Jick y Sturtevant Talking Stock of 30 Years

TAKING STOCK OF 30 YEARS OF
CHANGE MANAGEMENT: IS IT
TIME FOR A REBOOT?
Todd D. Jick and Kinthi D. M. Sturtevant

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ABSTRACT
The world of management and technology has become accustomed to the notion
of “2.0” advancements and transformative innovations. Is the field of Change
Management/Organizational Development itself in this story? Not enough! We
re-examine the field’s foundational beliefs, practices, focus, research directions,
and value add. We conclude that there is strong evidence from the front line and
from an IBM Case Study that the field must “reboot” to rethink our methods
and frameworks; the role and skills of change leadership for the future; change
practitioner capabilities for the future; the metrics needed to evaluate progress;
and the knowledge exchange between Academe and practitioners.
Keywords: Change management; digital; Management 2.0; organizational
change; user-centered design; VUCA
INTRODUCTION
The world of management and technology has become accustomed to the notion
of “2.0” advancements, innovative tools, and calls for faster, cheaper, higher
quality, etc. These are often characterized with words like “transformation” and
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Research in Organizational Change and Development, Volume 25, 3379

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34 TODD D. JICK AND KINTHI D. M. STURTEVANT
“disruption,” not only in terms of strategy and business models but also for
management practices (Bremer, 2015; Christensen & Raynor, 2013; Hamel,
2009). The clarion call is to innovate or die! We hear about “old” paradigms and
“new paradigms,” of advancements and “moonshots” which lead to consolida-
tion of winners and losers, and breakthrough best practices.
Is Change Management itself in this story? Well, yes and no. Yes, it seems,
because to become a 2.0 innovative company with leading edge management
practices, the tools of Change Management are often called upon to help with
the transformation itself. But no, or not enough, in terms of whether the field
of Change Management has changed itself sufficiently. This chapter will focus
on the journey of Change Management as a field, and its own prospective
evolution to a 2.0 state (we are using the term, “Change Management” as an
umbrella label to capture the many variations including Organizational
Development, Change Leadership, Organizational Change, etc. recognizing
that there has been a lack of one nomenclature).
We want to apply the starting point questions of any good organizational
change analysis to our very own field: What is the current state? What are the
forces for change? What is the desired future state? And how should we close
the gap between where we are and where we need to be? In so doing, we also
want to consider the magnitude of change using the Anderson and Anderson
(2010) framework of transformational, transitional, or incremental change: Is
Change Management in need of transformation and if so, why and how? Or,
are we in transition and if so, to where? And if we are stuck in our old ways, or
at best incremental in our improvements, why have we not significantly
changed? In short, is it time for a reboot of Change Management?
Other management practices seem to be in the midst of revolutionary, trans-
formational type changes. For example, GE has declared an end to its traditional
and previously well-regarded performance management practices, and is instead
introducing a more flexible, organic, and everyday version (Nisen, 2015). Ditto
for Accenture (Varma, 2016). New structures of organizational design such as
holocracy intrigue management practitioners and organization theorists alike
in their bold flattening of organization hierarchies (Cunningham, 2015;
Whitehurst, 2015). And cultures of transparency and feedback-rich environ-
ments are revolutionizing the traditional controls and the power structures of
organizations (Whitehurst, 2015).
Why have all these leading edge management revolutions occurred? For
many reasons of course. They result from organizations dissatisfied with the
results of the old cultures, structures, systems, and processes. Hierarchical struc-
tures that create boundaries limit the flow of information about customers and
environments. New organizational designs enable more boundaryless informa-
tion and communication flows and are enabled by technology (Ashkenas,
Ulrich, Jick, & Kerr, 2002). Millennials have also arrived in organizations chal-
lenging the values and practices which appear antithetical to their generation’s
devotion to making a difference, to work life balance, and to personal
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Taking Stock of 30 Years of Change Management 35
fulfillment. In short, whether it is a push away from unsuccessful leadership and

organization practices, or a pull toward new models, the forces for change in
organizations in general are propelling organizations to transform themselves
and to experiment with new approaches and practices.
However, the field of Change Management does not seem to have subjected
itself to the same scrutiny and improvement. It seems very apt to raise these ques-
tions in this volume of Research in Organizational Change and Development.
Our field has developed some well-honed tools, tactics, frameworks, etc. and
professionalized itself in a wide variety of ways. And yet, management theorists,
corporate executives, and others have been pleading for new thinking, faster
results, and in effect are challenging the field of Change management to question
itself, to reinvent, and dare we say it, to transform itself!
Our task in this chapter then is to examine the challenge of change for the
field of Change Management, a bit ironically because the very field itself has
admirably been dedicated to helping others to change. Now, it is time to look
in the mirror.
We the authors have been in the midst of the field for over 30 years each.
(DeViney, Sturtevant, Zadeh, Peluso, & Tambor, 2012; Jick, 2016; Jick &
Peiperl, 2010; Kanter, Stein, & Jick, 1992). We are not standing apart and
critiquing. We are ourselves committed to and creators of the very basis of
Change Management as a field, one primarily as an internal consultant and the
other primarily as an academic, educator, and external consultant. We have
built corporate training programs in Organizational Change and innovated
MBA courses at Harvard and Columbia for students and executives in
Managing Change. We have done formal research and surveys, intervened as
practitioners, written case studies, collaborated with peers in industry, and
experienced many of the issues we are discussing in this chapter.
But we find ourselves willingly and increasingly compelled to stop and reflect
on what’s needed to take Change Management itself forward to 2.0? to 1.5?
or whatever version is needed? Our focus is to identify the challenges the Field
must surely address, its shortcomings and opportunities, the areas that may be
holding us back, and the beginnings of a path forward. We want to stimulate
new thinking and challenge all of us as members of the research community to
align around new areas for focus for our discipline. We are using a combination of
traditional and untraditional sources beyond our own experiences referencing
the work of scholar practitioners like ourselves and various academic studies, the
thought leadership of consulting firms, and more and more, the blogs and points
of view of a multitude of professionals and practitioners on the front line.
It is never easy to be the proverbial shoemaker’s children, or in this case,
acknowledge that our own careers have helped to build the very field which we
believe must now re-examine its foundational beliefs, its practices, its focus, its
research directions, and its value add. Despite huge accomplishments and
professionalization of the Change Management field, there are risks, shortfalls,
and sobering realities that surely must be addressed. And in so doing, perhaps
we will be a role model for what all organizations and management practices
can and must do for themselves facing disruption, new realities, and the risk of
obsolescence.
On the strength side, the field of Change Management has grown into a pro-
fession with 50 years’ worth of developed tools, skills, and techniques represent-
ing accumulated knowledge and expertise. And the many volumes of Research
in Organizational Change and Development have been at the forefront of think-
ing for the field over 30 years as internal and external resources have been
brought to bear to help manage and cope with change. Structured methods and
plans have been utilized to ease the burden and mitigate the resistance typically
encountered. Whew, “Change Management in the proverbial box” appears to
be ready to lend a hand.
However, on the threat side, executives are still told that typically only 25%
of changes are considered to be successfully implemented (Bucy, Hall, &
Yakola, 2016; Passmore William, 2011). And the degree of difficulty seems to
be significantly on the rise. The environment for making change has been signif-
icantly transformed by forces such as technology, social media, disengaged
change-skeptical employees, millennials, and the global village. The confidence
in a proven relevant solution to today’s challenges appears shaken, because
there is not enough evidence that the desired short term results to make the
changes quickly and effectively are achieved routinely and successfully. And
sustaining the results is perhaps no less routinely achieved. It appears that no
one really has easy answers and frameworks to address the realities of today’s
or tomorrow’s challenges.
With new challenges, and in a sense, new degrees of difficulty, what will the
future bring? Will the success rate decrease as the complexity increases? This
appears likely if the field is captive to its traditions of models divined from
different times than today. Or, will the field of Change Management find its
way to strengthen, and perhaps revolutionize its approaches to align better
with the NEW challenges and thus increase the success rate? We are witnessing
the emergence of new vocabulary like “rapid change” (Laipple, 2012), “agile”
change, “new age” leaders, “stragility” (Auster & Hillenbrand, 2016), VUCA
world, and many others. Are these harbingers of a field in transition or of a
larger disruption which will lead to new paradigms and new approaches?
In order to begin to answer these questions, we want to use tools we often bring
to bear with clients in diagnosing organizations facing change. We will organize
our chapter in four sections: (a) Where have we come from in Change
Management? (Yesterday’s Field our Change History), (b) Where are we now?
(Today’s Field our Current State), (c) What are the forces for changing the way
we manage change? (The Case for Change), (d) And where should we be headed
and how can research help to get us there? (Tomorrow’s Field our Future State)
(see Fig. 1).
We will review the Change Management field as it has evolved over several
phases then: Yesterday’s field and its development through infancy,
Fig. 1. Changing Change Management.
adolescence, and early adulthood; Today’s field and what we call “adulthood”;
and Tomorrow’s field as it is emerging into what we hope is further maturity
and new directions. We will use a variety of case examples but the centerpiece
case will be IBM, based on one of the author’s experiences and research.
We must ask ourselves the difficult questions of what to stop, what to start,
and admittedly, what to continue as well. We want to stimulate a discussion with
Change Management thought leaders from academe and industry practitioners
to help evaluate the “state” of Change Management. If the answer is generally
loud and clear that it’s time for a reboot, we will need to transform ourselves and
perhaps accelerate doing so. On the other hand, it may be that we are already in
transition and we will have identified why and how this is happening and encour-
age its continuation. Or, if we conclude that we are stuck in incremental change,
then we might have to add our names to the bold eulogists who are already pro-
claiming that “Change Management is Dead” (Little, 2016).
CHANGE MANAGEMENT’S JOURNEY TO

PROFESSIONALIZATION
To begin, we want to review briefly the development of Change Management
over the past three decades to understand our change history, i.e., how our field
has evolved to its current state of professionalization. We will consider the jour-
ney of organizational psychology and Change Management, from academic
research and thought leadership to industry application and commercialization,
from Yesterday to Today, to better frame what Tomorrow requires.
We can highlight the evolution of the field across five dimensions:
Identity: The common names or emerging language used to describe the

focus of research and work, in academia, consulting, and/or in industry.
Academic relationships: The academic disciplines or departments shaping the

field, expanding knowledge and core concepts, and developing practitioner
capabilities.
Frameworks and methods: The frameworks, methods, and tools most widely
taught and used in practice.
Primary players: The key stakeholders advancing theory and methods and
practicing the discipline.
Domains of activity: The nexus of research and application, given the chang-
ing social and business environment and the change challenges facing many
organizations.
In describing the field below, we recognize that there are many related labels
and nomenclature. We want to be inclusive and do our analysis without having
to draw ever-changing distinctions between streams of thinking around the
topic. We will start with Organizational Psychology but then essentially encom-
pass the many subsequent names (Organizational Development, Change
Leadership, Organizational Effectiveness, etc.) into one overarching umbrella
called Change Management. In addition, we have experienced in reality
through both study and practice that these labels overlap more than not, and
simply have evolved from original names and changing nomenclature. We
remain practical in our orientation that the “field” of thinking of Change
Management captures the various historical roots and multitudinous nomencla-
ture which is prominent today, albeit all too confusing at times.
Yesterday Our Change History (in Brief)
Over 25 years ago, the field of Organizational Psychology gained a sharper iden-
tity, built upon a history of understanding human behavior and change.
Concepts from Engineering, Social Science, and Psychology together contrib-
uted a theoretical foundation for a new defined area of focus. Several academic
disciplines such as Industrial Psychology, Social Psychology and Organizational
Development converged as Psychology Departments, and Specialty Programs
developed fields of study centered on emerging theories of organizational
change. The early 1990s was a time of movement from theories and frameworks
focusing on individual behavior and motivation toward models of organizations
as systems, with growing attention to the various organizational drivers of
change.
In this period, analogous to the “infancy” of our field, many foundational
concepts were evident which have developed and grown through research and
practice in the intervening decades. Initially, the Primary Players in this disci-
pline were “academic consultants,” working directly with organizational leaders
and teams to address change issues, refining understanding and sharing their
experiences to advance the field of thought about how organizations, their

