INsight/ Bottom Up Change

Photo OF book cover by boom publishers.

Manila, 8 February 2023 — What can you learn from my partner’s new book?

Story 

It happened last week. I felt joy when Floor de Ruiter, my friend and collaborating partner, launched Bottom Up, his latest book on management and leadership. Translated from Dutch, the subtitle reads System transformation for go-getters. It’s go-getters who figure prominently in the stories of transformation that he and his team facilitated in a wide range of Dutch businesses and organizations during the past several years. Go-getters who were unwilling to give up after encountering serial failures with using conventional change management methods.

With a long flight from Amsterdam to Manila coming up, I immediately purchased the e-book version and read it at cruising altitude on my Kindle as we left the European winter for the warmer climes of Asia. I sincerely hope that an English version will become available, so that you, if you are a non-Dutch leader and reader, can also savor the fascinating stories and insights about changes that seemed impossible at first, but happened all the same. It’s not all about the Netherlands. Floor also shares what he calls humbling experiences while facilitating dialogues with go-getter activists for local democracy in Myanmar (just before the military coup). It gave me goosebumps to read that.

For now, let me highlight some points from the book that spoke to me and might be helpful to you as well. First and foremost, that implementing successful bottom-up change programs in large organizations with thousands of employees or shareholders (think of a casino, a huge cooperative of flower growers, the national police, and the tax department), is actually possible. Moreover, the book shows that when empowering teams of ‘activist’ leaders throughout these organizations with more ownership of the change process, it can be done much more rapidly than we might expect. Extraordinary results, for certain. So how did they do it?  

Challenge

The book offers a great deal of insight into the problems faced by the organizations in the cases, the counterintuitive ways that were devised in large-scale dialogues with the stakeholders to make the changes happen, and the complementary roles of the stakeholders and the facilitators in the process. The manner in which the design and implementation of the change process were handled stands out from the conventional way of change supported by external management consultants. That also applied to the way that conflict, resistance, and ownership were used as sources of energy, becoming essential ingredients in the process. 

Working with their clients on the cases, Floor de Ruiter and his colleagues at Flying Elephants, their change management ‘lab’ (my term), have distilled 12 principles for facilitating large-scale bottom-up change in organizations. They share these on their website (in English) as principles to guide radical change to ‘move a system.’ The first six are about preparing to move and building the foundation for change, and the second six are about the actual bottom-up change process driven by dialogue. I recommend that you give them a close look.

Reading the book, I was reminded that transformational ‘system’ change in businesses and organizations involves three levels. First, the engagement and transformation of individual leaders at all levels, including many without positional authority, the main go-getters in the book. Second, the teams that organizations always rely on to innovate by generating and prototyping changes. When involved in difficult changes, these teams will suffer lots of wear and tear, and that calls for extra care to restore their team health through regular ‘maintenance’ activities. The book mentions how this need is often overlooked. I agree. Finally, the transformation of the whole organization, the third level, follows from the changes at individual and team levels, which are the necessary conditions. As Floor explained in the book, organizations don’t transform, people do. 

Question

Historically, almost all changes in companies and organizations were introduced and led from the top down, with limited involvement of stakeholders. This has triggered many challenges, and has even given birth to a whole industry of business and management consultants. From the book, we see that introducing change from the bottom up is also possible, even if fewer examples are widely known. The value of Floor de Ruiter’s book is, therefore, to challenge our thinking about organizations by showing that large-scale bottom-up changes are possible and can even be fast and very productive and energizing when facilitated in the right way.

From a leadership perspective, it’s always our turn to transform ourselves first. Every change in the organization starts with expanding our self-awareness (and addressing our biases), transforming our mindsets, and developing our leadership skills and behaviors to suit the desired change. Then we need to transform teams, with exercises designed to inclusively challenge all members to practice new behaviors that expand their awareness and ownership of the change. These teams regularly need extra care to stay healthy, long after the initial teambuilding work. Then it’s time to facilitate the process of change throughout the organization, using the go-getter leaders and the influential teams, both the existing and newly created ones.

As leaders, we all want to change how organizations work, to increase performance, adopt new working cultures, and multiply impact. The Flying Elephants website offers many tips and tools for transformative change in people and organizations, under the banner of ‘changing the game of change.’ I warmly recommend that you take a good look. My question for you this week is about the changes you want to influence in your organization. What are these changes, and what can you do to apply a bottom-up process and become a go-getter for systemic transformation? You can set up a Free Strategy Call with me to talk about the change that you want to influence in your organization and how to go about doing it. I’m looking forward to hearing from you. 

P.S. If you do read Dutch, here is the site I bought the book from.