The Science of Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture

by Paul Gibbons

Leaders need guidance on change grounded in the latest science, not 20th-century myths.Hailed as "the best book on change in 15 years" and a book that belongs alongside classics such as The Halo Effect, Switch, and the Fifth Discipline - The Science of Organizational Change is a must-read for senior executives and change experts alike. Gibbons offers the first blueprint for change that fully reflects the newest advances in mindfulness, behavioral economics, sociology, and complexity theory.In this updated 2019 edition of The Science of Organizational Change, Paul Gibbons takes us on a journey from change mythology, from New Age change ideas, from "reports in drawers", and from pop psychology up to the present.In the first comprehensive treatment of behavioral science in business, you'll learn which cognitive biases caused the 2008 Financial Crisis, Enron, and the Deepwater Horizon. Later in the book, you'll discover how evidence-based management is helping leading businesses including Google.There are new concepts such as change-agility that answer the question - "how can organizations be more responsive, so they are the disruptors, rather than the disruptees?" Turbulent environments demand constant change, but the mindset, skills, and behaviors taught to business leaders are unhelpful and sometimes flatly misleading.First, the book identifies dozens of change management myths, bad models, and unhelpful metaphors, replacing some with twenty-first-century research. Gibbons links the origins of theories about change to the history of ideas and suggests that the human sciences will provide real breakthroughs in our understanding of people in the twenty-first century. For example, change fundamentally entails risk, yet little is written for business people about how breakthroughs in the psychology of risk can help change leaders.Change fundamentally involves changing people's minds, yet the most recent research shows that the provision of facts may strengthen resistance (a problematic concept also debunked.) Starting with a rigorous and evidence-based understanding of what makes people in organizations tick, he presents a complete framework for organizing your company around successful change. With case studies from Google, IBM, Shell, British Airways, British Petroleum, HSBC, and Morgan Stanley.Gibbons goes deeper and broader than any previous discussion of change leadership. In this multi-disciplinary treatment, you will a deeper understanding of flaws in human decision-making can help you make far better choices when the stakes are largest....How new advances in neuroscience have altered best practices in influencing colleagues, negotiating with partners, engaging followers' hearts, minds, and behaviors, and managing resistance....How to bring greater meaning and mindfulness to your organization - and reap their benefits....How new ideas from analytics, forecasting, and risk are humbling those who thought they knew the future - and how the human side of analytics and the psychology of risk are paradoxically more important in this technologically enabled world....How to improve your boardroom, promoting more effective conversations about strategy, ethics, and decision-making....What chaos and complexity theories mean in the context of your own business....How to create resilient and agile business cultures, and anti-fragile, dynamic business structures....How to link science with your "boots-on-the-ground" experience, through interviews with top CEOs who are applying its principles. You'll find case studies from well-known companies like IBM and Shell; and deeply relevant quotations from history's greatest leaders and thinkers.

Genres: Business, Leadership, Nonfiction

380 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 29, 2019

About the author

PAUL GIBBONS (from London, England) is passionate about science, and how science can be used to transform the human condition, and improve humanity's prospects. His writing and teaching "at the nexus of science, philosophy, and business" focuses on the application of the wider human sciences (not just psychology), philosophy, medicine, public health, mathematics, behavioral economics, and machine intelligence to business and business leadership.

He began his career by earning a degree in neurochemistry, followed by Masters-level study in International Economics and Finance. At 20, he moved to London as a "quant" derivatives trader, working at Salomon Brothers, Morgan Stanley, and First Boston. He eventually became Director of Eurobond Trading for the world's third largest bank. At 28, he resumed doctoral study in neuroscience, and then joined PwC as a strategist and expert on derivatives, advising on trading disasters such as Barings, National Westminster and Long-Term Capital. He then joined PwC's "Strategy, Innovation and Change" think-tank, developed its methodologies in change management, innovation and corporate transformation, and ran its board-level leadership development programs.

In 2001, Gibbons then founded his own firm, Future Considerations, which grew at 60% per annum under his leadership and still competes successfully for leadership development and culture change consulting engagements at top companies. After selling that firm, he joined the University of Wisconsin, Madison as a lecturer, while continuing to coach senior executives worldwide. In 2008, CEO Magazine named him one of two "CEO Super Coaches." He recently published Reboot Your Life: A 12-day Program for Ending Stress, Realizing Your Goals, and Being More Productive.