leaders, and employees operate in times of change. Boutique consulting firms,
often with Leadership Development and OD expertise, also provided special-
ized services to help companies address organizational change.
During this phase of transition, from decades of attention to industrial era
concerns of job satisfaction and productivity to the birth of applied organiza-
tional psychology, the Domain of Activity focused upon bridging practice and
the evolution of research in the field. Many of the beliefs about how companies
operate and how humans behave in times of change that were distilled or put
forth at this time still serve as underpinnings for the practice of organizational
change today, 30 years later. Examples of a few of these fundamentals mindsets
include the theories of Force Field Analysis, the concept that change can be
managed or led, the humanistic belief that Change Management requires high
touch, and a continuing emphasis upon the necessity to measure the ROI of
Change Management (Anderson & Anderson, 2010; Creasey and Stise, 2016;
Holman, Devane, & Cady, 2007).
In the 1990s and 2000s, the field of Organizational Psychology blossomed,
growing into what might be called our “adolescence,” with increased attention
to the concept of Organizational Change and formal professional specialization
in a practice termed Change Management. The profession continued to stretch
in multiple directions, evolving its values and beliefs in a period of identity
formation, as is common in adolescence. Academic Relationships grew:
Organizational Psychology departments offered unique degrees, while various
other departments such as Communications, Political Science, and Social
Science incorporated Change Management content into their curricula.
Business Schools and Leadership Training programs also began to address the
theory and practice of Change Management and change leadership, either as
important components of human resource management classes or as standalone
tracks of study. Harvard Business School’s inaugural course in Managing
Change occurred in 1987 and continued through the 2000s. And Columbia
Business School and many others carried the torch right up until today with
courses like Organizational Change.
Organizational Change Management (OCM) Frameworks and Methods
expanded dramatically in this period, as a burgeoning number of academics
and consultants distilled their research and experiences into models used to
help guide practitioners through a variety of organizational change efforts. To
this day, graduate students and change consultants are trained on and applying
models which were broadly disseminated and gained popularity throughout the
1990s and 2000s, such as the Burke-Litwin model, Mckinsey’s 7 S, Prosci’s
“ADKAR” model, John Kotter’s Eight Steps to Change, Darryl Conner’s
Stages of Commitment, etc.
This period also saw rising awareness of what is still the most widely known
Change Management tool developed by industry: GE’s Change Acceleration
Process (CAP) (Ulrich, Kerr, & Ashkenas, 2002). Under Jack Welch’s
leadership, GE commissioned a team of consultants, including one of the

authors, to study Change Management best practices across industry and acade-
mia and create a toolkit to help GE managers to build adoption of the “work-
out” program for business problem solving and employee empowerment which
was then rolling out across the company. The CAP model and variations on it
grew to be used by many other companies, as GE employees slowly moved on to
other positions and shared their understanding of the value of using more struc-
tured processes for Change Management. In fact, during the late 1990s and
2000s it was not uncommon for external consultants initiating work in other
companies to be asked to validate their Change Management approaches in rela-
tion to the CAP model. GE is still one of the few industry companies that licenses
its change method to other interested parties.
A hallmark of this era in the history of Change Management was a shift in
Primary Players due to the rise of large consulting firm practices in organiza-
tional change and Change Management. Companies such as Accenture,
Deloitte Consulting, PriceWaterhouseCoopers Consulting, IBM Business
Consulting Services, and others established their change credentials through
working partnerships with acknowledged thought leaders in the discipline such
as Darryl Conner, John Kotter, Warner Burke, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter,
respectively. Change skills and techniques were integrated into most of the “Big
6” (then “Big 4”) audit firms’ process and technology consulting work and
many of the large services firms launched separate Change Management (e.g.,
“Human Resource Management & Change” or “People & Change”) practice
areas composed of consultants who were specifically educated or experienced in
organizational psychology and Change Management.
Strategy firms such as McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group also conducted
research among their clients and then established benchmarks and codified frame-
works used to assess and guide programs to successfully bring to life organizational
changes necessitated by new business strategies. And leadership consulting firms
such as Mercer Delta Consulting established practices with the capability of coach-
ing boards and senior executives through transformational change.
Field application of change methods and continuing enhancements to
approaches since this time contributed to a comprehensive but multiplying uni-
verse of approaches for every stage of a Change Management program. As a
result, any internal or external change practitioner working in the past 1015
years has had a wide (some might even say overwhelmingly wide) and ever-
growing choice of tools from which to choose. Oftentimes consultants and
practitioners created their own preferred variations of “standard” techniques to
be drawn from their quiver whenever needed.
Consider just a short list of examples of the most commonly used Change
Management tools: Case for Change, Change Vision, Change Story, Change
Scoping, Change History, Change Readiness assessments, Change Impact assess-
ments, Stakeholder assessments, Stakeholder maps, Change Communications
Strategy, Organization Design, Culture Change, Training Strategy, Adoption
assessments, and more. Couple these individual tools with examples of plans that
historically have been created to manage end-to-end change programs and one
can appreciate the complexities facing change practitioners: Change Management
Plan, Stakeholder Management Plan, Communications Plan, Training Plan,
Organization Transition Plan, Culture Change Plan, etc.
The Domain of Activity in this period leading into the “early adulthood” of
our profession centered on widespread commercialization and scaling of OCM
capabilities across the business ecosystem, as hundreds of students moved into
the workforce and consultants gained practical skills in the discipline. The com-
plex and transformational change challenges which organizations faced in the
2000s included large-scale enterprise-wide technology, process and human capi-
tal management systems implementations (e.g., ERP systems such as SAP,
Oracle, PeopleSoft), M&A, divestitures, reorganizations, outsourcing, offshor-
ing, and more. Consulting firms seeking to sell and more effectively support cli-
ent organizations through these transformation efforts each developed
proprietary Change Management methodologies and new tools, based on their
real-world implementation experiences and tailored to the specific nature of dif-
ferent project-based change programs (e.g., PwC’s “Better Change”).
In many ways, the consulting firms helped to promote broader awareness of
the discipline of Change Management among industries, as most of the large ser-
vices firms sold their Change Management capabilities as a point of competitive
advantage and a critical success factor necessary to achieve the desired results on
any transformation initiative. The language of Change Management also moved
more broadly into the business lexicon as more and more general business jour-
nals published articles by academics and executives touting the importance and
benefits of attention to OCM to enable successful outcomes. This awareness
helped moved the discipline full circle to the point that consulting firms began to
encounter clients who were now asking for Change Management resources and
support when considering services partners for their large initiatives, which in
turn led to increased investment in building global Change Management consult-
ing practices with sufficient skilled resources to staff their clients’ project needs.
Early adulthood is typically characterized by peak physical performance and
development of a vision for the future. Similarly in this period, the OCM pro-
fession strengthened and application continued to spread across consulting
firms and industry from 2010 onward, while the Identity of the discipline con-
tinued to evolve, reflecting new management concerns, business trends, organi-
zational dynamics, and evolving areas of exploration. Consulting firms and
industry change practitioners began to question the accepted terminology used
to identify their profession and many began to consider changing the goals of
their practices, internal functions, and methods to better align with shifting
beliefs about the nature of the work:
• Practitioners and change leaders began asking if the term change “manage-
ment” minimized the level of accountability for driving successful change
and implied a more administrative, tactical effort than what is in actuality

required for success. Accordingly, some consultants and internal functions
began to rename their work as Change Leadership or Transformational
Change Management.
• In an environment where continuous organizational change was increasingly
acknowledged as the new norm, others asked if the goal of the profession or
internal function would best be identified as to build and sustain
Organizational Agility or Organizational Resilience.
• In addition, after many years of attention to the systemic organizational
drivers of change across an enterprise, there was renewed discussion about
the importance of creating the best Employee Experience to achieve business
results (Morris, Roylance, & Sherrell, 2016).
• And, despite increased understanding and application of organizational
change methods industry-wide, the fact that a quarter of all transformation
initiatives still reportedly failed to deliver the full results intended made some
question whether the discipline had lost sight of the fact that the fundamental
nature of this work has always been about building employee understanding
and commitment to change. Practitioners began to ask if attention should
revert to how to ensure and measure end-user Change Adoption.
The nomenclature itself, as well as other methods, became so voluminous that
it was hard sometimes to find common ground or the benefits of consistency.
When professionals gathered at an IBM online brainstorming to label the field,
there were 75 names generated (see Exhibit 1). Moreover, from a wide sample of
companies, practitioners reported that only 29% had common language or
change frameworks within their company (Creasey & Stise, 2016).
Meanwhile in academia, Organizational Psychology Departments and
Business Schools, as well as many associated Executive Development and
Leadership Certification Programs, continued to deepen their research and cur-
ricula on OCM. The expanded thinking about employee (and customer) experi-
ence also resulted in the exploration of related Marketing and Human Capital
Management concepts and greater cross-department Academic Relationships.
A consequence of these partnerships has been an even greater number of gradu-
ates from different disciplines with knowledge of the principles for leading and
managing organizational change moving into the workforce (many in organiza-
tional roles outside of HR or dedicated Change teams), as well as new avenues for
research. For example, one began to encounter resources with expertise in change
in agencies working on branding strategies (e.g., SYP Stone Yamashita
Partners), in Communications functions, in HR functions, and in M&A teams
many of whom were using their own rubrics and language for organizational
change efforts.
With more expertise and a range of practitioners, there was continued
exponential growth of Change Management methodologies and toolkits (see
Exhibit 2).
Exhibit 1. Case Example: IBM “Naming Mini Jam” for Change

Management.
In the late 2014, IBM’s internal OCM Center of Excellence conducted a
“mini-jam” an online brainstorming session with about 50 members
of its global community of Change Management practitioners to consider
new names for Change Management as a method, a function and a prac-
tice area. This mini-jam generated about 75 naming options, reflecting a
range of words proposed at the time because this community was seeking
a name to better reflect the business demands and stakeholder priorities
they were starting to experience when practicing Change Management.
Optimization Personalization Accelerated Change

