Organisational_Change_Management__a_Critical_Review

Critique by Robin May of Organisational Change Management: A Critical Review In his article, Rune Todnem By defines change management as ‘the process of continually renewing an organisation’s direction, structure, and capabilities to serve the ever-changing needs of external and internal customers’. He suggests that organisational change cannot be separated from organisational strategy and that, as such, successfully leading organisational change is the foremost task for management today. The author comprehensively refers to studies and research throughout his article. He suggests that research and theories concerning organisational change are confusing and contradictory and that most are supported by unchallenged assumptions. He quotes research to state that 70% of all change programmes fail. It is unclear as to what, if any, theories or research informed these change programmes. My professional career began with a decade in the electronics industry. I was party to several periods of significant change. During the first five years we grew from five to fifteen employees, a constant period of slow, continuous and successful change. The business was sold and relocated, becoming part of a large organisation – a period of discontinuous change. During the following five years the organisation was resold on three occasions, one of which involved a significant number of redundancies. From an employees perspective, it appeared to be unsuccessful periods punctuated by abrupt, sometimes dramatic, changes . I was not party to all of the planning concerning the above organisational changes, however of those which I were, none were informed by research or organisational change methodologies. I also have experiences in facilitating individual change over the last decade. Although organisational change management differs from that of the individual, I suggest applicable similarities. Within this critique I endeavour to compare my beliefs, formed through these personal experiences, with the theories and research quoted within this article. The author compares and contrasts the main change management theories and approaches in relation to Senior’s (2002) three categories of change; rate of occurrence, how it comes about, and scale. Within the category ‘rate of occurrence’ the article suggests two primary approaches; discontinuous change, described as rapid, abrupt shifts from the past, and incremental change which is described as continuous small steps as an ongoing process. The article suggests that the benefits of discontinuous change tend not to last, and this concurs with my later experiences within the electronics industry. My experiences in facilitating change in individuals are that change is rarely, if ever, transformational. It is usually a process of ‘three steps forward and two steps back’, and individuals often fallback into previous, habitual behaviours. This supports the idea that individuals within an organisation that utilises the discontinuous approach will ‘tow the line’ in the short-term but, if not supported to ‘re-freeze’ new behaviours, will ‘fall back’ into old patterns, thus losing the benefits of the new behaviours. When describing the incremental approach, the author mentions ‘negotiated shifts’. This is one of only a few references to suggest that successful change management requires the ‘buy-in’ of the individuals concerned. My early professional experiences suggest that successful change is affected with people, rather than ‘at them’. Furthermore, I believe that individuals within an organisation require ‘emotional fuel’ if change is to be fundamental and lasting. Logic and reasoning will not suffice: individuals need to want to change; to have emotional reasons for doing so. When working for a small busines, where a strong sense of loyalty and a desire to see the business flourish was shared, we successfully and continuously grew and changed over a five year period. This is in stark contrast to my latter experiences within a large organisation where there was little, if any, loyalty and even acrimony toward senior management. Individuals did not want to make change initiatives work and, as a result, the organisation got into financial difficulties resulting in large-scale redundancies. Successful advertisers recognise that to change consumers’ buying habits they must engage with their hearts; engaging at an emotional level in order to bring about change in purchasing habits. Within the category of ‘how change comes about’ the author compares the planned approach with the emergent approach. What differentiates the planned approach is primarily in the initial steps, in which the stages that the organisation must pass through are defined. Furthermore, this approach suggests that old behaviour needs to be identified and released prior to moving into desired, changed behaviour. Within my experiences of facilitating individual change, an effective and common practice is to clearly identify current behaviour and clear away misconceptions and faulty thinking that drive that behaviour, prior to moving to a required state. However the author suggests that recent thinking challenges this approach; that it does not work for rapid, discontinuous or transformational change, that it is based on unproven / false assumptions and is dependent on senior managers who, often, don’t have a full understanding of the consequences of their actions. The emergent approach is based on the theory that organisational change is a continuous, open-ended process of adapting to environments that, often, cannot be controlled. It suggests that the organisation as a whole needs to become an open learning system that is more concerned with facilitating for change; being ready for it, than for creating predefined stages and changes to go through. Within the category of scale the author suggests that there are four different sizes of change, from corporate transformation down to fine-tuning at the departmental and individual basis. It is within this latter category that the article refers to individual and groups being committed to achieving departmental excellence in meeting the organisation’s mission; inferring the emotional elements which I am suggesting are fundamental to successful organisational change occurring. There seems to be widespread agreement that the pace of change has never been greater, and that change comes in all shapes, forms and sizes. My experiences, both of organisational and individual change, suggest that a process of small, continuous changes work more effectively than discontinuous / transformational change provided that there are benefits for all stakeholders. An exception could be when large-scale redundancies are required. However, the individuals who remain need to be supported through the aftermath, which can be much like a grief process; an ongoing process of continuous, small steps in ‘coming to terms’ with the new reality; if the benefits of the change are to be retained. Maybe the adopted approach needs to depend on whether or not the changes are seen as positive or negative for those stakeholders most directly affected, with a discontinuous approach being more applicable in the latter case. Rune states the purpose of his article as being to take the first steps in constructing a new and pragmatic framework for managing change. I suggest a process that needs to be explicit regarding the significance of engaging with individuals’ emotions; that any new approach needs to factor-in these considerations.