Expressed subjects of uncertainty
and improvement suggestions
in narratives during change implementations
from hard to soft – A case study
University of Groningen Faculty of Economics and Business
MSc Business Administration – Change Management
I Abstract
In our currently quickly moving and complex environment, change initiatives are imminent to organizations and often organized in project form. Projects are used since the 1950s and with them, project management evolved. Project Management is traditionally divided into two paradigms: the hard project management paradigm, characterized by quantitative measures and a focus on efficiency, and the soft paradigm, which is characterized by its focus on interaction and learning. Despite their long tradition, projects still have a very high failure rate of up to 80%. A lot of research has been conducted aiming to improve the success rate of projects. One aspect that may influence the success of projects is uncertainty: change initiatives often trigger uncertainty in individuals and can lead to negative effects such as stress and lower performance. Those negative effects could hinder the successful implementation of a project. In case individuals perceive uncertainty, they engage with one another in a narrative form to make sense of the change they face and reduce their uncertainty. In the past, there has been a lack of research about how uncertainty in change situations has been communicated during a switch from hard to soft project management. This research thus aims to understand how uncertainty is communicated during the implementation of a paradigm shift. Therefore, a case study has been conducted at a financial institution in the Netherlands. This institution was implementing a pilot to move towards the Agile way of working (i.e. soft), whereas it’s work was previously dominated by hard project management techniques. To investigate the communication about uncertainty, a narrative, interpretative approach has been used where open interviews served the collection of data. It turned out that employees are mostly expressing hard subjects of uncertainty, but are mentioning hard as well as soft improvement suggestions, independently of the hierarchical layer. This implies a co-existence of two conflicting narratives (i.e. soft and hard), while also two conflicting organizational structures (i.e. the ‘old’ structure and the new Agile structure), and with that also two conflicting value systems (i.e. soft and hard) exist. From a practical perspective, this finding may help an organization by suggesting that embracing the soft composite narrative could make a switch from hard to soft project management more successful, and a stepwise introduction of a, parallel introduction of a new, soft structure may be of inferior choice.
II Table of contents
Introduction ... 1
Theoretical Background ... 2
The Concepts of Narratives and Sensemaking... 2
Hard and Soft Project Management ... 4
Uncertainty in Change Situations ... 6
Research Gap: Uncertainty Meets Paradigm Shift ... 8
Methodology ... 8
Findings ... 11
Expressed Subjects of Change ... 11
Expressed Subjects of Uncertainty ... 12
Expressed Improvement Suggestions ... 14
Subjects of Change, Subjects of Uncertainty, and Improvement Suggestions combined ... 15
Hierarchical Differences ... 17
Discussion... 20
Theoretical and Managerial Implications ... 23
1
Introduction
In our currently fast moving and complex environment, change initiatives are imminent to organizations (Bredillet, 2010; Burnes, 2004). Oftentimes, they are organized in project form, trying to get a hold on the complexity of nowadays’ change (Hornstein, 2015). Although projects are already used since the 1950s (Bredillet, 2010), their failure rate is very high and repeatedly cited with 70-80% (Allen et al., 2007; Hornstein, 2015). Some researchers claim that this failure rate, among other reasons, is due to a lack of ‘soft’ approaches in the project management world (Hornstein, 2015; Söderlund & Maylor, 2012). Traditionally, project management has been divided into two broader paradigms: the hard project management paradigm, and the soft project management paradigm (Beer & Nohria, 2000; Crawford & Pollack, 2004; Gustavsson & Hallin, 2014). The hard paradigm can be summarized by comprising traditional management approaches, focused on efficiency, predetermined goals and qualitative control measures, whereas the soft paradigm only lately receives more attention, emphasizing learning and facilitation by the means of intense communication (Crawford & Pollack, 2004; Gustavsson & Hallin, 2014).
Change projects often trigger perceptions of uncertainty in employees who are confronted with the change (Allen et al., 2007; Cawsey et al., 2016; Hornstein, 2015). Uncertainty is defined as a “lack of information” (Thiry, 2002; p.222). It is a “perceptual phenomenon” (Milliken, 1987; p.134), which is based on individuals’ previous experiences and can thus differ between individuals (Milliken, 1990; Weick, 1979). As the provision of information is crucial for any project success (Allen et al., 2007), uncertainty is likely to lower the success of any change intervention. Further, uncertainty can decrease satisfaction of employees and increase their stress and turnover rate (Bordia et al., 2004): The employees’ perceived lack of control and low perceived influence on the change they face can lead to effects such as learned helplessness and lower overall performance (Bordia et al., 2004). Hence, also the negative effects following uncertainty can hinder the successful implementation of a change implementation.
To deal with such uncertainty, individuals engage into a coping process that includes sensemaking and sensegiving: They engage with one another in a narrative form to try to make sense of the change situation (Sonenshein, 2010; Weick et al., 2005). By means of communication, individuals try to arrive at a plausible understanding of their situation (Weick et al., 2005).
This research thus aims to understand how uncertainty is communicated and how managers could then better deal with the expressed uncertainty to turn their change initiative into a successful endeavour. The research question to address those matters will be:
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The significance of this research is twofold: First, if the communication of uncertainty is better understood, this may lead to a more efficient reduction of uncertainty and therefore a more successful implementation of projects by managers in the practical field. Second, this research fills the theoretical gap of how uncertainty is communicated in a change situation that is shifting from hard project management towards a soft project management approach.
To analyse the communication of individuals, a narrative approach (Sonenshein, 2010) has been chosen. To that aim, a case study has been conducted at a financial institution in the Netherlands. This organization was currently changing their way of working from a hard project management approach to a soft project management approach (i.e. Agile).
Theoretical Background
This section will provide the theoretical background that underlies this research. Firstly, the concepts of narratives and sensemaking will be described and it will be explained how they are connected. Thereafter, an overview about projects, project management and change project will be given and the two paradigms (i.e. hard and soft) of project management will be explained. As uncertainty is often a concomitant of change implementation, the concept of uncertainty will be explained thenceforth. Lastly, the interaction of those concepts will be explained what leads to the research question underlying this paper.
