Bureau Zee

Making sense of instability – a case study of change in a large system, in Mind-ful Consulting, edited by Sue Whittle and Karen Izod and published by Karnac Books, March 2009

This story from the field of practice describes a process of change and organisation development that enabled the customer care centre of a utility company to recover from a situation of poor levels of customer satisfaction, a significant backlog in processing  bills, and regulator scrutiny. The instability, inherent in the crisis, and amplified through a number of interventions, opened up a potential space in which collaborative organizational design and leadership development became cornerstones of a turn around in performance. Bounding the instability (but not too much), containing the anxiety stirred up at various levels of the hierarchy and creating sense making opportunities within and between managerial levels appear as critical factors in consulting to large system change.