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26 July 2023 | Story Kekeletso Takang | Photo Charl Devenish
Prof Phillipe Burger, Prof Peter Rosseel and Prof Liezel Massyn
Prof Philippe Burger, Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, together with Prof Peter Rosseel and Prof Liezel Massyn, Head of the Business School, at the recent guest lecture hosted by the UFS Business School.

The business world today is confronted with continuous disruptions and uncertainty. Organisations are challenged to think about digitalisation, innovation, and transformation to remain competitive. Leaders must be able to take everyone with them on a journey of continuous change.

This is according to Prof Peter Rosseel, Director of MCR Consulting (a spin-off of the University of Leuven in Belgium) and Affiliated Professor at the University of the Free State (UFS), who gave the lecture in the UFS Business School. The title of the lecture was The Golden Triangle of Vision-Leadership-Culture: why changing behaviour is so difficult and what you can do about it? and it was aimed at challenging leaders to deal with disruptions and uncertainty, the lecture equipped attendees with the skills to do so. 

Prof Rosseel challenged attendees to stretch their thinking. “Change management is not a human resource function, it is a leadership concern. Leaders who want to see a change in behaviour should create conceptual conflict.”

Conceptual conflict

Laughter was coupled with moments of silence as Prof Rosseel, a visiting professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium, took attendees on a roller-coaster ride. He alluded to five examples of conceptual conflict, statements that shook the room. 

  • Team building doesn’t work, it is a waste of money.
  • Stop giving presentations, people only remember 4% of what was presented.
  • Take the word ‘consensus’ out of your vocabulary.
  • You can measure all you want; it won’t change behaviour.
  • Training as a strategy to change an organisation is a very bad idea.

He believes that conceptual conflict is important for the development of the culture of an organisation.

In addition to creating conceptual conflict, leaders should negotiate with their teams. “There are three ways to go about this; inform, engage/empower, and observe the change in behaviour. People want to be informed on time, people want control, and people want to know why. Meet these terms and you are well on your way to observing the change in behaviour. People can agree to change even if they don’t support it, as long as they believe it is fair.”

An attendee posed a question to Prof Rosseel: “In South Africa, we have trade unions, and this leads to a consensus approach to decision-making. How do we do away with consensus in decision-making?” Prof Rosseel responded by saing: “That’s the context within which you operate. You can’t change the context. Play the politics but never compromise the strategy implementation.”

The golden triangle of ‘vision – leadership – culture’ provides a framework within which organisations can operate. Vision is the content, while leadership facilitates the change in behaviour, and culture is created through strategy implementation and cognitive dissonance.

About the speaker 

Prof Rosseel’s field of expertise covers strategy implementation, change management, cultural and digital transformation, leadership, and learning. He travels the world to help leadership teams and their organisations to change (80% of his time). 

He also teaches change management, and digital and organisational culture transformation to first- and second-year students in the Master of Biomedical Sciences, third-year Bachelor of Criminology students, and third-year Bachelor of Psychological and Educational Sciences students. In 2024, he will also teach a postgraduate course to engineers on the same subject matter. In South Africa, he teaches in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences (20% of his time).

Read up on more programmes offered by the UFS Business School here.

News Archive

Islam. Boko Haram. Terrorism. Prof Hussein Solomon offers insight.
2014-09-04

 

 Photo: en.wikipedia.org

Prof Hussein Solomon introduction: video

When it comes to politics, there are lots of negative talk, but without any action or solutions.

However, with Prof Hussein Solomon, Senior Professor at the UFS’s Department of Political Science, there is not a lot of talk without solutions, but great activity regarding research work published on Islam, the Middle East, Boko Haram and environmental issues in Africa.

Prof Solomon’s most recently published article, Five Lessons Learned from Ejecting Islamists in Mali, was published in the Research on Islam and Muslims in Africa (RIMA) Policy Papers on 1 September 2014.
(https://muslimsinafrica.wordpress.com/2014/09/01/five-lessons-learned-from-ejecting-islamists-in-mali-professor-hussein-solomon/ ).

“The terrorist threat is mounting with each passing day in Africa with Islamist terror groups exploiting the ungoverned spaces, the availability of weapons, porous borders, an incompetent security apparatus and corruption in the political establishment,” Prof Solomon writes in this paper.

“It is therefore important, to explore cases where attempts have been made to dislodge the Islamists with a view to learn lessons so that future interventions do not repeat the failures of the past. This paper explores the intervention and lessons which could be learned from French and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) attempts to oust Islamists in northern Mali in 2013.”

Prof Solomon holds a DLitt et Phil (Political Science) from the University of South Africa (UNISA). In 2011, he was Visiting Professor at the Osaka School for International Public Policy (OSIPP). In 2007 and 2010 he was Visiting Professor at the Global Collaboration Centre at Osaka University in Japan and in 2008 he was Nelson Mandela Chair of African Studies at Jawahrlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. In 1994, he was Senior Visiting Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College at the University of London. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the MacKinder Programme for the Study of Long-Wave Events at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom.

He is also a Senior Associate for the Israeli-based think tank Research on Islam and Muslim in Africa and a Senior Analyst for WikiStrat.

More articles by Prof Solomon:

Boko Haram and the case of the abducted school girls
http://muslimsinafrica.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/reinvigorating-the-fight-against-boko-haram-professor-hussein-solomon/

Australian Broadcasting Corporation interview on Boko Haram
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/counterpoint/boko-haram/5657882  

Reflections on Inga 3 and Beyond
www.saccps.blogspot.com  

Nile and Okavanga River Basins (pdf)
 
Nigeria’s Boko Haram: Beyond the rhetoric (pdf)

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