Page 91 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chapter 4 ■ Theories of change: traditional models
need to inspire and connect with people. Accepting your own limitations,
bringing as it were ‘human scale’ to leadership, may be thought to help with
the latter need. Organizations need also to get the right people into place in
terms of knowledge, experience, skills and motivation. Finally, in the build-up
stage Collins emphasizes the need to face reality rather than not face facts
because people feel threatened or uncomfortable when doing so.
2 Breakthrough – during which the organization needs to build a passion for its
business, its products/services/sector/capabilities/technology and people.
Moreover, the organization must learn to think and act in both a disciplined
and decisive manner. For Collins speed is important but so is discipline.

The essence of the approach is to say that organizations need to plan to provide
certain defining characteristics of successful operation and ways of deciding,
working and performing. If these are diffused throughout the organization suc-
cess will emerge. However, the most important point to note here is that the
model does not require that we specify specific goals around the changes but
rather that we identify a direction of development along with a long-term goal
of being a lead or ‘defining’ company within a particular sector, of out-perform-
ing competitors and so on. Incrementally you would plan such goals, not least as
part of an annual budget process. So this is not a planned change model. Rather
it is a planned process of emergent change.
Both research and practical experience have shown the limitations of linear
models of organizational change. Such models appear to be such an over-simplifi-
cation when looking at the decisions and choices senior executives must make dur-
ing a period of change. This is not to argue them as being without value. The
author is well aware that practising managers find the Lewin model, the Kotter
model and OD as very meaningful when thinking about, planning and critiquing
particular changes in terms of the effectiveness of change planning and imple-
mentation. However, they often prove to be inadequate in a wide range of circum-
stances. This is particularly relevant where organization change is involved and
where any given change is one of a multiplicity of changes underway. Commonly
organizations have hundreds of change initiatives underway. This is common even
for quite small organizations. Yet most of the models do not include this as a cate-

gory in the model. At best it is subsumed within the organization context or
implied by reference to ‘organization politics’. But this is viewed by some observers
as leading to serious over-simplification.
The idea of emergent change and the linked idea of emergent strategy (Mintzberg,
1994) was developed to provide greater realism to discussions of strategy formula-
tion and change. They do so either by relying on complexity theory or by requiring
less to be specified in advance. We ought to note that logically open systems theory
is at least a precursor to this line of thinking.
Emergent theories based on complexity theory (e.g. Wheatley, 1992, 1996) will
be considered in the next chapter which reviews critical theory, postmodernist
ideas and complexity theory. Here we will consider leadership models of emer-
gent change (Higgs and Rowland, 2005) and market-induced change (Piercy,
2004).The former comprises a model of change leadership and change compe-
tencies in which leaders are viewed ideally as change enablers. The latter looks at
the role of incentives and rewards combined with disincentives all utilized as a
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