Page 21 - Managing Change in Organizations
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Chapter 1 ■ The challenge of change
If people understand what is to be achieved, why, how and by whom, this can
help. If they understand the impact on themselves, even more so. This is not to
argue that all resistance disappears. Indeed you can argue that more information
provided to those who do seek to obstruct change because their interests are
threatened may help them in their obstruction. But that is a matter of stakeholder
handling, timing and tactics. My point is that the arguments of many behavioural
scientists writing about change are overwhelmingly partial and, at least in part,
misleading. Rapidly skating over the issue of what ought to be changed, much of
the writing I refer to deals in employee attitudes, satisfactions, beliefs and so on.
Not that this is unimportant, but it is not the whole story. Much of an employee’s
response to any proposal for change lies in its perceived relevance, credibility and
likely success. If someone argues that something should change and presents a
credible plan which we feel is likely to succeed, then we are more likely to agree
with it. But we will search the organization change literature in vain for ways of
measuring ‘implementability’. Nor will we find any attempt to identify the ‘degree
of ambition’ in any proposals for change. The literature takes the content of
change as a given – a ‘black box’. There is some material on risk analysis which
clearly is relevant but even so most of the literature ignores even this material.
This book, therefore, seeks to depart from much of the existing literature by
tackling three problems in an integrated fashion:
1 What we can say about how to identify what should change and how to judge
how ambitious the change plans are.
2 What assessment we can make of the likelihood of these changes being capable
of implementation and what kinds of change architectures can be developed
to enhance the likelihood of implementation.
3 What the people and organizational issues of strategic change are and how
they can best be tackled.
The first two are inevitably linked. Part of the issue of how ambitious any set
of proposals are lies in how ready the organization is to adopt them and/or
whether an effective change plan can be adopted. Thus risk analysis and a
sense of how capable of implementation proposals are in the given organiza-
tion at the relevant moment in its life and in the economic, competitive or
other relevant context is a necessary condition for success.
In seeking to get to grips with the first problem we will examine ideas about strat-
egy formulation and new models of organization sufficiently to shape an outline of
how this problem can be formulated and considered, although our purpose is not
to write a book on strategy formulation but rather to show how an understanding
of how that discipline can help us. We then turn to a review of the main theoretical
models of organization change. These provide a conceptual basis for thinking about
how best to understand and manage change in organizations as well as providing a
means of understanding what happens in organizations as change is underway.
We then go on to look at the second problem. To do so we will deploy and
examine concepts such as change architecture, learning organizations and knowl-
edge management. These ideas we will draw together to develop the concept of a
change readiness index – a measure of how likely it is that a given set of changes
can be implemented. Our purpose here is to enable some analysis to be brought
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