Adoption Optimization Adoption Leadership
Adoption Personalization Change Agility
Managing Change Cycles Organizational Agility
Managing Adoption Cycles Change Realization
Value Focused Change Change Workout
Results Focused Change Risk Mitigation
Outcome Focused Change Adoption Acceleration
Driving Adoption Readiness Assurance
Value Accelerator Smarter Change
Change Experience Organizational Experience
Change Program Leadership Speed to Value
Innovation Agility Outcomes Acceleration
Transformational Leadership User and Organizational Readiness
Organizational Agility and Change Enterprise Change Agility
Transformation Readiness Change Optimizers
Adoption Management Engagement and Adoption
Culture Transformation Organizational Engagement
Adoption Optimization Change Adoption
Organizational Resiliency Optimize Change Agility
Manage at the speed of Change Accelerate Time to Value
Workforce Adoption Preparation Adoption Agents
Optimizing Speed of Adoption Change Acceptance
Change Engineering Change Experience Adoption
Pesonalizinig the Adoption Workforce Adoption
Transformation Effectiveness Adoption Motivators
Workforce adoption Optimization and Culture Enablement and Adoption
Change
Exhibit 1. (Continued )
Design for Adoption Workforce Optimization
User Adoption Acceleration Business Acceleration Consultants
Adoption Engineering Change Masters
Change Transformation Change Engineers
Organizational Transition Adoption Management
Organizational Value Transition Adoption Engineers
User Readiness and Adoption Adoptioneers
We help Make Change Stick Readiness Architects
Value Acceleration Enterprise Acceleration
Change Realization Optimal Enterprise Experience
Organizational Enablement
Architects
Exhibit 2. Case Example: IBM Change Management Methods

and Tools.
This world of choice was also evident in IBM. In 2010, when initiating the
effort to establish a common approach to organizational change in all parts
of the enterprise, one of our authors undertook a scan of the different
Change Management frameworks that were already in use across IBM’s
global organization (both internally and within the company’s business con-
sulting services unit). She found at least six different methods and gathered
over 500 individual variations of change tools and plans that had evolved over
time and practice. Many had been brought into parts of the company
through decades of different partnerships with academic consultants, strat-
egy firms, technology implementation firms, boutique change firms, and
agencies. And a large number of proprietary tools had been developed by a
cadre of IBM’s own business consulting services practitioners through years
of experience and application on a range of client projects as well as by
acquisition of other consulting firms, each with their own Change
Management toolkits (i.e., PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting).
With such a diversifying focus and overwhelming amount of choice in orga-

nizational change Frameworks and Methods available, it is not surprising that
there has been a resultant demand for simplification of methods and prioritiza-
tion of tools. As the field has matured, internal experts, and academics
launched efforts to codify the knowledge base into simpler checklists and stan-
dardized survey tools.
For example, in 2010, one of the authors surveyed Change Management
practitioners attending an annual Change Management conference, sponsored
by Prosci and today by ACMP (Association of Change Management
Professionals). Drawing from the well-known popular book, The Checklist
Manifesto (Gawande, 2009), the survey asked respondents open-ended ques-
tions about what should be on the Change management “checklist” of actions
needed “before takeoff” (pre-change), during the launch of the Change, and
during implementation.
The results of the survey of 47 Change Management professionals were tell-
ing (see Table 1). On the one hand, they confirmed that there was a solid under-
pinning of well-honed tactics which were widely known and used, and could be
easily summarized in a kind of checklist format. On the other hand, they only
began to hint at the changing times to come which would require agile thinking,
Table 1. Change Management Practitioner Checklist of Best Practices.

Pre-Launch Checklist
• Clear definition of future state
• Build and communicate a business case
• Do impact/risk assessment
• Identify and engage stakeholders
• Design a change plan
• Integrate Change Management and project management
Launching Change Checklist

• Early and ongoing communication
• Engage stakeholders
• Ensure visible and effective sponsorship
• Reinforce quick wins
• Conduct pilot
• Develop metrics
• Monitor progress
Post-Launch
• Emphasis on repetition of communication and measurement
• Build interaction model for sponsor, project, change manager, team and subject matter experts
• Agile thinking
Have a mitigation plan and plan for the worst
Source: Data collected at Change Management Conference, N ¼ 75 (Jick, 2010).
contingency planning, and other such flexible means to deal with the challenges
emerging for the field. Moreover, while this “checklist” revealed that practi-
tioners converged on critical Change Management actions needed, it did not
indicate the variety of templates or specific tools being used by respondents to
execute these steps.
In the 2010s, as more and more companies explored ways to build out their
own internal change capabilities, researchers and consulting firms contributed
frameworks for how organizations build internal Change Management matu-
rity through competency models, assessment tools, and skill-building programs,
recognizing that the demand for expertise in leading and managing change was
broadening (Jorgensen, Bruehl, & Franke, 2014; PWC Advisory Services,
2012).
Thus, the Primary Players in this era of Change Management maturity
expanded beyond academics and consultants and came to include a growing
number of practitioners working internally in industry. As companies increas-
ingly recognized the amount of ongoing large- and small-scale change, many
organizations began to invest in their own skilled resources to lead and manage
internal change efforts on their own, or in partnership with external change
consultants.
Many large corporations, in particular those with challenging transformation
agendas, established dedicated Centers of Excellence (CoE) accountable for build-
ing OCM skills across their companies and leading internal Change Management
programs for critical transformation initiatives. These included Nike, Caterpillar,
Verizon, Blue Cross, ADP, Prudential, Starwood, Chevron, and others such as
IBM (see Exhibit 3).
IBM’s example of creating a CoE and training leaders was one of many
done within companies to build Change Management capability. And they
were the envy of many companies with HR functions struggling to have knowl-
edge and skills services with scale to offer to the rest of the organization.
Having a CoE symbolically signaled that this was a priority for these compa-
nies. They seemed to be modeled after similar centralized efforts in companies
such as Quality, Risk Management, and Project Management.
At the same time, other companies sought third-party resources and peer
collaboration to build up skills to take back to their company. With such a
wide and still growing base of practitioners, professional associations, and con-
ferences on Change Management also took off in this period (e.g., ACMP, The
Conference Board Council on Organizational Change, 2014). Independent cer-
tifications were created to set standards for the profession, and a plethora of
end-to-end program guides, individual Change Management tools and change
training seminars have been made commercially available. Widely accepted
methods for other disciplines such as Project Management (e.g., the PMI) and
Lean Six Sigma also recognized the importance of Change Management, and
began to educate their practitioner communities and formally integrate key
Change Management actions into their formal steps.
Exhibit 3. Case Example: IBM OCM CoE.

In June 2009, recognizing that IBM was in a constant state of transfor-
mation and engaged in concurrent large-scale initiatives, the company’s
Enterprise Transformation SVP sponsored and launched a dedicated
OCM CoE to support the company’s enterprise-wide projects. The pri-
mary objective of the OCM CoE was to build Change Management
capability in order to improve the rate of adoption and maximize the
business impact of transformational initiatives worldwide. As one senior
IBM executive stated at the time, “As our culture has become more and
more collaborative, we’ve learned we can’t mandate change.”
IBM’s OCM CoE embarked on a multi-year strategic agenda to:
1. Build a sustainable change infrastructure, including development and

deployment of a standardized proprietary method and toolkit (“Better
Change for IBM”) and a global internal OCM community (which
grew to become one of the top 100 online communities in the organi-
zation with over 8,000 practitioners worldwide).
2. Develop change leadership capabilities across the company, providing
24/7 access to all resources and assets through an internal Better
Change website, conducting face-to-face, live virtual training and
change leadership workshops, hosting online practitioner conferences
and partnering with members of related professional communities
inside IBM (e.g., Project Management, Lean Six Sigma, etc.) to raise
awareness of best practices. By early 2015, the OCM CoE had edu-
cated over 50,000 IBM leaders and employees around the globe on the
principles of change leadership, Change Management, and how to
embrace change.
3. Apply Change Management discipline to key initiatives, integrating
formal change scoping and planning discussions into semi-annual key
project reviews and strategic plans and helping to staff critical trans-
formation programs with OCM project managers and seasoned
change consultants.
The Better Change for IBM method and a practical toolkit was built to
focus attention on:
• Leadership commitment
• Employee Buy-in
• Organizational Alignment
• Transition Management
• Value Realization and Adoption
IBM’s OCM CoE role was to continuously raise leadership awareness of

the importance of investing in and managing change throughout a
project’s lifecycle from strategy through adoption, using a common struc-
tured methodology. The CoE function’s objective was to enable key roles
across the company to lead and manage change themselves, in other
words to “teach them to fish,” and not to take on change program
management of all projects as a centralized CoE. Over time, several of
the internal functions at IBM with ongoing transformations began to
build up their own pool of change trained experts, relying less and less
upon OCM CoE consultants for staffing and execution of their Change
Management programs.
The above brief history of Change Management highlights that the discipline
as we all know it has grown exponentially over time academics and practi-
tioners nowadays are working in a world where there is a wealth of knowledge
and experienced talent, a choice of roles in industry and consulting, a multitude
of frameworks and toolkits, and a more pervasive appreciation of the benefits
of our work. New technologies and different academic partnerships are further
expanding the theories and methods available for change professionals (see
Table 2). There is much to be proud of and much value being delivered.
Although it may be easy, if not tempting, to bask in the appreciation of our
field’s progress and professionalization, there are many questions which we
must ask ourselves so as not to rest on our laurels:
• Is it time to revisit our value add in relation to what is emerging as new expec-
tations and pressures?
• Are there any signs of the profession practiced today becoming out of sync with
the business environment and new ways of working?
• Deep down, don’t we recognize that our track record of 25% success is not
satisfactory?
• Is the effectiveness of our discipline at any risk? Must we not open ourselves to
changing course, and quickly?
So, where have we come out after our decades long journey through the
infancy, adolescence, and early adulthood of our field? While we have set sail
and made progress, new winds are blowing, and new challenges appearing. In
other words, is it time to examine the extent of transformation of our own pro-
fession that is required and set an agenda and a research agenda to guide
our direction? The short answer to all the questions above for us is a resound-
ing loud yes … given the forces for change which are confronting us today,
which we will now discuss.
Table 2. Yesterday’s Change Management.

Yesterday
Infancy Adolescence Early Adulthood
Identity Emergence of the field Organizational Change, Change agility & resilience,
Change Management change leadership, etc.
Key OD, psych departments, Organizational psych, Organizational psych,
academic & specialty programs, business schools, & business schools,
relationships industrial psych leadership training, HR, marketing, HR
social sciences
Frameworks Theoretical framework Theoretical frameworks Prof’l Assoc & commercial
& methods (motivation, etc.) (Burke-Litwin, etc.) toolkits, tailored industry
methods & applied tools models, integrated methods
(Kotter, GE CAP, etc.) (PMI, etc.)
Primary Academic consultants, Large consulting firm Emergence of Industry
players boutique consulting firms practices growth, academic CoE’s, Prof’l Orgs &
“guru” partnerships Communities of Practice,
“Hub ‘n Spoke” resourcing
Domains of Move from focus on job Scaling of applied Org Wide talent pool moving
activity sat & productivity to birth Change consulting skills & change skills across
of applied Org Psych, methods, proprietary industries, competency
bridging research & toolkits for larger, varied certifications
application enterprise projects
TODAY CASE FOR CHANGE AND THE

CURRENT STATE
The forces for change to our field of thinking have intensified substantially and
come from many directions. All of us researching and intervening in organiza-
tions are facing the challenge of changing the field itself. As we look in the mir-
ror, we can’t help but consider that “there’s something happening here, what it
is ain’t exactly clear.” Or perhaps it is starting to become clear: our field is at a
crossroads. We are neither what we once were, nor yet sure what we are going
to be!
There are a multitude of external pressures which are forcing us to recon-
sider longstanding assumptions and approaches to change: the need for speed
and agility, addressing the digital environment, keeping it simple and self-
managing tools, the pressure to show ROI, the multiplying constituencies and
locations, recognizing the voices of the employees and customers, and aligning
and perhaps synthesizing the proliferation of change methods and related
frameworks. The change impacts of these external forces are already becoming
evident in new terminology, academia, technologies and tools, practitioners
and focus areas.
A Need for Speed and Agility
Organizations today are reporting that the rate and pace of change have
increased and moreover, they are faced with implementing multiple changes
simultaneously. It is not uncommon to be at the start of some changes, in the
“middle” of others and, if this is even still true, at the “end” of still others.
How are all these to be “managed” in a coordinated way, if at all?
It has been comforting to be able to apply Change Management models that
say, “Plan-Do-Sustain” (Nelson & Aaron, 2013) and with these models came
many thoughtful tactics for each stage and best practice do’s and don’ts. But
lately, change practitioners are experiencing the need to more fluidly manage a
portfolio of large and small scale changes across an enterprise which are all at
different phases, with a seemingly never-ending stream of new initiatives rapidly
coming into the pipeline.
Some new perspectives for the field of Change Management are emerging
which recognize this business environment. One of the early thought leaders,
John Kotter, has emphasized the need for speed in entitling his new work,
Accelerate (Kotter, 2014). Auster and Hillenbrand (2016) have highlighted the
need for agility in both strategy formulation and strategy implementation, coin-
ing the term “Stragility,” which focuses on ways to continually adjust plans,
direction, and stakeholder navigation. Passmore (2015), in his latest work,
stressed the task of managing a series of changes simultaneously and sequen-
tially and highlighted the continuous nature of the leadership task as opposed
to the discrete. And Setili (2014) set out a series of ways organizations them-
selves can turn agility to an advantage.
Change Impacts
In industry, business leaders are exploring how to build more flexible and agile
organizational structures and ways of working in the face of continuous
change. Teams have begun to address this demand for faster, more iterative
change initiatives through exploration of Agile Change Management techniques.
These methods began with the rise of Agile software development techniques
but have increasingly spread for broader application to other types of transfor-
mation and change initiatives. IBM was at the forefront of this integration and
a model for what other companies today are attempting (see Exhibit 4).
As one global transformation leader at IBM said to the Change
Management CoE in 2015: “By the time I reach what was the end of my
planned change program, the goals have shifted and we are onto a new target.
We need to be able to revise our Change Management plan as quickly as our
initiatives change nowadays.” Corporate change initiatives that many of us
have led which used to take a year or more have begun to shorten to a sequence
of 6090 day “sprints.”
Exhibit 4. Case Example: IBM Alignment of Agile and Change