The Concepts of Narratives and Sensemaking
The Australian author John Marsden once said: “I really believe that our stories make us who we are” (Marsden, 2007). He expressed this in the context of shaping and developing personalities. But even in a non-literary sense, he was very right: Also in a theoretical, academic, and even organizational context, the stories we tell influence the way we think, the way others think, and how we will perceive our future. Here, the two main concepts at play are sensemaking and narratives.
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order to ‘classify’ the situation at hand and reduce the equivocality of the situation. In case this ambiguity cannot be reduced, individuals engage into a search for a mental map which does reduce it: they engage into sensemaking. This selection (i.e. limitation of the possibilities of interpretations according to one’s past; or actively engaging into an extension of existing interpretative schemes) is followed and preceded by the retention mechanism: retention describes the ‘storing’ of the situations of which individuals successfully made sense. Because individuals are constantly interacting with their environment in multiple ways, sensemaking represents a continuous, subtle, even social process (Weick et al., 2005) which happens outside of individuals’ conscious perception (Ford et al., 2008).
The concept of sensemaking has been the focus, as well as base for multiple researchers in the past decades: Ford et al. (2008) state that it comprises the acts of searching for information and ascribing meaning to what we perceive and is therefore shaping human experiences within their minds (Hirokawa et al., 2000). This meaning ascription follows an evaluative and interpretative process, as described before: individuals assess a situation based on their former perceptions, experiences, and attitudes towards the world (Weick et al., 2005). As individuals attempt to act consistently over time, they continuously construe interpretations of their experiences to rationalize their actions (Weick et al., 2005). However, sensemaking is not only restricted to individual interpretation. By using narratives, individuals try to make sense of their own past and current experiences, but also influence other people in their sensemaking process (Sonenshein, 2010). This process is called sensegiving: It describes the discourse whereby individuals use narratives to determine how other individuals give meaning to their environment (Sonenshein, 2010). Similarly, Brown (2003) defines sensemaking as a narrative action by which meanings are composed and shared. Taking this perspective, she argues that rather the stories we tell and share after the actual experience shape how we think about it, than the experience itself. Those stories can be referred to as narratives.
According to Czarniawska (1998), a narrative consists of an original condition, an event or action, and a subsequent condition, connected by a plot which connects those elements in a meaningful way. Buchanan and Dawson (2007) state that narratives by their definition connect sequenced events and are therefore influencing actions that follow the causality they describe. Vaara et al. (2016) take the concept of narratives to an organizational level, stating that they are “temporal, discursive constructions that provide a means for individual, social, and organizational sensemaking and sensegiving” (p.498) and are used to make the future more predictable (Brown & Thompson, 2013). This is supported by Steigenberger (2015) and Weick et al. (2005) who claim that especially in situations of change, individuals and groups are inclined to think anew about their present and future situation. Following this line of thought, narratives are a tool that is necessary for individuals to engage in collective sensemaking and sensegiving and hence act upon their evaluations and interpretations of the situation at hand.
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(Steigenberger, 2015). It can thus be inferred that the stories being told guide the way a change takes place, how it evolves and whether it will be successful.
In research, narratives are also used as a tool for investigation: the interpretative approach focuses on the examination of narratives to infer how people construct and interpret organizational events. In order to refine this approach, Vaara et al. (2016) distinguish between individual and composite narratives: whereas individual narratives focus on stories told by single persons, composite narratives try to grasp collective interpretative patterns to analyse ascribed meanings of groups of organizational members. The construction of a composite narrative will also be the foundation of this research.
Hard and Soft Project Management
As depicted in the previous paragraph, the stories people tell have an enormous impact on projects within organizations and their outcome. Projects are used since the 1950s to achieve strategic goals of organizations (Bredillet, 2010; Stretton, 2007) and describe a series of activities towards a certain goal, within a limited amount of resources and time (Hornstein, 2015). Alongside the emergence of projects, project management evolved in the same decade comprising all the tools and their use that are necessary to achieve the projects’ requirements within the set limits (Hornstein, 2015). Hornstein (2015) posits that “change is an inevitable consequence of project implementations” (p.295) and concludes that therefore projects are organizational change initiatives. Griffih-Cooper and King (2007) add that change is imminent to project management, what makes it necessary to integrate change management practices into project management operations (Hornstein, 2015). Especially through the rise of complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty, change initiatives are now often organized in project form, aiming to simplify the change and attain a greater insurance of success (Bredillet, 2010; Shaw, 2016). However, this simplification does not seem to deem success, as the failure rate of projects is still incredibly high with up to 80% (Burnes & Jackson, 2011; Hornstein, 2015).
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In contrast, the soft paradigm is characterized by ambiguously defined goals. Here, the focus lies on relationships, meaning negotiation and discussions, hence qualitative rather than quantitative measures (Gustavsson & Hallin, 2014). It appears that the soft paradigm is closely related to individuals’ sensemaking: there are many different individual perceptions of a situation which leads people to engage with one another on a narrative level to arrive at a better understanding of their environment and come to a shared conclusion (Brown et al., 2008; Crawford, 2013; Crawford & Pollack, 2004). This sensemaking process and therefore the soft paradigm of project management have a huge impact on project success (Hornstein, 2015). It consequently attracts attention that only slowly the interest in the impacts of organizational culture, behaviour of employees and project managers, as well as leadership on project success increases (Hornstein, 2015). Researchers propose that it is necessary to put more emphasis on the soft side of change, to also account for people’s continually developing view of and attitude towards the situations in which they are taking action (Monteiro de Carvalho & Rabechini, 2014; Crawford, 2013). Crawford and Pollack (2004) state, projects do not necessarily need to be only hard or soft: as they are two ends of a continuum, projects can also reflect a mix of soft and hard approaches. However, Burnes & Jackson (2011) suggest that the values of change intervention, the change approach and the objective of change need to align concerning the hard or soft paradigm to make a change intervention successful.
