Page 349 - Managing Change in Organizations
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Chapter 18 ■ Strategic convergence: a new model for organization change
judgement. It allows for an affective component. In the model we seek to judge
resonance in the following terms:
■ Felt need: the extent to which change proposals respond to the felt needs of key
stakeholders. We are interested in both organizational level and local needs,
problems and issues.
■ Convergence: the extent to which change initiatives are convergent or mutually
reinforcing in terms of purpose, objectives and consequences.
■ Adaptability: the extent to which the implementation of proposals allows suf-
ficient scope for local-level response to need or circumstances as experienced
in the locality concerned.
■ Willingness to experiment: the extent to which the implementation process is
explicit about the need to experiment with solutions and learn from experience.
■ Customer primacy: the extent to which the proposals will provide for needed
developments of customer service/delivery.
Change culture
In many ways the most complex of issues because the word ‘culture’ covers
variations in national, occupational, organizational and often local belief sys-
tems about appropriate ways of operating and about behaviour. For our pur-
poses we are setting to one side national, and to some extent occupational,
variation in pursuit of a simpler model to guide our analysis of change in a
particular organizational setting. In doing so note this as a key limitation of
the model. There is no doubt that a fuller treatment of these issues would be
needed to allow for a comprehensive analysis of multinational organizations.
Also we are clear that occupational aspects will need to be examined in some
cases. For example, we would certainly need to deploy an understanding of
occupational variation when looking at a hospital for example, or at, say, reg-
iments in the British army or particular departments of central government,
law firms and many others. That said, no other change model deals with
these issues comprehensively and this model provides a more comprehensive
treatment than existing models in any event. We examine change culture as
follows:
■ Evidence-based leadership. This is a development of the ‘willingness to experi-
ment’ idea above. Here we ask the extent to which, in general, leaders are pre-
pared to learn from experience, codify that learning and thereby build on it.
To what extent is the organization a ‘learning organization’?
■ Informed choice. In essence this bears on the credibility of decisions for change.
In part it relates to the extent to which choice and decision making is based
on valid data. To the extent that judgement, experience, insight and intuition
is involved it is about the extent to which this is clear, unavoidable and under-
taken by those who are trusted to do so. We are, therefore, really looking at
whether an authentic process of decision making is in place. If so, then stake-
holders will perceive decisions as necessary, timely and appropriate.
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