Management.
In 2014, the IBM OCM CoE recognized that more and more project
teams of different types across the company were using Agile develop-
ment techniques, and that there was an opportunity to better integrate
the company’s Change Management methods and tools into Agile imple-
mentation efforts. As a first step, the Vice President of the OCM CoE
sent three internal Change Management consultants to Agile training, to
better understand the specific methods that were being employed within
IBM, and to identify potential areas for alignment.
These three consultants then completed further background research and
developed an educational seminar for all 25 OCM CoE internal consultants
to raise awareness and stimulate thinking about how to better align their
work efforts whenever assigned to IBM project teams using Agile methods.
At the time, Agile at IBM was specifically defined as a method which
“uses continuous stakeholder feedback to deliver high-quality, consum-
able code through user stories and a series of short, time-boxed itera-
tions,” although the application of the method could vary upon business
unit, leadership, and training. One critical factor was the ability to split
stories (epics) into smaller stories that could be developed, tested, and
deployed more quickly. IBM used 24 week sprints or “scrums” to move
the most important user stories to completion. Another key point to
understand was that in Agile deployment, what will be delivered in each
short release is not known until the sprint is planned.
The OCM CoE task force highlighted the fact that traditional Change
Management methods are structured around a project lifecycle based on
a linear approach but now would need to be modified to an iterative
approach, understanding that lifecycle steps still would exist but would
iterate multiple times throughout development of solutions. In addition,
the team raised the following considerations for the practice of Change
Management on Agile projects:
• Need for greater flexibility

• Ability to enable more frequent deployments
• Greater cross-functional team trust and communication
• More support for executive stakeholders who will know general direction
but few specifics
• Change team as a critical conduit of feedback for future decisions
• Need for continued involvement in adoption, to build understanding that
success does not end at deployment
Finally, the OCM CoE found that Change Management was not a role
mentioned in typical scrum teams at the time, therefore the value of
change actions needed to be clarified and Change Management roles on
Agile project teams determined.
As more and more companies have begun to advocate for and apply Agile
approaches to projects, the question of how to seamlessly integrate Change
Management activities into Agile methods, and who is responsible, remains key
to keeping our discipline current with the times.
The Digital Environment
In the recent years, the field of organizational change has been propelled in new
directions by the need to structure and enable organizations to address the digi-
tal work world as well. There is a growing awareness among innovators that
there are new ways to take advantage of mobile and social technologies to
engage with stakeholders differently and more effectively. Companies are seeing
that members of today’s workforce, especially their younger generations of
employees, expect to engage in the workplace with the same social and mobile
means they are already using to connect with others when outside of work.
Change Impacts
To illustrate, IBM has increasingly used technology in its “jams,” which are
online global dialogues that enable more and more sophisticated, data-rich,
and user-friendly conversations among tech savvy employees, customers, and
partners (see Exhibit 5).
In the practitioner world, the large consulting firms are also working hard to
ensure their value and usefulness to clients by offering new thinking and
approaches. McKinsey directly addresses the continuing failure rate with a call
to “Changing Change Management” by using digital change tools for more
timely and feedback-rich environments which enable flexible and agile change
implementation:
Digital tools and platforms, if correctly applied, offer a powerful new way to accelerate and
amplify the ability of an organization to change. However, let’s be clear: the tools should not
drive the solution. Each company should have a clear view of the new behavior it wants to
reinforce and find a digital solution to support it. (Ewenstein, Smith, & Sologar, 2015)
Other consulting firms, such as IBM Global Business Services and Deloitte, are
starting to stake this territory by forming partnerships with Apple, building
Exhibit 5. Case Example: IBM “Jams.”

Over more than 10 years, IBM has refined the usage of online “Jams” as
a means to reconnect with employees, generate ideas, and revitalize its
culture through “big conversations” because the company believes open
dialogue is a key component of a social workplace. Jams on various
topics are carefully designed and virtually facilitated as 23 day change
events which give large global audiences of employees (and when needed,
clients, or partners) a voice on organizational values, key business ques-
tions, and new ways of working.
Tens of thousands and in some enterprise-wide Jams, hundreds of
thousands! of comments and qualitative feedback from stakeholders
are mined for rich analytics-based insights. IBM regularly uses jams for
innovation and crowdsourcing of ideas which directly influence the com-
pany’s strategic thinking, build broader buy-in and help to accelerate its
transformational change programs (for an early description of IBM
Jams, see Hemp & Stewart, 2004).
mobile apps, expanding talent analytics capabilities and sentiment analyses,

and repositioning their services as Digital Change Management.
Keep It Simple and Do It Yourself
The overwhelming range of methods and tools in usage, coupled with an envi-
ronment of continuous change, has more recently culminated in movements
toward simplicity and self-sufficiency. Many leaders and sponsors of organiza-
tional initiatives today are feeling stretched to the limits and express impatience
with what they have come to see as overcomplicated, time-consuming
approaches to implementing change. Their constant plea goes like this: “Just
tell me what to do!,” “I understand all these steps, but what do we really have
to do?,” “We can’t wait, so how can we do this more quickly?” Industry practi-
tioners hear these pleas, comments, and questions more and more often.
Change Management team leaders report that executives in many of their com-
panies are increasingly asking for shortcuts in driving effective change pro-
grams and achieving results (Source: Industry Peer Discussions at Conference
Board Council on Organizational Change, 2015).
In addition, as industry leaders and relatively small dedicated Change
Management functions are pressured to handle the growing breadth of change
initiatives, there is a related push to enable others to do it themselves: to build
change leaders and practitioners among rank and file managers and staff so
they can embrace and lead change more independently. Leading edge compa-
nies are exploring ways to supplement their formal Change Management train-
ing programs with more “just-in-time” options, many of which include self-
serve change resources which can be accessed via company portals, websites or
from materials maintained and hosted in the cloud.
Change Impacts
Simple mobile apps, short videos, and learning “nuggets” are now being built for
mobile devices (i.e., smart phones and tablets) which more and more employees
and customers have at their disposal. Gamification and simulation techniques are
on the rise, as designers explore creative ways to build realistic scenarios and make
learning experiences engaging, memorable and effective (e.g., Root Inc.).
Not only are the large consulting firms exploring these techniques, but also
new smaller boutique firms have entered the competitive marketplace, many
with technology backgrounds, and have started to innovate and offer these
next generation easy-to-use change tools.
For example, the printed tool, called Change Management Pocket Guide
(Nelson & Aaron, 2013), is now available as a mobile app usable on all devices.
Their website describes the app as follows:
You can read and learn about the Change Management 101
Model™ and use the tools, answer key questions and build your own Change Management
solution with an actionable plan for each change initiative you encounter.
http://www.changeguidesllc.com/products/app-old.html
This is just one example of keeping it simple and doing it for themselves.
“Walk Me” is another example which is being marketed in social media chan-
nels as follows:
Change Management Has Never Been Easier. Use WalkMe To Put an End To Your
Organizational Change Management Confusion.
https://www.walkme.com/pages/organizational-change-management
We are not users of these specific convenience tools and can’t speak to their effi-
cacy or even popularity, but we are struck by their emergence, and the likely emer-
gence of many others to come. As these self-serve tools improve and proliferate,
one could posit that the primary players in Change Management may become
more of the managers and employees themselves who are impacted by change.
The ROI of Change Management: Show Me the Money
Organizations worldwide are operating in business environments which are

highly cost controlled and resource constrained. Leaders today must try to
keep pace with new markets, legislation, consumers, products and services,
technologies and changing workforce dynamics, etc., while trying to “do more
with less.” In other words, the need for Change Management is “always on”
(Hemerling, Dosik, & Rizvi, 2015). Yet, although internal change functions
have been launched in many organizations in the past decade, these teams are
still considered by and large to be staff functions and cost centers, with more
fragile roots, and with much more variable reporting relationships and funding
models than well-established functions such as Finance, Marketing, HR, or IT.
As companies continue to reorganize and look for areas for consolidation,
these relatively newer internal change teams are at risk. Several companies
have, perhaps prematurely, declared “mission accomplished” in building enter-
prise change capabilities and disbanded their centralized Change Management
CoE and deployed the skilled practitioners throughout other departments in
their organization (Source: Industry Change Leaders peer discussions,
Conference Board Council on Organizational Change, 2015).
Moreover, in an environment where practitioners are being challenged to
focus their efforts on the vital few actions that are necessary to drive successful
change outcomes, the fact that to this day the field has not been able to effec-
tively make the case for the “ROI” of Change Management becomes an even
greater barrier to gaining company support for investments in change
resources, programs and actions. “Show me the money” remains a critical chal-
lenge for our discipline.
Change Impacts
The best answers to date for this ROI pressure are the following: Less labor-
intensive delivery mechanisms, building decentralized communities equipped
with modest knowledge and accessible practical tools to take local action, a
focus on quick wins, just-in-time intervention processes and more local level
accountability for developing and implementing change programs.
One interesting approach is to set out a disciplined decision process for man-
aging new change initiatives to be deployed into what might be an overtaxed
division. This process is about loading a change effort for a higher probability
of success upfront. Pepsico developed what it called “guard rails” (i.e., the lim-
its of ongoing business change that would be accommodated) to determine
what fits within the road and resources which exist and what goes beyond the
change capacity of a group. This discipline increased the likelihood of return
on investment. To this end, change projects were stopped or delayed so that
high-priority projects would have enough resource and focus to get the job
done.
As one of their senior executives told us, “Guard rails help avert disaster. If
too much is changing all at once, the system gets bogged down and nothing
works” (Jick, 2010). The project leads monitored “guard rail exceptions”
through a steering committee. Typically, a large-scale project might accommo-
date 1015 exceptions per year. (For illustrative purposes, an exception might
be the introduction of a new product at a plant location being readied for an

install or a change in trade promotion at the same time as the rollout of a new
order management system.)
Clear adoption metrics for organizational change, which are defined up front
and used to measure change program outcomes as in the IBM example, help to
ensure that there are comparable measures on the ROI of Change Management
(Exhibit 6).
Organizations with Center of Excellence teams working with internal clients,
and change consulting firms working with external clients, have also been
Exhibit 6. Case Example: IBM Change Adoption Metrics.

