Publications from ODSW Social Insights: Letters by DSW (Vol 2) | Page 181

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authority which often goes against our human nature. Change is after all
mostly uncomfortable.
So how can we better facilitate change? It begins with building trust and
offering a professional view without any hidden agenda. We can begin by
talking about best practice as people usually want to be seen doing what
is best.

Changing mind sets
Managing change requires persuading groups and individuals to change the
way they work and to think differently about their jobs. There are generally
three levels of change.
1. At the most straightforward level, a unit can act directly to achieve
outcomes, without having to change the way people work by for example
divesting non core work or services to focus on the core business.
2. At the next level of change, staff may need to adjust their practices or
adopt new ones in order to reach, say, a new target. An already “lean”
unit might, for instance, encourage its staff to look for new ways to reduce
waste, be more productive or have outsiders propose fresh ideas into the
organization or unit.
3. At the third level, it is about cultural change which involves changing the
mind-sets or aligning the ways of all the staff in an organisation. This is often
required when an organisation aims to reach a higher performance goal by
having its staff throughout the whole structure interact in alignment with a
new goal. This is also required when an organisation wants to become more
efficient, relevant or competitive by changing its culture fundamentally from being reactive to proactive, hierarchical to collegial, or introspective
to externally focussed. Since the collective culture of an organization is
an aggregate of the shared group and individual mind-sets, this will be a
challenging task.

Understanding the Purpose of the work
In the social service sector, beliefs and mission play a big part in providing
the purpose in the work for staff. All enter the sector with a noble reason.
But some do find that they begin to question their purpose and reason or
experience some distress when they find that their beliefs are inconsistent
with their actions in their organisations. In such situations, what the theory of
cognitive dissonance1 says is that the individuals will find that they need to
1

1957 the Stanford social psychologist Leon Festinger published his theory of cognitive
dissonance when he observed in the subjects of his experimentation a deep-seated need to
eliminate cognitive dissonance by changing either their actions or their beliefs.
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