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fifth dimension is the number of available solution options. Because hard methods are usually focused on efficiency, hard projects tend to be limited in their solution options to those alternatives that are “culturally desirable and technically feasible” (Crawford & Pollack, 2004; p. 649). The chosen solution options are then generally implemented in a top-down fashion, whereas soft methods focus on a bottom-up implementation with an emphasis on participation and the exploration of multiple solution options. The degree of participation or practitioner role depicts the sixth dimension of the framework: hard methods normally have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. This extensive structure supports the goal of a fast completion within the hard paradigm. The same holds for the use of experts, as learning time decreases. The soft paradigm, however, favours the role of facilitators rather than experts, to further encourage collaborative behaviour of employees. The last dimension of Crawford & Pollack’s (2004) framework is the stakeholder expectation. Here again, the soft paradigm emphasizes interaction and encourages the exchange between stakeholders, whereas approaches in the hard paradigm ‘restrict’ themselves to useful and logical relations between different project components. From the perspective of the hard approach, people are interchangeable and predictable, while from a soft perspective different cultures and values provide useful input.
One project management method that is considered a soft approach is the Agile way of working: it values individuals’ interactions and negotiation higher than extensive documentation and sticking to the plan (Hoda et al., 2013). Agile working methods emerged in the 1990s in the software development industry as response to the traditional, hierarchical development models. Its focus is on incremental and iterative improvement, which allows for continuous feedback and involvement of the customer. Agile teams are supposed to be democratic and self-steering with facilitative management, thus directing attention on the social system concerns such as culture and individual development (Hoda et al., 2013; Hornstein, 2015).
Uncertainty in Change Situations
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ambiguity as the simultaneous existence of multiple interpretative possibilities of a situation. This triggers individuals’ sensemaking and the exchange of interpretations (Thiry, 2002).
On an organizational level, Sund (2015) claims that all interpretation, and hence action is performed under uncertainty: individuals in an organization perceive what is happening in their environment and collectively give labels to these situations to refer to them in the future. Those mental maps again influence the perception of organizational members and affect their (collective) evaluation of ‘uncertain’ situations (Sund, 2015). To reduce this uncertainty, individuals engage into a scanning process (Daft & Weick, 1984), by intentionally searching for information about events and their interconnections in the environment, aiming to reduce the mismatch between the ‘objective’ environment and the ‘perceived’ environment (Sund, 2015). During the interpretative progress, individuals again engage in a narrative process to make sense of the events and improve their shared knowledge framework (Daft & Weick, 1984; Sund, 2015).
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uncertainty can be reduced by participatory decision-making – both interventions depicting a soft approach.
Research Gap: Uncertainty Meets Paradigm Shift
As we’ve seen in the previous paragraphs, project success is highly dependent on the sensemaking of individuals and how they interact with their co-workers and managers on a narrative level about the project they face. Similarly, uncertainty is affected by the narratives people use and share within an organization during a change project. Hence, sensemaking, uncertainty and project success are tightly intertwined with the narratives people use.
In case that an organization wants to move from a hard project management approach to a soft approach and ultimately a ‘softer’ way of working, a special challenge is faced: it demands a change in the way of thinking of people about their work and how they organize it: a paradigm shift needs to take place. This paradigm shift demands a change of attention in the dimensions of a project on which they focus and how they deal with those new situations (Crawford & Pollack, 2004). Therefore, uncertainty may be especially high.
In the past, there has been a lack of research about how uncertainty in change situations has been communicated (Allen et al., 2007). Especially in the situation of a paradigm shift, a knowledge about how uncertainty is communicated may be of relevance to reduce uncertainty and increase project success. Therefore, the research question of this paper is: “What is the role of expressed uncertainty in narratives during the implementation of a soft project management approach in a former hard project management environment?”.
Methodology
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Those individual narratives were then combined to composite narratives which represent collective interpretative patterns (Vaara et al., 2016).
On that account, the base for this theory development were the composite narratives of employees working at a world-wide operating financial institution that is currently changing to a softer (i.e. Agile) way of working. This institution had been and was at the time of research still working in a way that is characterized by very hard approaches to project management. The transition period in this organization was organized in pilots, i.e. three pilots had been started whilst the research has been conducted. The rest of the organization was thereby still working in the familiar, ‘hard’ ways of project management. The financial institution was organized in three main divisions (also: pillars), which are specialized on certain processes and functions to operate the bank. All interviews in this paper were conducted within one of those three pillars, while still taking into consideration the criteria for interviewee selection (see next paragraph). Therefore, this paper has the form of a case study to better understand the dynamics observed in a real-world single setting (Eisenhardt, 1989).
The narratives were gathered via unstructured interviews: The idea behind unstructured interviews was that the researcher would ask one introductory question (i.e.: “How do you define this institution and what is your role here?”) and would further ask follow-up questions based on the words used and phenomena described by the interviewee. In this way, interviewees were not impacted by the interviewer regarding the topics they talked about. Like that it could be ensured that the topics brought up by the interviewees were indeed what they considered important and thus were their individual narrative, which provides construct validity (van Aken et al., 2012). In addition, the interviews were conducted across different managerial levels to guarantee respondent reliability (van Aken et al., 2012; Eisenhardt, 1989): Interviewees were selected by a contact person at the financial institution who was familiar with the managerial levels. The criteria for selection given to the contact person were as follows: (a) there was at least one representative for each management layer; (b) at least three of the interviewees were currently taking part in a pilot; and (c) all interviewees were connected to one of the pilots in some way. A detailed overview of the positions of the selected people and their payment scale can be found in Appendix 1.
