Page 83 - Managing Change in Organizations

CarnCh04v3.qxd 3/30/07 4:16 PM Page 66

Chapter 4 ■ Theories of change: traditional models
Indeed the impact of the latter was substantially more important. In practice this
implies that one effective strategy for change implementation is as follows:
1 identify people in teams who are respected members of those teams;
2 convince them of the value of the intended changes;
3 train them in the new methods and in change facilitation;
4 encourage them to support other members of their own team through infor-
mal or on-the-job training;
5 invest some of your training effort in the sharing of best practice across the teams;
6 ensure that supervisors and others support and provide ‘organizational cover’
for the efforts of those ‘most respected co-workers’; and finally
7 senior executives must secure the ‘space’ for this to take place, for example in
relation to performance management processes.
Leaders then ‘deepen’ the impact of change by persisting in the changes, not
moving on to other initiatives but rather constantly reinforcing existing efforts.
Not least this is signalled by the way leaders categorize those efforts, the words
they choose to describe change and by the profile they continue to maintain on
what some will deem as ‘yesterday’s solution’! For example, is there a difference
between ‘better value’ and ‘best value’? Of course there is and early on leaders
might call for the former and then, following early successes, change the message
to the latter. At the very least leaders need to be cognizant of the impact of their
words and behaviour as important ‘signals’ in the change process.
In effect leaders operate on a ‘knowing–doing’ axis. Putting ideas into action
is the essence of the implementation of change. The models set out in this chap-
ter seek to gain a better understanding of what leaders contribute to achieving
change implementation. While we refer to one category of models to be consid-
ered as linear, all are linear in the sense that they tend to describe change as a
series of steps and stages, and also because they tend to rely on relatively clear cut
ideas about cause and effect. Note, however, that the last model we examine (that
of emergent change) could be viewed as being rather more subtle in terms of
underlying philosophy and therefore foreshadows the so called ‘critical theory’

models to be examined in the next chapter.
We will consider four approaches to theorizing about how major changes can
be implemented. These are:
1 ‘Clinical’ approaches.
2 Linear approaches.
3 ‘Systems’ approaches.
4 Emergent change.
Interestingly enough, theorists following each approach appear to start from an
assumption shared among them. This assumption is often stated early on in
any writing about organization change. Change is depicted as difficult. People
instinctively resist change and ‘most change efforts fail’. As I argued earlier in
this book this commonly held view hardly stands up to critical scrutiny.
Which organization do you know that has not been changed dramatically over

66