In 2014, IBM’s OCM CoE worked closely with global Shared Services
leaders to help their teams formally scope the change program complex-
ity and resource requirements of their major transformation initiatives.
As the OCM CoE partnered with the project sponsors and teams during
the annual strategic planning cycles it was evident that IBM leaders were
very clear on how to set financial and process goals and focused on mea-
suring and reporting business results. The OCM CoE, however, recog-
nized an opportunity to define and agree upon how to measure the
adoption of a change, to answer the question “are people committed to
the new way of working using the tool, process, and so on, as intended?”
The OCM CoE conducted external research to review various definitions
of change adoption and then developed a proprietary toolkit to help
internal IBM project teams define adoption metrics specifically aligned
with their project’s goals. These metrics could differ for process, struc-
tural, cultural, or technological changes, but were designed to serve as
leading indicators of a change initiative’s progress as well as formal mea-
sures of the organizational outcomes necessary for desired business
results.
The CoE recommended that project teams identify adoption metrics in
three categories that would provide insight into whether impacted
audiences:
• are experiencing the change positively,

• are committed to working in the new way, and
• have shifted to the new way of working, demonstrating new behaviors
and actions.
In addition, a standardized Adoption survey was created to measure the
progress of stakeholders along a commitment curve toward ultimate
adoption and sustained change.
exploring different more cost-effective staffing models for change projects,

including expanded “hub and spoke” structures, one-time scoping and planning
workshops, offsite “change studio” sessions, change coaching hours, offshored
change resources for select work stream activities, and other innovative
approaches to minimize dependence on a dedicated pool of change experts.
But sometimes shortcuts become short circuiting, so the effectiveness of
these new staffing approaches have not been validated as yet. The results of
these approaches are still mixed as some suffer from quality or sustainability,
and are only applicable for simple change interventions. Complex and multi-
faceted interventions, such as organization redesign or culture change, usually
require practitioners with deeper Change Management expertise and are less
well suited for delegated staffing models. As the field experiments with more
iterative project management techniques and simpler self-serve tools gain larger
mass use perhaps even developed for usage on specific types of organiza-
tional change outcomes may improve. The question remains whether organi-
zations can rely on new staffing models using traditional Change Management
methods and tools, or if new methods and tools should be redesigned to enable
new staffing models.
Multiplying Constituencies and Locations
Much of the work of Change Management requires understanding the impact

of changes on key individuals, roles, and groups, as well as any unique stake-
holder needs, and then designing tailored actions to build end-user awareness,
commitment and adoption of the change. But these tasks, and the tools and
approaches historically used, have become more difficult to execute in the busi-
ness environment that many companies operate in today. Global brands and
today are comprised of multiple constituencies several generations of
employees, business units, geographies, locations, languages, country cultures,
partners, etc. making it well-nigh impossible to use old techniques to “reach
out and touch” every impacted stakeholder in the course of a change program,
let alone to spend enough time with each and every one of them to understand
individual differences and reactions to any change.
Change Impacts
IBM has been at the forefront of becoming a globally integrated enterprise
(DeViney et al., 2012). Recognizing how difficult it is to operate across coun-
tries and constituencies, IBM was compelled to develop a new way of working
when deploying global changes (see Exhibit 7).
Many large organizations and consulting firms today are also beginning to
employ new approaches, utilizing emerging technologies and exploring new
means of communicating and engaging with far flung stakeholders. Virtual
Exhibit 7. Case Example: IBM Global Business Model.

IBM is a global organization which operates in 128 þ countries, has 7 þ
business units, client-facing and support functions, at least five genera-
tions of employees in its workforce, and more than half of its employees
work virtually from home or at client sites. In addition, the workforce is
comprised of employees with a range of tenure, varied backgrounds in
terms of how they came into the company (e.g., via an acquired com-
pany, as an experienced hire or a new grad), and a wide range of roles.
Any enterprise-wide change initiative has to assess specific impacts and
take into account these stakeholder differences and more when planning
a change program.
When planning Change Management programs in support of global
initiatives, IBM’s OCM CoE regularly had to address questions such as:
Are there any country laws or regulations to take into account?

Do we need to translate training and communications content?
What regional and/or business unit specific roles are impacted? Will they
react differently? What unique enablement or support is required for
these roles?
Are there cultural differences to accommodate in how we deploy this
initiative?
How will we engage employees who do not work in a physical office?
Will we use different messages or media channels to engage different gen-
erations in the workforce?
What factors will best motivate each stakeholder group to change?
The OCM CoE developed enhanced approaches to deploying change to
include “change play-books”(i.e., support materials developed centrally
to be tailored locally) to help local teams guide their implementations,
virtual communities for change agents to access information and change
resources, and a multitude of social platforms for communication, train-
ing, and ongoing stakeholder engagement.
channels such as Cisco Telepresence centers, Skype videos, WebEx sessions,

conference calls, and even robotics are being used to reach out to leaders and
employees worldwide.
One could say that the digital workplace is both itself a force for changing
the way we manage change, as noted previously, and a solution to how to man-
age a world of increasingly diverse stakeholders. Online communities have
become a new avenue for companies to engage with employees to accelerate

change, as described by Gast and Lansik (2015):
New lessons are emerging for executives striving to harness the power of social media in the
cause of wider participation … Digital tools to facilitate networking and collaboration … propel
horizontal cascades which at their best can weave new patterns of engagement across geographic
and other organizational boundaries. In this way, they make it possible to have new conversa-
tions around problem solving, unlock previously tacit knowledge, and speed up execution.
This seems to represent the first generation of technology tools which are not
just “automating” traditional conversation patterns but in fact beginning to
change the way we can converse with increasingly diverse stakeholders and the
very way that change is implemented. Here too, there is an opportunity, if not
a need, to revisit current assumptions about “best practices” for communica-
tions planning and delivery on change initiatives: multiple, short and concur-
rent changes impacting the same stakeholders may require very different
communications techniques than those that have been applied to very long-
term time-bound change initiatives, one at a time.
The Voice of the Employee and Customer
Another related force for changing the way we change comes from the wide
range of voices which have been enabled, empowered and monitored in trans-
formative ways. Consider the traditional way that a change initiative gets set
out. A leader articulates a vision, a direction, and a call to action. It may be
reactive or may be proactive, but it somehow is attributed to the insight, man-
date, if not foresight of a leader or top executive team.
Today, change arises in entirely different ways. Forces for change come
from employees and customers whose democratized power is enabled by social
media. Their voices, their needs, their demands become amplified through chan-
nels of information and communication which previously either never existed
or were fostered through employee or customer surveys controlled and insti-
tuted by a company itself.
At the 2015 Conference Board Council on Organizational Change, over 200
company attendees participated in a table exercise to identify forces impacting
their organizations which they now have to take into account in Change
Management; a recurring theme that emerged was what some called “the power
of one voice,” where a lone voice has the potential to spark a movement of
many others into a change imperative. Social channels have empowered any
employee or customer to raise issues and today anyone could potentially galva-
nize change within an organization.
Change Impacts
Communications nowadays are more transparent, egalitarian, and less control-
lable from the top down. Research also highlights the fact that organizational
change today is multi-directional it can arise and be driven from the top,
from the bottom, and peer to peer. (Conference Board, 2014; Jorgensen et al.,
2014). Hierarchies are flattening and “horizontal cascades” of messaging are
becoming more common (Gast & Lansik, 2015) and internal social media are
helping to democratize the organization and drive more transparent dialogue
(Clayton, 2015).
Recently, Volkswagen’s emissions scandal was heightened and action taken
after the accumulation of 100,000 tweets from angry customers (Swaminanthan
& Mah, 2016). These tweets not only highlighted the discontent of the stake-
holders, but also identified leaders by name whose accountability for change
became part of public discourse and no longer an internal matter which could
be controlled from within. Nothing can go hidden as demands for change bub-
ble up from employee, customer, and community voices whose power to force
change has been liberated.
Several companies who have recognized these trends, especially those with
comprehensive social media channels and active online collaboration cul-
tures, are actively using technology to encourage dialogue and monitor inter-
nal or external attitudes via “dashboards,” sentiment analyses, online
engagement polls or surveys, and community sites or “digital hives” (Gast &
Lansik, 2015).
One example of all this new “sensing” of social media occurred at Verizon
Headquarters in a dedicated command center (see Exhibit 8). More and more
companies are not just reacting to crises but trying to monitor trends and pat-
terns, sizing up threats and opportunities.
The increasing capabilities of companies to attend to the many voices does
not directly solve the challenges presented without considering new questions
that are arising:
• Whose voices do you listen to? Is any individual or group more important or
influential when change leaders can emerge from any front, at any time?
• What about people who are silent or are minimal participants on social chan-
nels? How do we know what their attitudes are and take them into account in
an equally timely manner?
• How do you listen to stakeholders’ voices proactively? Do you have to task or
generate discussion or simply capture it?
• Can one predict the direction of a mood in time to counteract resistance or to
more rapidly build upon existing support?
• Is there a tendency for stakeholders to be more critical, or more positive, on
public forums how do we counterbalance that to ensure we do not over-react?
These questions and others will need to be taken account in future

approaches to Change Management, as the constituents of change continue to
use their voices. More and more stakeholders expect to be heard and expect to
Exhibit 8. Case Example: Verizon’s Social Media Center.

In 2011, Verizon transformed a former newspaper reading room in its
Headquarters into a Social media command center. Previously, the room
was a place for only executives to read daily newspapers. It was often
locked and rarely used. Each day the new newspapers were swapped in
for the old ones.
Over the last five years, the space has been transformed into a data-rich
monitoring center of social media trends. All the social media sources are
represented on different screens and programmed to capture any and all
references to Verizon and its competition. It is essentially a scorecard
or dashboard of customer perceptions and opinions positive and
negative and tracks these sentiments on a moment to moment basis,
and specific to different issues, to different regions, and to different
customers. A small team of young college graduates are monitoring the
trends and issues and relaying them in summary fashion to Executives on
a daily basis.
Each executive also can access this information on their desktops. Each
sees an interactive map of social media trends. Key insights are
highlighted such as “Chicago T-Mobile had a successful campaign indi-
cated by increased social media mentions reducing VZ sales by X%.”
The CEO might look at his monitor and based on that comment ask
questions to probe for more understanding of that data.
have an influential role in guiding the outcomes of change, and there are more
and more channels for multi-directional dialogue emerging.
The answers to these questions in the future will help to determine the ways
organizations will respond. Organizations may be either/both enabled or forced
to make change as these voices heighten and are addressed. It no longer feels
like a leader “controls” the velocity and direction of many critical changes, but
rather leaders must learn to respond and perhaps partner with wider communi-
ties and voices.
Diffusion of Methods
After many years of advancement being driven largely through Organizational