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The interviews were conducted anonymously with one researcher and one interviewee. In some cases, a second researcher assisted in the interviews to increase researcher reliability (van Aken et al., 2012; Eisenhardt, 1989). In total, eleven interviews have been conducted within one of the three business pillars of the financial institution. All of the interviews were recorded (in total 9h, 5min, 37sec) and later transcribed by the researcher. The transcripts were then analysed with a software program (i.e. Atlas.ti) to improve systematic working and ensure researcher reliability (van Aken et al., 2012).
The single-case analysis took place in multiple steps. First, while re-reading the transcripts, inductive codes were given to all passages that were linked to the current pilot. If, for instance, an interviewee stated: “And I guess that’s the pilot itself. […] I’m not sure whether it’s time waste, because with a cultural change you have to go through these kind of things, but a set of guidelines might be handy to have. And then you can say "So these are some guidelines, or these are box you can work in, and then you can decide it on your own", but we didn't even get the box. We didn't get the guidelines, we didn't know anything.” (FM_01), the code “acknowledging that new way of working demands culture change” was connected to the quote. In a second round of coding, the codes attached in the first place were specified and/or grouped (i.e. grouped into a ‘code family’) according to topics. Eventually, an amount of 70 different codes and eight code families was developed. To ensure controllability, researcher reliability and internal validity (van Aken et al., 2012), all codes and families can be found in the Codebook (see Appendix 2).
During the analysis, it became apparent that the mentioned subjects of change and subjects of uncertainty were either representing the soft or the hard paradigm of project management (Crawford, 2003; Crawford & Pollack, 2004; Gustavsson & Hallin, 2014), a more profound classification was done with the help of Crawford and Pollacks (2004) framework. To guarantee for controllability and internal validity (van Aken et al., 2012), each of the subjects with the respective analysis can be found in Appendix 3.
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Findings
This findings session will present the results of the single case analysis in the following way: Firstly, the composite narratives regarding the expressions about change will be explained in detail, and examples will be given. In the same way, all composite narratives concerning expressions about uncertainty will be described, defined and examples will be provided. Thereafter, simultaneous occurrences of those concepts within the composite narratives will be discussed, as well as differences in those co-occurrences across hierarchical layers will be analysed. To provide both a clear understanding of the quotes and analysis, and a clear distinction of timely periods, the researched period will be called “current period”, “pilot”, or “transition (period)”. Those words will be used interchangeably. The “old” way of working describes the way of working outside the pilot, i.e. how the institution under concern used to work. The “new” way of working will be referred to when talking about the Agile structure applied in the pilot, or the prospect of the Agile way of working being used throughout the bank, which is the ultimate goal of the organization.
Expressed Subjects of Change
All interviewees described changes that were currently happening at their institution. However, it appeared that the interviewees were talking about different subjects of change. In total, eight different subjects of change could be summarized from the narratives of the interviewees: formal structures, dependencies, communication network and content, knowledge structure, responsibilities, local structure, decrease in management control, and mindset.
All expressed subjects of change (in the following also called ‘subjects of change’) were analysed according to the hard and soft scale by Crawford & Pollack (2004). Based on this analysis, changes in formal structure, responsibility structure, dependencies, and locality structure can be regarded to as ‘hard’ subjects of change, whereas changes in knowledge structure, communication network and content, mindset, and a decrease in management control can be regarded to as ‘soft’ subjects of change (see Appendix 3b).
It appeared that a bit more than half of the expressed subjects of change were hard (40 out of 72; see Appendix 4a). One interviewee working in the IT operations described a hard subject of change, i.e. how the responsibility structure changed with the new way of working:
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manager has changed with this way of working. Because they're only managing basically the people, they're not managing the work the people do.
Here, the change in responsibility is expressed by stating that “the role of the manager has changed with this way of working”, together with an explanation about what changed (“they're only managing basically the people, they're not managing the work the people do”).
The soft subject of change which was mentioned most was a change in knowledge structure (mentioned 13 times). This change was expressed by one manager in the following way:
FM_06: So, we decided that there will be a heavy involvement out of the Front Office. We're organized in a way that we selected three people, all with different skill sets, being involved in the daily, day-to-day meetings in the squats, being approachable, being actively approaching the teams with questions that they have, to deliver support, and…So, it was difficult. The people that I work with, that we have within my team, they have responsibility, where they need to be at the desk for 100% and just focus on markets as well. So they cannot step out and be a hundred per cent dedicated towards building an application.
Here, the interviewee describes the change in knowledge structure by stating that they “selected three people, all with different skill sets […] in the squat” and afterwards describing that this is different than in the ‘old’ organizations because the people he works with also “need to be at the desk for 100% and just focus on markets”.
Summarizing, the main finding about the different subjects of change was that the number of hard subjects that were mentioned was about the same as the number of soft subjects of change that were mentioned. It should be noted that the Agile work implementation is a soft project management approach. Therefore, the fact that hard subjects of change were mentioned as often as soft subjects of change indicates some contradiction.
Expressed Subjects of Uncertainty
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Similar to the subjects of change, the expressed subjects of uncertainty (in the following also referred to as ‘subjects of uncertainty’) were analysed according to the hard and soft framework by Crawford & Pollack (2004). Consequently, emotional and learning uncertainty were located in the soft paradigm, as they expressed uncertainty about a soft issue (in the following also called ‘soft uncertainties’). Structural, processual, and output-related uncertainty described uncertainties about hard subjects and were therefore located in the hard paradigm (in the following also called ‘hard uncertainties’; see Appendix 3c). In total, ‘hard’ uncertainties were mentioned 44 times throughout the interviews, whereas soft uncertainties were expressed only eight times.
The hard subject of uncertainty which was expressed most (22 times) was structural uncertainty. Summarizing the statements of interviewees, structural uncertainty here describes expressions which state that the roles, tasks, and responsibilities in the eventual new way of working or the pilot are unclear or might even vanish. It also includes statements about necessary re-alignments of priorities or changes in the hierarchical structure. One employee stated:
FM_01: I come from Change [Department of the organization], I am the project manager, and I should be responsible for the delivery. But I don’t have a project team. Because we have now, in the New WoW, a BusDevOp Team, so: IT, Operations and Change together with the Business, are now together, working in agile/scrum manner, where you have a PO, a product owner, you have DevOp Engineers, and you have a scrum master, which is one of the DevOps Engineers. But in that way there is no project manager anymore. And the team should be self-steering. So I don’t prioritize, because it’s the PO who needs to prioritize, … so it’s a bit difficult how to see what I need to do.
