Terms of Engagement: Changing the Way We Change Organizations

Customer Reviews

If readers can connect Axlerod's insights with Senge's new book, "Schools that Learn," they will have superb guidance on how their schools might be redesigned to meet the needs of a new age.

I am the Director of Faculty Development at a Jesuit high school in San Francisco. We are currently using Axlerod's model with great success.

So argues Richard Axelrod, democrat and change consultant. Believing that current change practices are too slow and bureaucratic, Axelrod asserts that there simply isn't enough engagement. In other words, after forty years in the business world - a world in which "it sometimes seems as if everything is changing at the speed of light" - the author has concluded that change efforts fail when people don't feel involved.

Whether this is a brilliant insight or a beacon of the trite and obvious is for the reader to determine. In the meantime, consider Axelrod's "engagement paradigm": widen involvement, connect people, create communities, and embrace democracy. All laudable in theory, and the author goes to great lengths to prove that such an approach doesn't cost or waste or confuse as much as a skeptic might imagine. But what does it mean? Larger meetings, fine, open-ended questions, certainly, flip charts and round tables, marvelous, but do these a paradigm make? When you look for details here you find yourself grasping at shadows. Ask for a specific action and Axelrod recommends "creating a compelling purpose." Some might find this a little vague.

Yet lying beneath the misty surface are basic assumptions, assumptions about pluralism and democracy all the more intriguing for remaining untested. Axelrod asserts for example that in large group change meetings, individuals frequently set aside their self-interest for the benefit of the organization. Perhaps, but couldn't we look to our founding fathers for another explanation? Examine the Federalist Papers and their hallowed brethren among American documents, and you'll find that democracy's strength grows not in spite of individual self-interest, but because of it. The negotiated settlement, the win-win solution, the efficient organization: people support such a "democratic" achievement because there's something in it for them.

_Terms of Engagement_ is unsubtle boosterism: of democracy, of Theory Y, and of the Axelrod Group and its Conference Model, which the book more promotes than describes. (Similarly treated are the Group's "walkthrus," a curious colloquialism from an author who eschews contractions.) If you too believe that change happens best in multitudes, pick up a copy of the book today. If not, consider why this nation is not a democracy. It's a republic.

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