20:23) You have to honor the past in order to create the future. The pieces in the parts are too complex to fix one at a time. Right? That kind of thing. And and then we talk about quality, acceptance, speed. All right? It's sort of the conditions. If the quality of the decision is important, acceptance is important, speed is important.
(20:43) I know that whole scale change works when those kinds of conditions are met. Um even having done that, the essence of whole scale change is engaging the whole system. So, the question is, what does that look like? Is that 500 people on a Zoom call doing a hackathon or a jam? Is that 500 people in a room physically together? When whole scale was invented, it was about getting everybody in the room, physically in a room.
(21:11) So, everybody was enamored with 300, 400, 500. Whole Scale Change I think probably engaged the largest numbers of people of any of the approaches, whether it was open space or the future searches 64 people. That's how Marvin Weisbord designed it. So, Whole Scale was the most robust, right? way of actually engaging and and describing the process of getting from where we are to some end.
(21:40) Um There's a couple of models like DVF, which is in the Whole Scale Change book, and Richard Beckhard's, there's a model called DPPE. There's some simply elegant tools that we helped to say, "Here's what it looks like to demystify it." Right? Um You know, if we said, "We're going to do step one, but we don't know what step two looks like," client might not hire us.
(22:02) So, we have to pretend like we know what step two is going to look like, but we know between one and two, we're going to have a conversation about is that still the right right? From our experiences, is that still the right thing to do? Or how would we adapt it to make it stronger in some way? Right? I think that's, you know, it's Um but I always start with the principles and and the conditions and that I that we know from 30 years of doing this are most likely to be used where Whole Scale would be most likely useful. So, a lot of
(22:34) organizations wrestling with AI means for them. So, I'm really interested in your take on kind of AI, what that means, how Whole Scale kind of change approaches might might support people with that that conundrum they've got at the moment. Well, you know, there's two I mean, the socio-technical. And so, AI is just another technology, right? You know, it it was the assembly line in Henry Ford's day, right? Which radically changed everybody's way of thinking about it.
(23:04) AI is just a new technology and so the question becomes you know, in in today's languaging we call it AI native. This is this is the self-organized black factory, right? Where it's only bots. But the truth is humans will never be out of the equation. There's always going to be a social component. Whether it's to the people who are designing it, the AI, or the people who are using it and living with it.
(23:33) And so I think we get I'm not sure what the right word is. We we're a little hesitant because it's a it's an it's hard to understand what happens in the black box, right? In the AI thinking. But the goal is still to jointly optimize. It isn't either or. It's what Eric Trist and his colleagues found out in the 1950s was if you don't optimize both, you sub-optimize both. It's that simple.
(23:59) The promise of technology only works if the social system is engaged in a way that embraces it. How do you do that, you know? And so I I did a large group meeting 6 months ago, Danny, where we had an empty seat at the table. And the empty seat was AI. Right? And the question is, you know, what what information don't we have that we could use that might be helpful to our deliberation? And so the person sitting there with the AI hat on is actually asking the tool, the digital bot, right? Its inputs and its advice. And and because
(24:33) of its power, you can get things more quickly. You know, AI can give you ideas. It can give you suggestions. It can give you current state, future state faster than we as humans can think of it. But it's up to us as humans to decide what's the right answer. You know, so there's this dynamic of AI included, I augment my large group work, whether it's face-to-face or virtual, with the brilliance and the knowledge and the intelligence of a artificial tool.
(25:04) And it's just another technology that I'm embracing. And so, you know, thinking about joint optimization, augmentation, how does you know, what When I used to go to Japan in the '80s, you would walk down the production line, and you would walk through the production line and one's workstation would have a robot.
(25:25) And the next station would have a human. And the next station would have a robot. And the next station would have a human. And and you look at these and you walk down the production line and you think, I'm not I don't why is there a robot here and not here? Right? And the answer was because we believe robotics, the purpose of robotics is to save humans.
(25:47) The work is dull, dirty, or dangerous, and they had a whole way of talking about that. Then we automate it. Right? We we we create we leave the human where the human is important, and we robotize, automate, AI where it where it would be helpful to humans, and or removes risk, liability, consequences to humans, right? And so, you never take the human out of the equation, but you you use it in a way that helps to inform the choices that we as humans only we as humans can make.
(26:23) And only because ownership and commitment only comes from us making them. Right? The AI bot could tell us what to do. Question is, would we believe it or not? It's so fascinating. It's an incentive organizations that don't have this kind of guiding policy that it's just becoming what it becomes almost, isn't it? So, Paul, we want to say a huge thank you. We've loved the conversation.
(26:40) I feel we're only scratching the surface. We'd love to invite you back for a part two at some time in the future when you're free. We we haven't explored the equation DVA, DVF plus R, your perspectives on uh resistance, and also things like deja vu all over again, the lessons that we're losing from the the '70s and '80s as well.
(26:59) So, if you'd be happy to come back, we'd love to do that. I'd be happy to do that. You You just a couple of words that that are most important to me. Well, actually the one that you just touched on is resistance. I I think there's there's a paradigm about resistance that exists in the world that limits its its usefulness.
(27:18) The resistance is a gift. And people who resist resist because they care. If they didn't care, they would let you do whatever the devil you wished. And so, there's a whole reframing, Garin, right, of what we how resistance plays in the change process and in Holscher. In Holscher, we embrace it. I love it. The And the louder it is and the more exuberant it is, the better it is.
(27:44) And so, we could have a whole conversation just about how you do that and how you tap into it how you give it voice in a way that has it be being appreciated for what it's worth. I'd be happy to come back and have another conversation. Brilliant. Well, there there's a mic drop moment to finish this session. >> [laughter] >> I think I think our audience would love to have you back.
(28:05) Well, well, thank you so much for we really appreciate it. We know you're really busy as well. Um if people want to follow your work, is it okay for people to sort of go to your page on LinkedIn and just to see the kind of things you're up to at the moment? No, you know, I mean, I'm mostly retired if you have to remember, right? So, I shut my web page down because I didn't want people calling me and trying to get me to do work.
(28:25) I'm trying to do less, not more. But, I'm on LinkedIn. You know, people can find me on LinkedIn. They can uh anybody can reach out at any moment. That's probably the easiest way to find me. Uh I'm always open to a conversation in my in my day to talk to people about what we're doing. Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for we really appreciate it.
(28:42) We've really enjoyed the call. Um if you're there watching this and if you've really enjoyed it and you think there's know else that would really appreciate exploring whole scale system change, please share the the podcast with them as well, and also hit the like button as well.
(28:55) But most importantly, thank you so much for we really appreciate it, and we look forward to speaking to you guys again >> I apologize for cutting it a little bit short. Thank you both so much for doing this. >> [music] [music] [music] [music]