Self being a project manager, this interviewee expresses the uncertainty about whether her own role will still exist in the future as it does not exist in the pilot.
A very soft subject of uncertainty was ‘emotional uncertainty’. This label was given if interviewees stated explicit emotions like fear about the future. This type of uncertainty was only mentioned twice (see Appendix 4a). One interviewee stated:
Researcher 1: Why do you think that teams fall back into their old teams?
FM_14: Yeah that, something crossed my mind: I think people are still a little bit afraid of an RFA.
Researcher 1: Why are they afraid of that? I don't know how that works, so that is a serious question.
Researcher 2: People tend to lose their jobs?
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Here, the interviewee explicitly states that other employees may fear to lose their jobs and therefore are rather reluctant to really accept the new way of working.
Concluding, the biggest findings were that (1) each employee expressed some kind of uncertainty; and (2) an immense difference between the number of expressed hard uncertainties and the number of expressed soft uncertainties exist: 44 versus eight, respectively. The expression of mainly hard subjects of uncertainty clearly conflicts with the implementation of a soft (Agile) project management approach.
Expressed Improvement Suggestions
It appeared that interviewees were not only describing the change that happened at their institution but were often also giving improvement suggestions how they would enhance the pilot and its implementation. Similar to the subjects of change and subjects of uncertainty, the voiced improvement suggestions could be assigned to the hard or the soft paradigm, depending on whether the subject to be improved was a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ issue (see Appendix 3d): In total, 24 hard and 28 soft improvement suggestions were expressed in interviewees’ narratives, respectively.
Researcher: When you're saying it should be autonomous but it is lacking, why is that? FM_05: Oh, we don't have enough.. let's say influence on the chain. For certain things we're still dependent on other persons. Yeah, it's infrastructural. […] Basically we don't have yet the full end [process] under control. […] And the goal of [this organization] is to have all end-to-end in the control. And to be able to handle that, you need to take in more, let's say parts of the system. Like infrastructural and all that stuff. And if you have that, then we can also promise in what they want, do the whole end-to-end [process]. That's what [this organization] actually wants. Here, by stating that the problem of the successful pilot implementation is infrastructural and expressing that the whole process needs to work agile to make it work (“And the goal of [this organization] is to have all end-to-end in the control”), the interviewee expresses a hard (i.e. structural) improvement suggestion.
The interviewee in the following examples gives a soft improvement suggestion, focussing on the improvement of communication and autonomy of the teams:
FM_08: But for [this organization] I think it is very important to give autonomy to the team, so that they can say "okay, this is indeed our back-log", and they can handle all the communications will stakeholders, they can show the stakeholders actually "this is what we delivered, and this is what we think is the right step to do next".
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FM_01: I think that communication is very important. So better communication, training, I think I mentioned also training. I think it's an important- that people have some idea of what- of Agile, of the roles that are going to be in, in the new Way of Working or the Agile Way of Working, cause some people, I noticed from LMI [division], didn't even know. I mean I had some background because I read something, but again I had to read and I had to find out where I need the get the information, because it was not handed over to me. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Uhm, and uhm, so: communication, some sort of a trainer or […] some guidelines, Agile coaching, to facilitate some of the sessions. Sessions with management, sessions with teams.
Here, the interviewee combines soft improvements such as communication with strict guidelines, which represents the hard paradigm.
Summarizing, the main finding was that there were nearly as many hard as soft improvement suggestions given by employees.
Subjects of Change, Subjects of Uncertainty, and Improvement Suggestions
combined
As mentioned in the previous sections, it appeared that, although the Agile implementation is located in the soft paradigm of project management, hard and soft subjects of change were mentioned nearly equally often (37 and 31 times, respectively; see Figure 1). The same holds for the improvement suggestions made by employees: 46% of those expressions described a hard solution to improve the pilot implementation (see Appendix 4b). Only the expressed subjects of uncertainty differ highly from this observation: Here, 85% of the described uncertainty can be assigned to the hard paradigm (see Appendix 4a).
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As can be seen in Figure 1, hard and soft subjects of change were often mentioned in combination with hard subjects of uncertainty within the same narrative of an interviewee. The numbers on the arrows indicate the co-occurrence of concepts within the same quote. The following example shows a combination of a hard subject of change with a hard subject of uncertainty:
FM_12: Yeah, because what effectively happen is that you're taking two sets, or three sets of different teams, and shuffling them together. Yeah, so you have one team that knows each other very well, and the application very well, same with the other team. And then you have the operation or the Business people that also know each other very well and their tasks, and then you're taking all of them and shuffling them up, and saying "you belong here, you belong here, you belong there". Now what happens then is, it creates noise, a bit of noise between themselves. And some of them might think of the change a bit.. yeah, negative, instead of positive. So they don't see the added benefit. So in the first few weeks it was difficult to get everyone up to speed, […] to have everyone have the same goal.
The interviewee here describes a hard subject of change, i.e. the formal structure (“you're taking all of them and shuffling them up, and saying "you belong here, you belong here, you belong there”), shortly after that he explains that because of this shuffling up, “it was difficult to get everyone up to speed”, which can be labelled as output-related uncertainty (i.e. hard; see Appendix 3c.b).
Similarly, the interviewee who gave the following quote voiced output-related uncertainty (i.e. hard subject of uncertainty; see Appendix 3c.b). However, he combined this hard uncertainty with the description of a soft subject of change: a change in the communication network and content (see Appendix 3b.d):
FM_04: In a smaller team, everyone can- they can assist. Yeah, if they work as a team. Uhm, and people are more obliged to ask for help when they need assistance, so I think the output will be higher. It's also with the new WoW, when from every part of the overall value chain, if you have a small team, then every, every part of the value chain delivers something, If you work with this team. I think it will be, […] I think the output will be higher.