Psychology departments and Business Schools, emerging theories of innova-
tion, employee journey mapping, cognitive data and analytics are beginning to
influence the discipline of Change Management.
In many organizations, user-centered design (UCD) is a rising methodology

intersecting with Change Management. UCD is a process based upon under-
standing users, tasks, and the environment and is specifically focused upon
design evaluation checkpoints that drive understanding of the whole user expe-
rience. This iterative process, spearheaded by IDEO, includes end users
throughout design and development and ultimately results in a user-centric
solution. In an ideal outcome of this method, the desired user experience is
baked into the new designs to such an extent that resistance to change would
be minimized and adoption optimized. Theoretically, successful UCD could
reduce the need for many traditional Change Management interventions.
Change Impacts
While the growing usage of UCD is a positive trend for users impacted by change
programs, it presents some challenges for Change Management practitioners them-
selves. The majority of people trained in UCD and accountable for driving these
design efforts in companies are not in traditional Change Management roles: UCD
teams are often comprised of process design experts, new hires with degrees in inno-
vation and design, and even technical developers. In addition, although there is
great synergy and common goals between UCD and Change Management, there
are some overlaps and gaps in methods/tools still to be addressed. Even where the
techniques converge, the language being used to define the activities are not the
same, leading to confusion among project managers and change leaders about what
is what (for more information on IBM’s approach to UCD, see Lashinsky, 2015).
On a related front, as companies are refocusing on employee experience as a
critical part of a change, marketing agencies, and experts are being hired to
apply the disciplines of creating “journey maps” and “personas” to better define
a desired future state. The trend is positive, because it focuses attention on
impacted roles and users, and emphasizes stakeholder needs and experiences
which have traditionally been raised by Change Management practitioners.
However, change practitioners need to integrate themselves and their work into
the activities of these new design teams.
Finally, as mentioned before, technological advances are upending tradi-
tional ways of gathering information from stakeholders of change. In the digi-
tal world, there are now a myriad of new social and mobile ways to gather
information from constituents, via directed conversations and indirectly via lis-
tening and sentiment analysis tools. Newly valued players include experts in
developing apps and cognitive analytics, skills which many of today’s change
practitioners do not have.
These disciplines represent exciting frontiers to advance the field of Change
Management, however the expertise is primarily coming from arenas outside of
the traditional departments of organizational psychology and business education,
representing opportunities and challenges for collaboration as we take our profes-
sion into new directions.
SUMMARY: CHANGE MANAGEMENT TODAY

In summary, our profession has reached a mid-life transition point a time to
revisit our assumptions and set a new course. Many practitioners, including
industry change leaders and consulting firms, are already grappling with how
to accommodate these seven forces for change: the need for speed and agility,
addressing the digital environment, keeping it simple and self-managing tools,
the pressure to show ROI, the multiplying constituencies and locations, recog-
nizing the voices of the employees and customers, and aligning and perhaps
synthesizing the proliferation of change methods and related frameworks. In
the aggregate, they are leading us to a new identity, new kinds of academic
practitioner relationships, new frameworks and methods, new primary players
in the field, and new domains of activity (see Fig. 2).
And we see signs that the field is responding and recognizing that the status
quo of thinking is not really an option. Consider three pieces of evidence: A
Conference Board Council on Organizational Change representing approxi-
mately 15 member companies that has set out New Principles, the recent offer-
ings and frameworks of prominent consulting firms that have promoted New
Frameworks, and a Lean Management practitioner who has proclaimed that
Fig. 2. Yesterday versus Today’s Change Management.
while “Change Management is dead,” there is a promising resurrection in new

“isms” which should be adopted by change advisors.
A recent task force of industry change leaders who were members of The
Conference Board Council on Organizational Change reviewed the context for
change in their companies and collectively identified the following “5 guiding
principles for changing the way we change” in today’s world (The Conference
Board, 2014):
1. Business is in a continuous state of change (concurrent, fast, complex).
Therefore, Change Management must become more agile, continuous, and
iterative. Today’s organizations will be going through change indefinitely;
change is not something that happens at a single point in time but rather a
continuous state of business.
2. Focus Change Management efforts on the new reality and future state to accel-
erate progress. People need to have a clear picture of what will be expected
of them in the new reality (and how they will be equipped to perform in the
new reality). While it is important to understand an organization’s current
state, which is the operating baseline, be sure to move forward quickly
(do not spend an inordinate amount of time assessing and analyzing the
current state). Equally, remember that the future state is far from a static
goal since you cannot see all the way to the end, as you get closer your
vision of the future will also shift.
3. Traditional communications are no longer sufficient. Change management
requires dynamic, continual conversation and engagement. Conversation
and engagement are more than the act of developing and distributing formal
communication.
4. Expand the circle of accountability for change. Value change leadership which
emerges from inside out, outside in, bottom up, top down and across the
organization. To succeed, Change Management cannot be solely the respon-
sibility of a single function, role, or person.
5. Adoption and internalized behavior change are the ultimate measure of success
of Change Management. Do not declare victory when the project work plan
is complete; rather, declare victory only when the business, the teams, and
the individuals have made the desired behavior and mindset changes, and
their work outcomes demonstrate true business integration and adoption.
Furthermore, in a sampling of recent models and frameworks being offered
by prominent consulting firms, some intriguing themes are emerging which
reflect the pressures and realities of Change Management today:
• Deloitte’s approach is called, “Pragmatic Pathways” (Hagel, Brown, Gong,
Wang, & Lehman, 2013) and was developed tellingly at its Deloitte Center
for the Edge focused on innovative ideas. Their Change Management
approach is built around “small moves, smartly made.” Neither traditionally
incremental (small steps) or transformational (bold big steps), it is a hybrid.
More importantly, it acknowledges many of the difficulties in managing

transformation and offers three key ingredients of success: increased velocity
of the initiative, decreased initial investment, and minimizing uncertainty
wherever possible.
• BCG’s approach is called “Always On Transformation” (Hemerling et al.
2015) which underscores the fact that companies are facing a myriad of
change initiatives simultaneously. In the aggregate, then, over 85% of com-
panies in a BCG survey have undertaken transformations. However, their
research shows that only 24% of companies with “completed transforma-
tions” actually outperform competitors short and long term. And thus their
message? Leaders need new or different skills to translate transformations
into results.
• And McKinsey (Bucy et al., 2016) emphasizes the imperative of speed in
transformation and identifies key enablers: “A governance structure led by a
Chief Transformation Officer, a relentless delivery cadence, and robust track-
ing and reporting systems.” They focus on the performance focus so that
there are clear quantifiable business results that come from transformation.
• Not surprisingly, there are similar themes from KPMG, who are tagging
their emphasis as “The Change Challenge; Realizing the Full Value of your
Business Initiatives” (KPMG, 2014)
• Korn Ferry lauds the necessity of agility in all aspects of running a company
and its talent, and promotes “change agility, the willingness to lead transfor-
mation efforts, continuously exploring new options” (Swisher & Dai, 2014).
These examples are probably echoed in other consulting firms today who are
selling services that they think will be worth buying and renewing.
Thematically, they all seem to speak to the many forces and pressures on doing
Change Management speed, delivery of quantifiable results and leadership
accountability. They seem consistent with many of the more recent academic
books and articles, and the short and pithy blogs and discussion boards about
Change Management.
Finally, a lean Change Management practitioner (Little, 2016) has provided
a rather intriguing list of methods or tactics that seem to reflect many of the
realities and forces for change described above. On what basis? He wrote: “…
it’s difficult for traditional change methods/frameworks/models to be used in
times of extreme uncertainty … Agile transformation, or any digital transforma-
tion, re-organization and more, is social change and that cannot be managed.”
Instead, he proposes in Table 3 nine new Change Management “isms” for
today’s times underscoring more collaborative, fluid, flexible, and inclusive
change tactics (see Table 3).
All three examples Conference Board Members, Prominent Consulting
Firms, and a Lean Change Management practitioner - seem to share the same
underlying premise the “old” tools and methods do not seem well suited to
tackle transformations going forward. Points of emphasis of the new and
Table 3. Nine Change Management “Isms” or Today’s World of Disruptive

Change (Little, 2016).
• Co-creation of change over getting buy-in
• Cause and purpose over urgency
• Informal networks over communications plan
• Big visible walls over status reporting
• Diagnostics over change ROI/metrics
• Delegation poker over explicit roles and responsibilities
• Avoiding resistance over overcoming resistance
• Run experiments over managing change activities
• Department tax over change project budgeting
seemingly improved ways vary by firm and by author of course, but they all try
to address the quandary that the world seems to be demanding more of Change
Management than is routinely delivered.
OUR FUTURE STATE? REBOOTING CHANGE

MANAGEMENT AND REFOCUSING OUR RESEARCH
There is more than enough evidence that the challenges of managing and lead-
ing organizations have grown exponentially with the onset of the “VUCA
world”: the recognition of this concept of increased volatility, uncertainty, com-
plexity, and ambiguity has become ingrained in the fabric of doing business.
The “old world” crutches of relative predictability, control, and reliable plan-
ning have disappeared and been replaced by turbulence and the unexpected.
But how does one set out to “make change” when the starting point and the
basis for the change itself become moving elements?
Our data and observations of today’s “Current state” of Change
Management leave us wondering if the glass is half full or half empty. On the
one hand, there has been some promising new thinking which is setting out to
respond to these challenges. There is a wealth of knowledge and choices in tools
and methods, especially with the aid of technology. There is a huge talent pool
of resources. There is a widening of the disciplines and players who offer
enriched thinking about Change Management. At times, the cup seems over-
flowing which is positive but perhaps it’s “too much of a good thing.”
On the other hand, the pressures and forces affecting the field are substan-
tial, challenging, and difficult to address, and the field may indeed be falling
short or at risk of losing relevance if it doesn’t change itself to remain in sync
with the times. And the wide range of offerings, tactics, frameworks, and disci-
plines might be both overwhelming and confusing. So, we now venture into the
question of where we need to be headed from here. Have Change Management
research and practices, its academics and its practitioners approached the
leading edge fruitfully? That edge we want to name using terminology familiar
to all of us Transformation.
Anderson and Anderson (2010) describe it this way:
Transformation occurs when the organization recognizes that its old way of operating, even
if it were to be “improved,” cannot deliver the business strategies required to meet new
marketplace requirements for success … These changes are so significant that they require
the organization … to shift its culture and people’s behaviors and mindsets. A key feature of
transformation is that the specifics of the new state are unknown when the change process
begins … it must be crafted, shaped and adapted as it unfolds. (pp. 910)
The part of this definition which is most intriguing is that the new state is an
unknown. Once the forces of change are unleashed in a transformational mag-
nitude, no one can really know where and how things are going to come out.
Cummings and Worley (2015, p. 533) characterize this as the “gamma change,”
discontinuous shifts in mental or organizational frameworks involving consid-
erable new learning and unlearning.
It is perhaps the reason why we are so taken with the emerging thinking that
is challenging a lot of the foundations of Change Management. The number of
blogs from practitioners and consultants which are advocating transformational
change is appearing more and more frequently, and ideas can be shared easily
and widely with just a click of a button (Auster & Hillenbrand, 2016; Bucy et al.,
2016; Little, 2016; Rick, 2016). This is strong evidence that there IS something
happening here, and we are hopefully going to set out to make it clear!
The Case for Initiating Change … to Ourselves
From the analysis of our current and future state and the case for change
derived from our own experiences and all that we are reading and seeing as
trends, we believe there is a harbinger of transformational change in our field.
Change Management appears to be at an inflection point but it is difficult to
see with total clarity where we are headed and where we should be headed.
Therefore, we propose a focus for examining these questions and a research
agenda by examining a few key underlying mindsets and beliefs of Change
Management which appear to be under siege. And in the end, the burden of
responsibility will be on us as a field to endorse the classic precept of “physi-
cian, heal thyself!” Change management must take its own medicine of what
needs to change, even not knowing the exact shape of its future rethinking,
reskilling, and rebooting.
We have highlighted above the evolution of the field of Change
Management, the forces and pressures facing the field today, and the necessity
to examine the ingredients of changing the way we change. Just as any culture
change requires re-examining deep-seated values and mindsets, and any science
of knowledge analysis requires shifting fundamental assumptions, we want to
challenge ourselves and the field to examine four precepts of Change

