Creating the Congruent Workplace

For organizational and personal change to happen and be sustainable, there must first be a system of thought balanced against action. Williams and his concept of congruence provide an alternative to the often chaotic, unbalanced ways in which change is currently understood and its accomplishment attempted. He challenges the organizational model of compartmentalized structures, offers a persuasive refutation of the fashionable paradigm of organizational transformation (one based on dominance and control), and argues a provocative notion that innovation is actually the successful result of reworking what has not worked before. A new look at the processes that create organizational movement, Williams' latest book is a guide for leaders, managers, consultants, and corporate practitioners, and a new way for students, teachers, and researchers to rethink the entire change process. Williams has found through his own experience that people focus too closely on the action behaviors of organizations and too little on the thinking behind them. The result is that gaps open up and create pitfalls in our efforts to achieve excellence in human and organizational performance. Williams suggests that organizations innovate themselves into failure. To counter this, he provides a true systemic approach to enhancing organizational performance, a system of what he visualizes as congruence, a way to fit thoughts to actions. It is as much a way of thinking, says Williams, as it is a method toward goals—goals that are clear and essential to the survival of any organization. Drawing liberally upon his own expertise as a teacher, consultant, and therapist, he helps others to appreciate the successes that can be realized when balance and the alignment of thought and action are achieved, and when the search for change becomes a planned, focused, and systemic endeavor.

LLOYD C. WILLIAMS is Professor of Management Leadership in the School of Management, John F. Kennedy University, and an organizational change consultant based in Cave Creek, Arizona. With advanced degrees in the study of organizational psychology, ethics, marriage and family therapy, and personality and culture, he focuses his consulting practice on developmental problems encountered by private, public, and not-for-profit organizations worldwide. His four previous books for Quorum are The Congruence of People and Organizations (1993), Organizational Violence (1994), Human Resources in a Changing Society (1995), and Business Decisions, Human Choices (1996).