Complexity, Management and the Dynamics of Change Challenges for practice

4 Change and the dynamics of change: thinking differently (p. 74-75)

Key points

• Perceptions of change

• Traditional views and approaches to change

• Three well-known change models

• Comparing old and new approaches to change

• Strategy and strategic change

As discussed in Chapter 2 and as you will be all too aware, the world has moved on very rapidly in the last decades. The twentieth century saw unprecedented upheavals in all aspects of human life as we have manipulated and changed our world bringing about massive technological, sociological, ecological and economic changes on a global stage. In some ways this has prepared the way for the acceptance of complexity science in the wider community. It was all too easy to argue that this new science with its talk of paradoxical, turbulent and unpredictable events was unrealistic and even fanciful when the world about you seemed to move at a steady pace. But this was before the crumbling of traditional manufacturing industries, the advent of the Internet, the development of fast-moving global economies, media frenzies, designer mores, terrorism and climate change.

Faced with such dizzying changes is it any wonder that many managers struggle to keep up and all too often cling to old ideas like comfort blankets? Unfortunately, as I hope was demonstrated in Chapter 2, too many managers and writers on management are still influenced by old ways of thinking. These ways of thinking are essentially laboratory based and while very useful for the hard sciences and the creation of new technologies, they are extremely unhelpful for dealing with the real, very volatile world of people and organizations that exists ‘outside the lab’.

In my experience most thinking managers are all too aware of the shortcomings of many of the approaches offered by mainstream management literature and some of the business schools on how to introduce effective organizational change. The prescriptions offered usually amount to ‘adding another lane to the motorway’ to solve traffic congestion – and as we all know this offers only temporary relief. In other words, they are merely doing more of the same thing. They continue to do the ‘things’ that they have always done. It is a way of thinking that does not help us to deal with modern realities and hinders the development of intelligent and sustainable management practice.

I would argue that if we are to learn to cope much better with our changing world then we need to radically change our thinking and our perceptions of change and the dynamics of change. Understanding and using concepts from complexity science – and the real world – will enable us to do that. In fact, it should enable managers to dramatically shift their thinking. No longer will they see change as an item on their agenda or ‘to do list’, but rather adaptation learning and change will be the normal flow of organizational life and managerial practice. Organizational change will be like breathing in and out.

It will be something we do all the time that is absolutely necessary for our existence and totally commonplace. But before I move on to specifically describing how we might do this I shall consider some of the popular notions and models of change, something on the nature of change and on the nature of change in organizations today as a necessary prelude.