Mentioning the expectation of a higher output, although it is not sure yet whether this increase will be accomplished, describes output-related uncertainty. The statement that “people are more obliged to ask for help when they need assistance” reflects the change in the communication network and content.
As mentioned before, expressed hard subjects of uncertainty were often combined with hard and soft improvement suggestions within the same narrative alike (see Appendix 6b). A co-occurrence of a hard subject of uncertainty and a hard improvement suggestion can be found in the following example:
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FM_05: Because that would have- the thing is, they do it because one team is not delivering the value.
Here, the interviewee expresses output-related uncertainty again (“because one team is not delivering the value”) as the reason why he would implement the change more top-down, i.e. in a hard way (“I would have mixed it”), whereas the institution at hand left the choice to the teams whether they want to mix in a new fashion or stay in their old teams.
A combination of a hard subject of uncertainty and a soft improvement suggestion is expressed in the following quote:
Researcher: How do you perceive are people reacting to the implementation of the new Way of Working? Or to the change?
FM_13: I think we don't know. I think it has not been communicated, to be honest. So, [Manager A] needs to put some communication on this one. So, I know because I'm part of [Senior
Manager B’s] [Management Team], so I'm aware of the basics, but even myself, my teams are- or two of my teams are actually operating in the pilots. So you have the basis, but.. myself has still a lot of questions. Okay, but what does that mean? For WB [Department], what does it mean for us as change teams? What does it mean for one of my team? You know, I have more
questions also, at this moment. So I think the communication is crucial and we need to get started I guess on the communication.
The employee expresses processual uncertainty (i.e. hard; see Appendix 3c.c), as he doesn’t know how the change will affect his team and the structure of the Change department. As an improvement suggestion, he stresses the importance of communication (i.e. located in the soft paradigm; see Appendix 3d).
Summarizing, the most important observations are that (1) hard and soft expressed subjects of change co-occurred with hard expressed subjects of uncertainty; and (2) hard subjects of uncertainty co-occurred with hard as well as soft improvement suggestions alike.
Hierarchical Differences
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Figure 2: Overview how often hard/soft changes, improvements (here: ‘prescr.’) and uncertainties were mentioned per hierarchical layer (see also Appendix 5)
Figure 2 shows that that managers describe most hard as well as soft changes: hard changes are mentioned 4 times more by managers (i.e. 21 times) than by all other hierarchical layers, where hard changes were mentioned on average 5 times. This is the case although the sample size of each layer is about the same (i.e. 3 Seniors, 3 Managers, 2 Operations/Consultants, 3 Operations/IT). Similarly, soft changes are mentioned 3 times more often by Managers (16 times) than in other hierarchical layers on average (5 times). This pattern continues for improvement suggestions: Managers voiced 13 hard and 16 soft improvement suggestions, whereas the other hierarchical layers expressed on average four hard and soft improvement suggestions, respectively. The biggest difference appeared in the expression of hard uncertainty: Managers were mentioning hard uncertainty in 29 quotes, whereas Seniors, Operations/Consultant and Operations/IT expressed them eight, four, and three times, respectively. Soft subjects of uncertainty were merely mentioned by any hierarchical layer, except for Seniors who didn’t mention them at all.
Although those differences in numbers are immense, astonishingly the relation between the concepts stay the same, independently of the hierarchical layer (see Appendix 5c).
Figure 3: Co-occurrences of voiced subjects of change, subjects of uncertainty and improvement suggestions; Management layer; see Appendix 5d
When comparing Figure 3 and Figure 4, it stands out that in both cases, hard and soft changes are mentioned together with hard subjects of uncertainty. Similarly, in both cases, hard subjects of uncertainty are mentioned in combination with hard and soft improvement suggestions. The
hard changes soft changes prescr. hard prescr. soft hard uncertainty soft uncertainty Totals
Senior Manager (3) 5 3 2 3 8 0 21
Manager (3) 21 16 13 16 29 3 98
Operations/Consultant (2) 6 7 3 4 4 3 27
Operations/IT (3) 5 5 6 5 3 2 26
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numbers on the arrows indicate the co-occurrence of concepts within the same quote. However, when looking at the overall interview as a narrative, it appears that the number of co-occurrence of hard/soft change expressions with hard subjects of uncertainty, as well as the number of co-occurrence of hard subjects of uncertainty with hard/soft improvement suggestions increase (see Appendix 5a), which reinforces the findings from the quotes.
Figure 4: Co-occurrences of voiced subjects of change, subjects of uncertainty and improvement suggestions; Non-managerial layer; see Appendix 5e
Another interesting finding is, whereas the upper hierarchical layers seem to believe that the change is really happening and are working towards it, especially Operations/Consultants and Operations/IT are often voicing the doubt that the actual way of working might not at all change: Researcher: So, what you're saying is that the work not changed since 1989 or the way of
working?
FM_05: No, no, let's say I already worked with the Business directly since 1989. Only they called it different, they called it DSDM.
Researcher: Okay.
FM_05: So, they present it as a new way, but it's basically old wine in a new bag.
Among others, they justify those doubts with the co-existence of the legacy structure. One interviewee stated:
FM_14: But at the same time you can also see that the rest of the organisation, as we are a pilot, that the rest of the organisation is still there. And the rest of the organisation is also still trying to influence that team. And that is not good Because then we don't really make it a pilot.
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of subjects of change, subjects of uncertainty, and improvement actions do not change across hierarchical layers.