Management which appear ripe for rebooting and rethinking, and perhaps
transformation: (1) force field analysis, (2) “managing/leading” change, (3) high
touch, and (4) measuring outcomes.
Lewin Force Field Analysis
Kurt Lewin’s seminal work (1951) on change bears revisiting in light of the new
external realities and pressures. The famous model focused on the forces for
change which enable change versus restrain change. And the task of any orga-
nization dedicated to change is to increase the enabling forces and decrease the
restraining forces. In so doing, Lewin modeled the phases of change through
three stages: Unfreezing, Moving, and Refreezing. The first two phases seem
just as relevant today as before. Unfreezing by disconfirming key assumptions,
or reducing the incentives of certain behaviors, etc. remains a necessary first
step in making change. And the second phase of “moving” to new behaviors
and attitudes is the actual changing and transitioning.
But the final phase of the model called “refreezing” seems ill suited to a fast
changing agile world, in which not only it is incumbent to be ready to make
change at any time, but also it is likely that the very changes you had just suc-
cessfully instituted have themselves to be undone or unlearned. Thus, the very
goal of refreezing will be effort spent that makes it harder to undo and reverse
the change itself. This was flagged already some years ago by Weick and Quinn
(1999) who contrasted episodic with continuous change. They indeed posited
that whereas “Episodic change follows the sequence unfreeze-transition-
refreeze …, continuous change follows the sequence freeze-rebalance-unfreeze”
(Weick & Quinn, 1999, p. 361). Lewin himself was perhaps not unaware of this
as he characterized refreezing as a “quasi-stationary equilibrium” because the
forces for change and the forces against change were in balance and thus the
state was stabilized, but perhaps at risk. But that recognized the fragility of sus-
taining change, rather than today’s proposition that staying flexible and agile
poised for the next change is a desired state in which nothing is intended to
stay rigid because that would make it harder to flex when needed. In essence, it
may be time to “go back to the future” of Lewin’s concept of the fragile equi-
librium state of play, emphasizing more of the fluidity of change, while under-
emphasizing the “refreezing” construct which has a very different connotation.
There are a number of research questions this change fluidity raises
(see Table 4).
Being nimble and being “re-frozen” seem completely at odds. In short,
Change Management in its traditional form seems out of synch with the new
world of challenges. This paradigm of institutionalizing and solidifying change
seems then to be ripe for rethinking. It appears counter-effective in a fast
Table 4. Research questions Change Fluidity.

• How useful is it to “refreeze” and sustain when that may contradict the future needs to unfreeze and
undo and adjust initial changes?
• Under what conditions is the premium on changing and solidifying and under what conditions is there
a premium on continuous change and improvement?
• What is a better way to conceptualize the Lewin phases for tomorrow’s world of continuous, “always-
on” transformation?
• What is the difference conceptually between quasi-stationary equilibrium and steady state change?
changing world and even may muddy the measurement of success itself, which
is premised on an “endpoint.” And it may be an example of a fundamental
foundation of Change Management in need of renovation and transformation.
The concept may not only be outdated but also prove to be counter-productive
for future change needed. At best, it may be ineffective, but at worst it may
impede the rapidity of future changes.
“Managing/Leading Change”
A second stream of Change Management thinking, research and practice is the

presumption that change can in fact be “managed” and/or “led.” Industries of
research and consulting have offered guidance and data on the control, over-
sight, guidance and inspiration provided by centralized leaders, managers,
sponsors, champions, etc. It is quite understandable, as in any human and orga-
nizational endeavor, to assume agency. And it is quite understandable that our
training at IBM (“Better Change”) and textbook writing (Jick & Peiperl, 2010)
has itself furthered this same paradigm.
Here’s how it goes: Change leaders provide vision, top down. Changes are
planned. Changes are managed in projects, phases, and milestones typically
middle down. Changes are measured for desired outcomes, by the top. Leaders
are rewarded and recognized for the impact they had in “driving change.” Or
so it always seemed … until the fast paced, fast changing, uncontrolled world
of external forces conspired to put leaders in positions of being the recipients of
other’s change forces, of barriers and challenges outside of their control, feeling
unable to “lead” the change.
After all, how does one plan goals and processes with confidence in a
VUCA world? If things are constantly changing, is there a “starting line”? If
things are constantly changing, where is the “finish line”? Is the very notion of
“managing” change becoming an oxymoron? Consider what an Agile Change
Coach observed:
I described how today’s organizations don’t have the luxury of spending six months creating
the perfect change plan anymore. The difference with Lean Change Management, in the con-
text of these massive transformations, is to rely on emergence first. That is, start doing with
minimal planning because early-on you have no idea how the change is going to be received.
Odds are you’re not even sure where you want to go until you try something. (Little, 2016)
There are emerging answers. What is emerging looks and feels quite different
than the Leader-led change paradigm. Instead of leading, we have verbs like
navigating, facilitating, open sourcing, jamming, orchestrating, catalyzing,
engaging others, and self-identifying grassroots volunteers. Gratton (2016) adds
that the impact of technology is not to remove management but to change to a
far more complex role managing virtually, managing more diversity, and man-
aging communication more across groups than within. Even the notion of
holocracy tends to point to teams and in situ leaders. The very definition of
change leader then is broadening; it is now by no means a model totally reliant
on the CEO or senior executive. And social engagement forums are now
available for change agents to emerge organically rather than being selected or
nominated by a senior leader.
Leaders must become listening posts. In the area of strategy development, or
what we might call change vision development, O’Reilly and Tushman (2016)
advocate treating strategy as “dialogue, not a ritualistic document based plan-
ning process.” And they also recommend that the leadership community be
engaged in the work of renewal, and “engineer the process so that you create
bottom up pressure that is at least equal to the pressure from the senior team.”
In short, empower new voices and new dialogue, and democratize the leader-
ship role.
There are more voices being incorporated which are influencing the change
from traditionally far afield places. Customers are influencing the direction and
the pace of change by the impact of their social media voices. Employees and
especially millennials are challenging organizations to change with a variety of
agendas such as sustainability and transparency. Activist investors are acting
on “behalf of” but not at the behest of management and setting forth change
agendas with aggressive and urgent timeframes. And regulators, social ideolo-
gues, and start up models all contribute to influencing organizations on their
change agendas.
Thus, the emerging leadership role of orchestrating and catalyzing change
seems to be primed for researching a number of questions (see Table 5).
Table 5. Research Questions on Orchestrating and Catalyzing Change.

• Under what conditions are new leadership models and approaches most frequently emerging?
• What are the most critical skills needed for such leaders?
• Will change leadership vary for different change scenarios? Different subcultures?
• What skills and approaches are getting in the way of being a successful change leader in the
organizations of the future?
• What organizational norms, processes, structures and technologies are most enabling of these new
leadership models?
• How will all employees need to be prepared and equipped to join in the more collaborative leadership
roles?
High Touch
Underlying Change Management has been a rather overt humanist value which
prescribed a “high touch” approach. If it is true that “all change is ultimately
personal,” it was assumed that an effective Change Management approach must
include direct interactions with every impacted individual. Building acceptance and
overcoming stakeholder resistance meant that people needed to be listened to, if
not accommodated. Therefore, face-to-face focus groups, roadshows, town halls,
point-in-time surveys, and 1:1’s have been commonly used methods for stakeholder
management, communications, and training. People managers and the Human
Resource function understandably have been the “go-to” channel for providing
and gathering information and for proposing ways to accommodate the feedback.
The techniques most closely associated with helping employees adapt to
change have been centrally managed as either a “push” or “pull” high touch
effort. But the notion of giving employees a voice in change seems to has been
tipped on end with the advent and the promise of technology and more egalitar-
ian usage of social media. And the traditional paradigm of high touch has been
supplemented and perhaps even usurped by “high tech,” which now easily allows
for continuous 24/7, asynchronous and two-way dialogue. Organizations today
have the ability to reach out and touch employees directly and more frequently,
and employees have similar ability to reach out and talk to management, to peers
and to the external world.
The world at large has changed to incorporate so much more of the high
tech in communication, relationships, and other forms of formerly face-to-face
interactions. In fact, breakthrough thinking is required since research indicates
employees often want more digital forms of communication:
Common sense tells us that people going through change need in person interactions with
people they trust and a safe space to process what’s happening. But because we spend nearly
three hours per day on social platforms, and because more than half of employers are already
using internal social media, companies also have an opportunity to leverage social media as a
Change Management tool…. (Clayton, 2015)
(In a study by Weber Shandwick and KRC Research) 55% of respondents who had gone
through a change event at work said they wished their employer offered more digital and social
engagement, while 42% said they wanted more face to face communication. (Clayton, 2015)
With the rise of social communications, however, there is a resurgent premium

on the employee experience and how we effectively engage employees with both
high touch and high tech during continuous change. Several research questions
arise (see Table 6).
Measuring Outcomes
Academics and thought leaders are being pressured to arrive at measurable

ROI outcomes. And yet there remains considerable disquiet about how to do
Table 6. Research Questions on High Touch and High Tech.

• What forms of “high touch” interventions are the most effective? Do they vary for different types of
change? For different stakeholder types? In different cultures?
• What forms of “high tech” interventions are the most effective? Do they vary for different types of
change? For different stakeholder types? In different cultures?
• Under what conditions are employees saturated with information overload, becoming inured to the
amount and frequency of social communications?
• What is the magnitude of employee expectations for having a voice, and how does that influence a
leader’s approach?
• What does it mean to identify and manage resistance, when in the new world resistance can swiftly
become a movement?
this. And for many, the problem is that companies rarely measure the COST of
Change Management (PWC Advisory Services, 2012). It is hard to imagine the
evolution of the Change Management field without sorting out the basic ques-
tion of its costs and its benefits in as meaningful a way as possible.
There are some promising developments on identifying the measures.
Creasey (2016) created an ROI tool to measure Change Management’s value
add, and to answer the enduring question of what is the payback for all the
Change Management methods and efforts. He distinguishes between the means
and the ends of Change Management. Stagl (2016) identified four key measures
of success including: (a) End goal, (b) The Change (e.g., change in process,
organization, behavior and/or mindset), (c) Adoption Rate, and (d) Project
implementation (Change Management activities such as training attendance, or
communications touch points). And Sirkin, Keenan, and Jackson (2005) set out
a model called “DICE” which measured Change Management success in terms
of (Project) Duration, (Performance) Integrity, Effort (over and above normal
effort) and Commitment to the change itself.
All of these frameworks are reasoned attempts to address the enduring ques-
tion of whether the change was successful. Some of the measures are about out-
comes, and some are about means. Some are direct measures of change
adoption and commitment, while others are indirect indicators such as number
of people trained or number of communications. Overall, though, the majority
appear to be used in a rearview mirror way to look back at what happened,
and not for predictive and course correction purposes.
Somehow it seems that these measures still assume that “the” change can be
cordoned off, that it can have a T1 measurement point and a Tfinal measurement
point, that there is only one change, that the change’s desired outcomes are static
and enduring, and that many other factors explaining outcomes and even inputs
are not affecting results other than the Change Management effectiveness itself.
We think this area of developing face valid and scientifically valid measures
deserves both more thought and research. The figure of “25% success” has
been a stalwart for decades and we are not convinced of its scientific basis. In
fact, there are many variations on this finding.
For example, an IBM study found that only 20% of projects headed by the
“unskilled leaders” succeeded but that 80% of masterful leaders were able to
succeed. (Jorgensen, Owen, & Neus, 2008). KPMG similarly found that compa-
nies with strong Change Management capability were nearly twice as likely to
outperform less focused peers in terms of meeting their strategic goals, staying
on time, and staying on budget (KPMG, 2014). Moreover, they said that suc-
cess ultimately is determined by comparing those who had projects without
Change Management with those who incorporated formal Change
Management. Some call that “managed change” versus “unmanaged change.”
In fact, in a recent study, companies which used a structured Change
Management methodology outperformed those who did not by 57% versus
41% (Creasey & Stise, 2016). And they found that Change Management effec-
tiveness correlated with three dimensions of project success: Meeting objectives,
staying on budget, and staying on schedule (Creasey & Stise, 2016). The main
finding was a strong correlation between Change Management process effec-
tiveness and project outcomes. This finding helped to prove the value of the
work of change practitioners.
And further evidence of Change Management’s value add can be found in a
McKinsey study:
A study of 40 large scale change projects at large companies showed that change programs
ranked excellent by leaders yielded a Return on Investment of 143%; programs that were
poor or nonexistent delivered a ROI of 35%. (PWC Advisory Services, 2012)
IBM’s study (Jorgensen et al., 2014) similarly demonstrated that organizations