He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his two sons, Conor and Luca.

Reviews

[Sam Motes · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book by Gibbons follows the standard format of many business books of spending the first third of the book trying to convince the reader why they have game changing knowledge to share before really getting into the meat of what they have to share. He spends significant time bashing other well respected leadership business book authors like Kotter, Porter, Christiansen and even the mighty Drucker as he builds the case that their process do not stand the rigger of scientific testing and that some of their work can cause harm to the change process. At times it felt like a sales tool to drive leaders in big business to reach out to his company for consulting work. Once you get past that, Gibbons does share some good insights based on research and real-life examples of how to drive big complex changes in organizations through agile methodologies building anti-fragile teams and what pitfalls and myths to avoid.

[Todd Cheng · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good Digest of Several Books

This book is a good read in the mix of the about 12 others. If you have read “The 5th Discipline”, “Black Swan”, “Machiavelli”, Systems Thinking, Cognitive Bias, and others leaderships and culture books nothing will surprise the reader. However, the book also brings new mental models to the table regarding neurosciences and the authors contrasting research on the topics. It is well organized with key points and a summary at the end of each chapter. Despite the often heavily quoted and cited topics it is a pleasant read. A hard write I am sure with the mix of topics, but the author choreography helps it to digest.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Every sentence in this book is a list. If I had a nickel for every comma in this book.....

However, the book is filled with great real life takes on how to be a leader during, before, and after organizational changes. It was great, but it was not for me.

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't finish this book. I am a project manager implementing digital solutions, so the content intrigued me, but there is no way that I can force myself to sit through the pain of continuing to read this book. This book was so poorly edited that it distracted from my ability to focus on the content. Comma misuse runs rampant and punctuation with parentheses is inconsistently applied. I find it utterly ironic that the author frequently berates "the establishment" (i.e. Harvard Business Review) for publishing without peer review and by the looks of it the author himself couldn't find anyone to peer review his work from a purely structural and grammatical standpoint, let alone from a content perspective. And then the content...the book is poorly marked with regards to footnotes in order to find the supporting work cited for any given passage of text. This is especially disconcerting when the author inserts his own (holier-than-thou) observations without much delineation between published and documented information and his own ideas that even he admits he has not had the ability to test in reality. I flipped to the bibliography (correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought it was supposed to be "works cited" by now?) and it was poorly formatted for e-reader to the point that it's unusable as a reference for my own investigation.

This could be a great book and I do believe the content would be important if written well and properly supported by both supposition and science. However, as it is currently written (and "edited"--there is no way to express how loosely I use that term here), it is difficult to extract any real or actionable value from the book.

[Mario Sailer · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book has almost nothing to do with change management and not much with the science behind it. Instead you get a book about leadership and management in general and a lot of opinion and consultant talk.
Paul Gibbons points to problems in leadership and the work of consultants that are valid. But despite being conscious and questioning the methods used, he offers almost nothing. Sometimes he referrers to topics he assumes the reader knows without explaining them (change management 101 for example, something I even could not find in the internet), some assertions are plainly wrong and there is a lot of fluff in his writing. I found it a waste of time to read this book. Maybe because I read most of the books he mentioned and therefore are able to set his writings into context and saw the shallowness.

[Matt Connor · Rating 1 out of 5]

A one star rating maybe low for the first book written by an emotionless computer, but deserved of a corporate drone. This author doesn't appear to know how to write in a form other than PowerPoint snippets. This was truly a struggle to read, I can only hope that there is not a Book 2 to suffer through as well.

[Ioana Hreninciuc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Takes a while to start in earnest, I’d say the first 50-100 pages are pretty bland, but is overall very interesting and informative on the fallacies of organizational change. Helps give a clear view of why change fails & what to do about it.

[Jesse McBurney-Rebol · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just a painful read. I'm sure much of this has been regurgitated from text books but there is nothing new here nor does it distill change management down into a usable approach. Save your time ad pass on this one.