Discussion
In the previous section, a detailed overview and description of the identified composite narratives regarding uncertainty, as well as hard and soft aspects of the change intervention was given. The research question to be answered in this paper was “What is the role of expressed uncertainty in narratives during the implementation of a soft project management approach in a former hard project management environment?”. To answer this question, three main observations were described in the preceding section: First, the expressed uncertainty of interviewees was mainly one of hard types, accounting up to 85% overall. Second, the amount of expressed uncertainty (independent of whether it was of the soft or hard type) in the interviews was significantly larger in the hierarchical layer of Managers than in the other hierarchical layers (i.e. up to 6.5 times as often; see Appendix 5b). Lastly, hard subjects of uncertainty co-occurred with both hard and soft improvement suggestions within the same narrative, independently of the hierarchical layer. Possible explanations for those findings will be discussed in the following.
Thiry (2002) claims that uncertainty emerges if there is a gap or distinction between necessary data and data that is already obtained. Uncertainty can therefore be labelled a “lack of information” (p.222). He continues that hence, uncertainty triggers information seeking and the drive to resolve this particular lack of clarity. Further, for him uncertainty is a phenomenon which succeeds ambiguity. He defines ambiguity as the presence of numerous possible, contradictory interpretations which leads to an incomplete awareness of the situation. In his view, ambiguity triggers sensemaking, as this makes it possible for people to share their views and understandings of the situation by the use of narratives (Balogun & Johnson, 2005; Thiry, 2002). Araujo & Easton (2012) add that narratives make it possible for individuals to translate ideas and experiences into “relevant current meanings” (p.315). Narratives thus link individuals’ frame of reference with the current and possible future situations, which should reduce the feeling of ambiguity (Araujo &Easton, 2012).
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they will refer back to their existing frame of reference and act according to it, rather than changing it.
The institution under investigation has historically been one where hard approaches to project management clearly dominated. This formed employees’ hard frame of reference (Weick, 1979). Paired with the findings from the previous chapter, this established hard frame of reference is likely to have led the interviewees to mainly voice hard subjects of uncertainty, as ‘hard’ is everything they know from their past way of working: The hard way is one they know very well, and which thus gives some feeling of stability in a situation of change. This argument leads to the first proposition:
Proposition 1: Individuals’ ‘hard’ frame of reference leads them to express mainly hard subjects of uncertainty within their narratives.
A second interesting finding was the fact that uncertainties were expressed to a higher degree by managers. Already Balogun & Johnson (2005) explained that middle managers are the hierarchical group that is most involved, as they are both agents and recipients of the change. This is in line with the expression made by the interviewees: The Managers (i.e. middle managers) described that their positions might completely vanish in case that they implement Agile working organization-wide; at the same time, they are responsible to implement the new way of working. Therefore, it seems natural that Managers express most uncertainty, as they face the biggest changes.
In accordance with that, especially lower hierarchical layers (i.e. Operations/Consultants and Operations/IT) often expressed that they didn’t think that their actual way of working will change (i.e. two and four times, respectively). If those hierarchical layers do not expect a change to happen, that explains why they do not express a lot of uncertainty: there is nothing to get adjusted to. Proposition 2: Middle managers express more uncertainty in their narratives due to their higher involvement in a change from the hard paradigm to the soft paradigm.
One possibility why Managers express mostly hard uncertainty, may be explained with help of Burnes and Jackson’s (2011) value alignment. Based on Graves (1966) they state that organizations and groups in organizations have values “based on a common underlying purpose” (Burnes & Jackson, 2011; p.139). However, Burnes & Jackson (2011) state that those values can change: in case a change occurs in an organization or its external environment, and the current value system of the organization turns out to be ineffective in coping with that change, the value system of the organization can shift. This means that individuals will change their values to be able to cope with the change they face. In the long-term, this change in values leads to an alteration of the organizational culture (Burnes & Jackson, 2011; Graves, 1966).
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coping with the change: As managers’ hard values are still effective, there is less (or no) need to change to a softer value system. This line of reasoning is supported by expressions of interviewees: They stated that the existence of the legacy structure inhibits the complete, successful implementation of the pilot. One interviewee said:
FM_14: If you for instance take one of the things that are important within the new Way of Working, the Agile Way of Working, that's autonomy within the team: that's not there. At all. Researcher: Why?
FM_14: Because the old hierarchical line is still there. […] So we struggle with those kind of things. How can we really let it go and really switch to the new Way of Working, or do we want to keep the control from different angles.
The continuing effectiveness of managers’ hard value system may thus reinforce managers to express hard subjects of uncertainty. This reasoning leads to the following proposition:
Proposition 3: Expressed uncertainty in middle managers’ narratives is mainly hard as the current (i.e. hard) value system is still effective.
The last observation that serves to answer the research question was the finding that employees expressed hard as well as soft improvement suggestions in combination with hard uncertainty. As explained previously, when talking about uncertainty, managers expressed uncertainties they have in the current situation, in the here and now, where their hard value system is still effective (Burnes & Jackson, 2011; Graves, 1966). However, when talking about improvement suggestions, individuals are talking about a desired state they want to reach in the future. In the institution under investigation, senior management advertised that the new Agile way of working should lead to a culture change within the institution. The bottom-up implementation of the pilot as well as the given autonomy in teams were first signs of this culture change towards a softer values system. This promotion from the side of top-management can be seen as sensegiving: senior management actively tries to influence their employees to change towards a certain direction with the use of narratives (Sonenshein, 2010). This sensegiving from the side of management might have encouraged or pushed employees towards a softer way of thinking about the future, or at least lead employees to consider softer aspects of project management in the future. Employees’ acknowledgement that the value system in the future will be soft, may have lead to the emergence of soft improvement suggestions, as improvement suggestions also refer to a future situation. In opposite to the expressions about the here and now (i.e. hard), expressions about the future are therefore not only hard, but also soft. This leads to the following proposition:
Proposition 4a: The fact that the future value system will be soft, leads to the expression of soft composite narratives about the future (e.g. improvement suggestions).
