Rethinking organisational change with Sally Hopper MSc, FCIPD, FRSA

.Sally is the Director of Human Resources at Hertfordshire County Council where she leads on all aspects of people management for a diverse workforce of over 8,000 staff. During her time in this role her work was dominated in 2020/21 by supporting and deploying the workforce in response to Covid-19. In 2021/22 she led a review of pay and terms and conditions working with staff and unions to do so. This review reduced numerous job descriptions to bring about a transparent job families.In 2019 and 2022 she was recognised as one of HR Most Influential Public Sector by HR Magazine. Keen to keep on learning and contributing to knowledge and practice in recent years she has been undertaking her PhD and her research focusses on organisational change and the behaviours and ethical considerations that emerge for those caught up in the change. She is a Trustee of the London Playing Fields Foundation and a lifetime user and fan of Epping Forest and environmental issues, including recognising the importance of open/green spaces on mental health and wellbeing.Sally is working towards her PHD on Rethinking Organisational Change.This thesis explores her work as a Director of Human Resources in local government, public sector in the United Kingdom. It makes a contribution to knowledge and practice and to ongoing debates and thinking about organisational change and specifically concentrates on the behavioural considerations when organisational change is scripted and located in a system taking a priori approach.Over the past six years, Sally has been inquiring into narrative accounts of what she does as a researcher and practitioner as a means to understanding and reflecting upon the way organisational change is considered in knowledge and practice. Prior to undertaking her research she had led or contributed to a number of organisational change ideas and initiatives. Alongside her PhD she works full time and continues to lead or contribute to organisational change ideas, which rely on orthodox thinking, she has drawn on this experience in her narrative inquiries where she draws on knowledge and pays attention to her practical experience of managing organisational change. Throughout this experience, she became increasingly aware that organisational change initiatives tend to be scripted by those leading the idea and can fall short of what one set out to achieve, or be abandoned altogether.To enable her to rethink a reliance on orthodox thinking, this research relies on the perspective of Complex Responsive Processes. This perspective combines ideas from pragmatic philosophy, practice theory, group analysis, and the complexity sciences and provides different ways of thinking, reflecting upon, and understanding organisational change.This rethink has caused her to recognise the profound tendency in knowledge and practice to figure out to a plan, which includes a scripted narrative of key points one should make, as well as things one should avoid saying at all. The suggestion is that in knowledge and practice, rather than so much attention being paid to this approach, instead this pattern of behaviour continues.