with structured change methods and with trained resources delivered better results.
KPMG (2014) in a brochure promoting their Change Management services focuses
on the relative success of “addressing and mitigating resistance … in order to
ensure effective and sustainable realization of business value.” Nevertheless, there
remains considerable disquiet about measurement validity and measurements
which will suit emerging conditions encountered in change initiatives.
For all this potpourri of measures and actual results, we recognize that the
majority of sources are from consulting firms who have an obvious interest in
showing the value add of their services. And there is strong need to move from
singular outcome measures that are historical reflections to sense and respond
metrics that allow for continuous improvements.
This shift to a “sense and respond” approach appears to be the wave of the
future and more realistic in measuring Change Management’s value add. These
measures are more continuous, more multidimensional, more agile, and more
prescriptive and perhaps likely to lead to more positive results. These measures
should be used as data for course adjustments and for predictions, rather than
for bonus-able evaluations on fixed historical results. The benefits of adjusting
along the way will likely improve the overall success result considerably.
There are numerous researchable questions that still need to be answered by
independent Change Management researchers (see Table 7).
Therefore, we will need multidimensional evaluations which will relieve

eager sponsors of change who would be able to point to some measures that
show change progress (such as winning over key stakeholders, or mitigating
friction and potential disaster). As a corollary to this point, it seems that the
binary evaluation of either wholesale failure or wholesale success hides too
much of the real story of Change Management.
In sum, Fig. 3 identifies four of the foundational beliefs, theories and under-
lying frameworks in need of further research and likely recasting. In total, these
strongly suggest that the magnitude of changing the way we change is transfor-
mational in nature. Incremental tweaks appear thoroughly inadequate, and
Table 7. Research Questions on Sense and Respond Metrics.

• How best do we measure progress, as well as the outcomes, and would 25% success still be the
resultant pattern?
• If change is continuous, at what point or points should the measuring be done to optimize a sense and
respond approach? When is it too soon, or too late, to affect progress and outcomes?
• When is a so-called “failure” actually a measurement “error” if the goal itself changes but only the
original goal is measured? Is that a failed Change Management effort or an ill chosen outcome
measure?
• How do you measure what would have occurred had there not been a Change Management effort? In
other words, how do you simulate control groups or alternative intervention comparisons to consider
the net effect of the interventions? (Creasey, 2016, has begun to examine the friction costs of real
resistance or hypothetical resistance that might have occurred)
Fig. 3. Changing Change Management for Tomorrow.
while a number of leading practitioners and scholars have set out ideas for a
more substantial “transitional” type change, we are advocating that the circum-
stances are more indicative of the type of change where the roadmap is less
clear, the forces more substantial, the scale more uncharted, and the task more
robust. In that respect, the research questions we pose will be invaluable to
helping to navigate the transformational future of our field.
CONCLUSION: A RESEARCH AGENDA

Thus, the field is being stressed in a number of ways, and we are challenged to re-
conceptualize some of our assumptions and beliefs: the foundational elements
which have endured for the last three decades and more (Shull, Church, &
Burke, 2014). In so doing, we are setting out a research agenda in the following
four areas:
• Change Fluidity: Eliminating the “end state” of refreezing, and replacing it
with what appears to be a journey of continuous and ever-changing change
challenges.
• Orchestrating and Catalyzing Change: Reducing the expectation of central-
ized leadership and relying far more on creating communities of stake-
holders, empowering many change agents and facilitating conversations.
• High Touch and High Tech: Our reliance on high touch contact points is not
scalable in a global world, in a world of multiple digital sources of two-way
engagement.
• Sense and Respond Metrics: The metric of defined success or failure, as a
binary outcome, seems far too limiting and hard to substantiate. Moreover,
the definition of success itself has been changing. The alternative is to use
more granular and real-time measures of engagement and of progress, i.e.,
more fluid measures.
In writing this chapter, we drew from our personal backgrounds in the aca-
demic world and the practitioner world of Change Management. What we dis-
covered was a natural and enduring inter-relationship between the world of
ideas and the world of practice. Each of us has crossed the “lines” regularly in
our careers, with the practitioner engaged in seeking and contributing ideas to
the academic dialogue, and the academic applying concepts, and frameworks to
live and educational case examples.
In reflecting on the profession of Change Management, we have observed
the ebb and flow of this partnership and there again, an inflection point has
emerged to test the partnership’s optimal benefits. In the early days of the field,
as we said, the flow of ideas tended to originate through academic research and
science and then be operationalized by consulting and commercial interests.
The pendulum, however, seems to have swung in the last decade where the
practitioners and consultants are driving more of the thinking and the refine-
ment of methods.
While the thought leadership from the academic side has some promising
developments (Auster & Hillenbrand, 2016; Kotter, 2014; Passmore, 2015;
O’Reilly III & Tushman, 2016; Laipple, 2012), we are concerned that a gap is
growing with those on the front line of using Change Management in the field.
And the stronger prescriptions are coming from consultants and industry thin-
kers who are trialing and addressing the more transformational forces with
answers (Bucy et al., 2016; Little, 2016).
Consultants and industry are also much more prolific and successful in dis-
tributing digitally, whereas academics still tend to distribute through print with
longer life cycles. There is more collaborative crowdsourcing, idea generation,
and enhancement occurring in the social channels dominated by consultants
and practitioners. Academics are disadvantaged, unless present in these social
dialogues, because they are focused and rewarded on more traditional channels
of dissemination such as research articles and books.
It is important, however, to recognize the depth of knowledge and profes-
sional research skills which academics bring to the table. Consultants and
industry practitioners who are rapidly experiencing, testing, and reformulating
approaches to managing change will be hesitant to slow down to accommodate
academic input, but would benefit greatly if academics can find ways to better
integrate themselves and their expertise into or even ahead of today’s pace
of development of change techniques. In particular, the next generation of
students who are moving into the workforce need to understand the forces for
change in the profession and be primed to contribute effectively in the realities
of today’s business environment.
Our working together to construct this chapter of ideas itself helped us to
see that the benefits of closer ties between academic research and thought lead-
ership. The themes and observations born of everyday scars and problem solv-
ing in today’s challenging VUCA world can reap new insights and a new
agenda. We also respect those for whom this distinction is less relevant because
they operate effectively as bridgewalkers between scholarship and practice
(Burke, 2015; Coghlan, 2013).
The research we are proposing for the next decade (and perhaps an even
shorter time frame, given the pace of change) should help us better understand
the transformation afoot in the field. It is undoubtedly taking us into new
uncharted territory. It is both exciting and foreboding, it is attempting break-
throughs in thinking but requiring letting go of comfort zones and familiar rou-
tines. As stated above, there is work to be done in a variety of areas which as a
result will ask all of us to change ourselves rethink our models, methods and
frameworks; rethink the leadership function, role and skills for the future;
reskill change practitioners with new capabilities needed for the future of work
(e.g. design thinking, data analytics, etc.); and reconstruct the metrics needed to
evaluate progress, journey milestones and ultimate success or failure. And,
while we are looking in the mirror, our task also includes reviewing the partner-
ship and knowledge exchange between Academe and practitioners to optimize
how each can contribute to the transformation and reconstitution of our
profession.
We are emphasizing the “re” in all of this agenda to underscore that we indeed
do conclude that rebooting the field itself will lead to something more transfor-
mational in its aggregate outcome. The 30 years in the field that we have
observed and participated in, and the 25 volumes of Research in Organizational
Change and Development, encapsulate significant progress and deepening of our
profession. But the Refocusing of our research for the future is the needed
response to a new set of complex pressures and challenges. It will be new empha-
ses as we described above, and it will undoubtedly require more inter-disciplinary
academic studies drawing on the traditions of organizational psychology and
sociology but enhanced through other disciplines such as Data Analytics, Design
Thinking, Cognitive Computing and Social/Mobile App development.
Perhaps someone writing a chapter in the 50th edition of Research in
Organizational Change and Development will look back at this 25th issue and con-
clude that it served to shift the conversation, innovate thinking about Change
Management, and led to the very transformation which the field typically helped
to realize for others but this time looked into the mirror and did for itself!
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Jick y Sturtevant Talking Stock of 30 Years

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TAKING STOCK OF 30 YEARS OF

Todd D. Jick and Kinthi D. M. Sturtevant

Research in Organizational Change and Development, Volume 25, 3379

fulfillment. In short, whether it is a push away from unsuccessful leadership and

Fig. 1. Changing Change Management.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT’S JOURNEY TO

Identity: The common names or emerging language used to describe the

Academic relationships: The academic disciplines or departments shaping the

Yesterday Our Change History (in Brief)

experiences to advance the field of thought about how organizations, their

leadership, GE commissioned a team of consultants, including one of the

and implied a more administrative, tactical effort than what is in actuality

Exhibit 1. Case Example: IBM “Naming Mini Jam” for Change

Optimization Personalization Accelerated Change

Exhibit 2. Case Example: IBM Change Management Methods

With such a diversifying focus and overwhelming amount of choice in orga-

Table 1. Change Management Practitioner Checklist of Best Practices.

Launching Change Checklist

Have a mitigation plan and plan for the worst

Source: Data collected at Change Management Conference, N ¼ 75 (Jick, 2010).

Exhibit 3. Case Example: IBM OCM CoE.

1. Build a sustainable change infrastructure, including development and

IBM’s OCM CoE role was to continuously raise leadership awareness of

Table 2. Yesterday’s Change Management.

Infancy Adolescence Early Adulthood

TODAY CASE FOR CHANGE AND THE

A Need for Speed and Agility

Exhibit 4. Case Example: IBM Alignment of Agile and Change

• Need for greater flexibility

The Digital Environment

Exhibit 5. Case Example: IBM “Jams.”

mobile apps, expanding talent analytics capabilities and sentiment analyses,

Keep It Simple and Do It Yourself

The ROI of Change Management: Show Me the Money

Organizations worldwide are operating in business environments which are

be the introduction of a new product at a plant location being readied for an

Exhibit 6. Case Example: IBM Change Adoption Metrics.

• are experiencing the change positively,

exploring different more cost-effective staffing models for change projects,

Multiplying Constituencies and Locations

Much of the work of Change Management requires understanding the impact

Exhibit 7. Case Example: IBM Global Business Model.

Are there any country laws or regulations to take into account?

channels such as Cisco Telepresence centers, Skype videos, WebEx sessions,

become a new avenue for companies to engage with employees to accelerate

The Voice of the Employee and Customer

These questions and others will need to be taken account in future

Exhibit 8. Case Example: Verizon’s Social Media Center.

After many years of advancement being driven largely through Organizational

In many organizations, user-centered design (UCD) is a rising methodology

SUMMARY: CHANGE MANAGEMENT TODAY

Fig. 2. Yesterday versus Today’s Change Management.

while “Change Management is dead,” there is a promising resurrection in new

More importantly, it acknowledges many of the difficulties in managing

Table 3. Nine Change Management “Isms” or Today’s World of Disruptive

OUR FUTURE STATE? REBOOTING CHANGE

The Case for Initiating Change … to Ourselves

challenge ourselves and the field to examine four precepts of Change

Lewin Force Field Analysis

Table 4. Research questions Change Fluidity.

A second stream of Change Management thinking, research and practice is the

Table 5. Research Questions on Orchestrating and Catalyzing Change.

With the rise of social communications, however, there is a resurgent premium