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of action describe the “basis for action” (Argyris, 1976b; p.367), as they reflect people’s values, attitudes, and beliefs. Espoused theories of action represent theories of action that people want to live up to. Theories-in-use, however, depict the values and behaviours that can be construed according to how people really act: Theories-in-use are reflected by the behaviour people actually show. Argyris (1976a, 1976b) states that often a mismatch exists between espoused theories and theories-in-use (i.e. a mismatch between how people would want to behave based on their beliefs and how they really behave). This same mismatch can be observed at the institution under investigation. As stated before, senior management advertised the alteration towards a soft value system in the future. The acknowledgement of a change towards a soft approach depicts the new, espoused theories of employees: they intend to act in a softer way. However, their current actions (i.e. theories-in-use) are still hard. Already Argyris (1976a) acknowledged that an alteration towards softer theories-in-use takes time and involves a lot of struggle. Thus, as individuals still have their hard methods available and will switch towards softer approaches step by step, it is likely that hard and soft values will co-exist for a while. Given that, it is also likely that the narratives of employees will comprise hard as well as soft approaches at the same time.
Proposition 4b: The co-existence of a hard and soft value system (i.e. soft espoused theories and hard theories-in-use) leads to the expression of conflicting (i.e. hard and soft) composite narratives.
Theoretical and Managerial Implications
This study was aimed to give a thorough analysis about the composite narrative regarding uncertainty in the situation of a paradigm shift from hard to soft project management. The findings of this analysis were explained with the use of multiple theories, such as Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory, Weick’s (1979) frame of references, Value Alignment (Burnes & Jackson, 2011), and the theoretical concepts of sensemaking and narratives. This research filled the gap about how uncertainty in change situations is communicated: The study found that with the co-existence of hard and soft paradigms (or hard and soft values) within one organization, also two conflicting composite narratives emerge (i.e. a soft and a hard composite narrative). This means that although mainly hard uncertainties are expressed, individuals also state hard as well as soft improvement suggestions: A hard composite narrative capturing uncertainty co-occurs with a hard and a soft composite narrative about possible improvements. This aligns with the notion of Crawford and Pollack (2004) that change implementations are not only hard or soft, but can also reflect a mix of both.
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entails. Therefore, managers need to be aware that if they want to move toward a soft paradigm, their training and communication should also be focussed on the soft aspects that are about to come. Also, it appeared that the presence of an old, i.e. hard value system may hinder the successful introduction of a soft project management approach. Therefore, a stepwise introduction where the legacy organization is still active may be of inferior choice.
Limitations & Future Research
The findings of this investigation were very interesting and led to some helpful conclusions. However, also this research bears some limitations. The biggest limitation is the fact that this investigation is a single-case analysis, only. Moreover, the interviews were conducted at only one of three pillars of the institution under concern. This limits internal as well as external validity (van Aken et al., 2012). Although the interviewees were chosen in accordance with the goal to give a valid representation of the different hierarchical layers of the organization, they were chosen by an employee of the institution. This may influence the randomness of choice (van Aken et al., 2012). Due to technical problems, three of the interviews with the originally contacted employees were not recorded and could thus not be used for the analysis. Two ‘replacing’ employees were contacted (via the contact person of the institution) and interviews were conducted. In sum, only eleven interviews could be used for the analysis: Three individuals of each hierarchical layer were interviewed, except for one layer (Operations/Consultants), where only two individuals were interviewed. This also decreases internal and external validity, as the observations may be due to individual variations (van Aken et al., 2012). Another important limitation is the nature of the unstructured interviews that were used to arrive at a composite narrative. Although this freedom allowed for a broad acknowledgement of topics, the controllability of the research decreases (van Aken et al., 2012). Similar, as the interviews were conducted mainly one on one (i.e. one researcher and one interviewee), the direction of the interview was heavily influenced by the mindset and understanding of the researcher, which limits researcher reliability (van Aken et al., 2012). Naturally, as interviews were only conducted within one financial institution, the findings especially regarding such individual perceptions as uncertainty may vary considerably at other financial institutions. Similarly, as the research has been conducted of the starting period of the pilot implementation, it might be interesting to follow up on the findings and investigate whether or how the narratives including uncertainty and improvement suggestions may change during the long-term of the transition.
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future researches, the unstructured interviews should be conducted by multiple researchers to account for a broader variety of mindsets, influencing the direction and understanding of the interviews. Lastly, to better control for randomness, interviewees in future research should be chosen by multiple contact persons at the institution.
III
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Appendices
Appendix 1: Overview of Interviewees, including position and payment scale
Code Position Payment Scale Transcribed Conceptual management layer
FM_01 Senior Project Manager 12/15 done Manager
FM_02 Managing Consultant Feature Engineer 12/13 done Consultant FM_03 Development Engineer Proficient 11/12 done Operations FM_04 Global Head Trading Professional 15/15 done Senior Manager FM_05 IT Specialist, Development Engineeer 12/12 done Operations
FM_06 Principal Trader 13/15 done Manager
FM_07 Program Manager - NO RECORD
-FM_08 Senior Consultant, Feature Engineer 11/13 done Consultant FM_09 PO; Officer Non Financial Risk D - NO RECORD
-FM_10 FM Business Management - NO RECORD
-FM_11 Senior Programme Manager 14/15 done Senior Manager FM_12 Advisory Operations Specialist 10/12 done Operations
FM_13 Senior Program Manager 14/15 done Senior Manager
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Appendix 3: Assessment of hard and soft according to Crawford & Pollack (2004)
Appendix 3a: Overview of the seven dimensions of Crawford & Pollack’s (2004) Framework of hard and soft:
Appendix 3b: Described Changes
XVIII Appendix 3b.b: Changes in Knowledge structure:
XIX
Appendix 3b.d: Changes in Communication Network & Content
XX Appendix 3b.f: Change in Dependencies
XXI Appendix 3c: Described Uncertainty
Appendix 3c.a: Structural Uncertainty
XXII Appendix 3c.c: Processual Uncertainty
XXIII Appendix 3c.e: Emotional Uncertainty
Appendix 3d: VOICED IMPROVEMENT SUGGESTIONS
