How Do I See Change?

"In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital." Leadership expert Warren Bennis implies in his famous quote that in business, change is something that can be initiated and driven to completion. Much along these lines, change in business is usually divided up into two theories: planned approaches and emergent approaches.

Planning Change

If change is something that we can plan and drive to completion, then it would reason that a process model could be put in place for change management. There are several theories about which steps are part of the change process and how many steps to include in the process. While this approach might seem logical and well structured enabling us to measure steps along the way to completion, it doesn't seem to fit change. Ultimately it assumes that "organizations act under constant conditions that can be taken into consideration and planned for."(Barnard, M. & Stoll, N., 2010) This is simply not the case. Change is not an intermittent and structured force but is unpredictable and chaotic. Changes happens so fast that trying to plan for it would be nearly impossible and management in this way would fail since the planning would be happening in retrospect. Due to this, some would argue that change is not something that can be planned, but rather something to be controlled.

Controlling Change

The emergent approach would suggest that change is more of a "continuous, open-ended process of adaptation." (By, R.T., 2005) Instead of planning and producing a process for change, it is something that is always happening and revealing itself. Theories such as Kaisan and Six Sigma were developed to control change and increase employee involvement. This may work for the short term, but change ultimately can not be controlled. Continued change may wear on employees and actually diminish creativity and innovation (Feher, P., 2004). There are also commonalities with this approach and the planning approach in that an distinctive process is developed around change and the state of continuous change becomes a routine (By, R.T., 2005). This would suggest that change can not be controlled.

Leading change

Change is a constant. It will happen. In this case, I feel that the most appropriate way to deal with change is to lead change. If the organization does not lead change in the direction or path that it would like to go, the change will happen and may not be in the best interest of the organization. By doing proper root cause analysis first to determine why the change needs to happen, it can then be determined what needs to change. Executives and management can then understand and start "living" the change. Communication and interaction with employees should be a part of the process as they will inevitably lead the change.
Success comes from evaluating and re-evaluating the change and making sure that the root cause that was identified is still being addressed and is still a priority.


References:

Barnard, M. & Stoll, N. (2010, October). Organisational change management: A rapid literature
      review. Retrieved from http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cubec/migrated
     /documents/pr1.pdf

By, R.T. (2005, December). Organisational change management: A critical review. Journal of 
     Change Management. 5(4), 369-380. Retrieved from https://www.evernote.com/shard/s19/
     client/snv?noteGuid=a89b445f-0f7e-42e3-b620-d637bc8d3b35&noteKey=fa0833b8bd90729208
     c5d3a714e129d9&sn=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.evernote.com%2Fshard%2Fs19%2Fsh%2
     Fa89b445f-0f7e-42e3-b620-d637bc8d3b35%2Ffa0833b8bd90729208c5d3a714e129d9&title
     =Todnem%2Barticle

Feher, P. (2004). Combining knowledge and change management at consultancies. The Electronic
     Journal of Knowledge Management. 2(1), 19-32. Retreived from https://www.evernote.com/
     shard/s19/client/snv?noteGuid=20e443c6-8054-47b8-9c01-629f08f3c52f&
     noteKey=fdb97f847766e91faa5a87eafbafbc9f&sn=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.evernote.
     com%2Fshard%2Fs19%2Fsh%2F20e443c6-8054-47b8-9c01-629f08f3c52f%2Ffdb97f847766
     e91faa5a87eafbafbc9f&title=CM%2Band%2BKM%2Barticle


Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 5, 2019 at 8:44 PM

    Very nice post, Apryl. It seems like another manifestation of a desire to design and control plays out here (which is fine, reasonable, great). It'll be a large project (ie, ongoing nurturing-the-self work), but the shift from wanting or seeing that type of steadiness coming from others versus you being the one that provides it to others, is I think a thing to weave into your professional dev. Note: it's an executive leap to think and "be" like this. In many ways, your quality work demonstrates you've already done this in many instances before, so we're talking not necessarily about something very "new" for you, but rather new for perhaps tangible versus intangile work (ie, a manufacturing process(es) versus knowledge processes).

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