Update 30th April 2009

This short amendment to my original post is to summarise it for the Working / Learning Blog Carnival over at David Wilkins’ Social Enterprise Blog. The post is about self-directed and self-instigated learning for personal survival in the workplace as a response to stress, and to gain a perception of control in the face of a seemingly overwhelming work situation.

It is a story of a senior nurse taking control without instruction from above. The post also reflects on theoretical perspectives of taking this sort of chaotic action, which requires courage that not all managers have or they are too ground down to instigate. This offers a clear role for learning facilitators, who stand alongside the managers as they start their journey to change destructive cultures and detrimental working practices.

Taking Control Through Action

One of the things I want to do with this blog is to report stories of managers getting on and succeeding in creating working environments that are good for business and good for people.

One of these people is my sister, who is a senior nurse in a hospital in the west of Scotland. Talking to her in November 2006 (I was back home for our mum’s funeral), she was telling me about her response to the pressures of the job. She decided that she would no longer put up with the situation she was in and so she took matters into her own hands. Without waiting for instructions from above, she instigated a text-book performance improvement and culture change initiative. She acted on intuition and her long experience of working with people. This nearly drove her nuts but she reasoned that this was no worse than the stressful situation she was already in.

Chaotic Action

In his classic book, The Social Psychology Of Organising, Karl Weick writes about the implications of his analysis for practice. He proposes that chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction and says:

“When there is confusion and some member of a group asks, ‘What should I do?’ and some other member says, ‘I don’t know, just do something’, that’s probably a much better piece of advice than you might realise. It’s better for the simple reason that it increases the likelihood that something will be generated which can then be made meaningful. It’s OK not to know where you are going so long as you are going somewhere. Sooner or later, you’ll find out where that somewhere is.”

Taking action, no matter how chaotic the context, creates outcomes for debate and assessment that inform further action. It also has a psychological effect; it creates the possibility for increased self-efficacy – “people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce effects”. High self-efficacy beliefs are associated with personal confidence and perceptions of competence. This is what the social psychologist Albert Bandura says

“A strong sense of efficacy enhances human accomplishment and personal well-being in many ways. People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided … they set themselves challenging goals and maintain strong commitment to them.

They heighten and sustain their efforts in the face of failure. They quickly recover their sense of efficacy after failures or setbacks. They attribute failure to insufficient effort or deficient knowledge and skills which are acquirable. They approach threatening situations with assurance that they can exercise control over them. Such an efficacious outlook produces personal accomplishments, reduces stress and lowers vulnerability to depression.”

My sister denies that she is anything special. I disagree. Profoundly disagree. Whatever it was in her that made her take action was not conscious awareness of superior capability. Quite the opposite; if one thing characterises my dedicated siblings  – two sisters and one brother all nurses in the same hospital – it is modesty in recognising their enormous capabilities. They know they are good but see that as just doing their jobs.

Not every manager has her courage and determination. Part of what the Smart Work Company does is to work alongside more diffident managers to help build up their confidence as they set in motion the transition to new ways of working and managing. I asked my sister if she would have appreciated that sort of help and she said ‘of course’. She would have known what to expect, that the sort of resistance she was meeting was normal and that in fact, although nothing is predictable, her experience was consistent with patterns of indicators we see from documented accounts of culture change and performance improvement. She would also have appreciated the emotional support, some of which she did get from sympathetic nursing staff (she also got a lot of bad-mouthing).

More Than Two Years On

I am going back up home next weekend for my great-nephew’s christening. Chatting to my sister yesterday, she told me that the high heid yins (as we colloquially call upper management in Scotland) have put in place a hospital-wide programme of reforms, partly in response to a bad outbreak of C difficile in another hospital in the region. Her ward had a snap inspection last week and of course passed with flying colours. I am taking my video camera and voice recorder to get an interview with her. The interview will be posted as soon as I can edit it.