Abstract
Dear New Space Readers,
This editorial delves into the study of industry emergence, focusing on two perspectives of understanding change: the “synoptic” view, which sees change as a series of fixed events along a timeline, and the “performative” view, which perceives change as a continuous, experiential process. Dr. Harmidos Tsoukas, in his chapter “The Performative Picture: Thinking About Change as if Change Mattered” from the Oxford Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation, 1 emphasizes the need for an integrative approach, highlighting the importance of recognizing patterns in recurrent change processes.
The performative view is lauded for its ability to capture the complexity and fluidity of organizational change, emphasizing the role of agency and the interconnectedness of experiences. The text criticizes the synoptic view for its inability to grasp the phenomenology of immanent change, which occurs between fixed points in time. It underscores the significance of narratives in shaping potential outcomes and acknowledges the temporary nature of stability within organizations. The author advocates for a balanced perspective that incorporates both views to effectively manage and understand change processes.
The first perspective sees change as a series of events, fixed in time and relevance, called the “synoptic” or “entitative” image or view. Synoptic changes are events that happen along a fixed timeline, and change is the difference in some state variable from some first time point, T-one, to some second time point, T-two. In this view, process is defined as a series of changes, and agency by change agents is a secondary phenomenon.
The second image or view is referred to as “performative” or “enactivist” view and perceives change as an ongoing process of experiences that are reconceived and woven together in different ways over time. This view observes change from within, looking at how change happens, the role of change agents, and how the organization responds to it. In this view, change is continuous and change outcomes are not deterministic or predetermined, they are probabilistic or possible outcomes. Another important aspect of the performative view is the primary role it gives to agency. For the performative perspective, the more important aspects are what lies between each individual stop. The role of agency during the journey between stops leads to multiple possible directions and outcomes along the journey.
Obviously, both aspects are important, and there needs to be an integrative or “conjunctive” perspective. If change processes recur, then patterns may arise. The synoptic view might help identify that a change process is recurrent, and the performative view can give an overall understanding of the underlying patterns that lead to the recurrence. This recurrence leads to a situation where stability and change can peacefully coexist, so understanding the patterns is critical to the accomplishment of successful change process management.
Many practicing managers describe their experiences in terms of multiple concurrent activities. I use the phrase of having “many balls in the air,” and each activity is a flowing stream of events that are experienced if not actually managed. The change going on within each stream is constant and inherent to each stream, referred to as “immanent.” So how should immanent change be viewed? Whereas the synoptic view might be able to describe the recurring patterns of this flowing change, it cannot describe the phenomenology of the immanent change itself. Because the immanent change happens between the stops along the change journey, the synoptic view misses all of it.
The performative view shines a light on what makes change possible, and this is based in many dimensions, two of which include relationality and temporality. Relationality refers to how different qualities of change are interconnected and related, changing each other and themselves. Substantive or physical elements of change may be independent of each other, but events and experiences are not; they can only make sense when put in context with other events and experiences. I love the quote given in the chapter that “every drop of experience is a novel weaving of the world of preceding experiences, out of which that drop arises.” In other words, every experience results from all experiences that came before it.
A second dimension is temporality. This refers to how the past and future combine to affect the present. The past can be interpreted, reinterpreted, and filtered, all from multiple perspectives, to project a host of possible futures, and both past interpretations and future possibilities are used to construct present actions. The past is referred to as a virtual dimension that can be accessed through intuition, allowing more skilled agents to draw on their experiences to recover past qualities and apply them to current contexts. Ultimately, the chapter acknowledges the role of narratives that provide the impulse for the many different potential outcomes in the present.
The performative view focuses on agency, and in doing so, recognizes the active role required to accomplish and maintain the perception of stability. Interestingly, organizations are described as a flowing stream, generating temporary vortices or eddies that provide a perception of stability in a limited region, similar to the eye of a hurricane. Of course, these areas of stability are fleeting, dissipate, and are reconstituted over and over. Organizationally, these periods of stability are due to active agency of change agents. Even though the synoptic view is predominant in many industries, it is important to augment it with the performative view because it provides a picture that is closer to the actual experience of change agents because it can better describe the complexity and fluidity of an organization.