Intentions and Realities of

Change
 Section 1: The realities of change-scale,
span, and timing.
Scale of Change
i. Incremental Change
ii. Discontinuous Change

Span of Change
iii. Modular Transformation ( Limited to department,
Group, Team etc)
iv. Corporate Transformation (Affects the entire
organization)
The timing of change initiatives
i. Anticipatory Change
ii. Reactive Change

• Punctuated Equilibrium: Romanelli and Tushman (1994)

depict organizations as evolving through relatively long
periods of stability with bursts of discontinuous change,
and those bursts of discontinuous change, in turn, laying
the foundations for new periods of equilibrium . They
call this the Punctuated Equilibrium model of change
• Change that is seen to be of strategic
importance is one setting may well be
considered a mundane adjustment to another
organization

• Employees at lower levels in the organization

experience the change as incremental whereas
senior managers tend to describe it as
discontinuous and revolutionary.
The depth of change: First-order and second-order change

i. First order change makes changes within an established

way of doing things.

ii. Second-order change creates a completely different way

of looking at the situation.

• Incremental second order change and discontinuous first

order change.
 Section 2: What Changes
Change focused on individuals

Change at group level

Change at organizational level

i. Delayering
ii. Downsizing
iii. Outsourcing
iv. Process Reengineering
v. Merger and Acquisition
vi. Strategic Alliances
 Section 3: How intentions and realities of
change relate
• The planning of change has played a significant
part in change management from the 1940s to
the present day, yet, in reality, change is rarely
delivered totally in accordance with the plan.

• Two contrasting views of change

i. Planned Change
ii. Emergent Change
i. Planned Change
• It emphasized the managers deliberate intentions to
achieve organizational change, with a clearly defined
start and end point for the change

• Over the past half century, it has become accepted

practice for most organizations, particularly medium-to-
large-sized organizations to undertake some kind of
business planning for example plans to meet budgets,
for growth or market segmentation, or for specialization.
• Plans tend to encompass actions for the immediate
year and sometimes strategies for, say, five years.

• Public sector organizations need to provide plans that

are open to central authority scrutiny as part of the
process of review of their performance.

• Organizations may have dedicated planning

departments and use formal planning techniques to
assess the external environment as part of this process.
• The contribution of Kurt Lewin, a German-American
psychologist.

• The term “planned change” is often attributed to him.

• He distinguished change that is consciously embarked

upon from that which just seems to happen, and
undertook research into the conditions that enable
individuals and groups to change.
• Two of his important frameworks are
a. Force Field Analysis
b. Three Step Model of Change.
a. Force Field Analysis
b. Lewin’s three- step model of change

1. Unfreezing the present (involves sound analysis of the

internal and external environment to gain a clear focus
for the unfreezing)

2. Moving to the new level (involves movement )

3 . Refreezing the new level (involves stabilizing the changes

and making them part of the system)
• Lewin’s original ideas focused on needs of small
groups of employees to adopt change through
being involved with the implementation

• In case of discontinuous change, the principles

of ‘unfreezing and refreezing’ become complex.
Some argue that Lewin’s three phases are ill-
suited to this purpose.
• Many writers suggest that the planned view is most applicable to incremental
changes. Leaders can plan small scale changes, try out new ideas to see
which are likely to be effective and try to induce commitment within the
organization through continual. But low scale, change called as Logical
Incrementalism.

• Leaders who embrace the view that change must be planned for assume that
they can be sufficiently certain in their analysis to decide what needs to
change, and how to control the variables in the plan to achieve the outcome
they want.

• Such views tend to pay attention to patterns of authority in an organization

and expect that commands that are issued from the top will travel through
the organization in determined way.
• Planned change anticipates a relatively predictable
external environment

• It expects communication to be efficient and skilled.

• Depends on a critical mass of people within the

organization becoming quickly aligned to the change.

• Believing that change is systematic

• Large consultancies typically work with change
models based on Lewin’s three stage
principles, producing time tables, objectives
and methodologies for different stages of
change.
ii. Emergent Change

• In last twenty years, some organizations have chosen to step

back from strategic long term planning because they
perceive the inevitability of other events getting in the way
which renders it invalid.

• Some comment on complexity of modern organizations,

others the speed of change in a high-tech global
environment, others on issues of power and politics that
make plans unmanageable.
• Emergent change is a view that sees change as an ongoing
process of organizational adaptation with the organization
being interdependent on the larger external environment.
The environment affects the organization in unpredictable
ways resulting in a complex mix of messy decisions.

• There are three different lenses on emergent change

a. Emergent Change: Readiness for Change
b. Emergent Change: Renewal
c. Emergent Change: Complexity Theory
a. Emergent change: Readiness for change

• This view focuses on organizations developing the

capacity to change, to be agile enough to change.

• Short-run responsiveness: being able to increase or

decrease the headcount

• Long-run agility: focuses on being able to change

technology or products faster than competitors.
• Organization needs the capacity to continually scan the
environment

• Scanning involves picking up small signals, making sense of an

incomplete picture.

• Emergent-readiness views leader’s role as the communicator of

the long term intentions and encouragement of employees to
be alert to possibilities to move in that direction.

• It pays attention to issues of power and politics.

• Experimentation is encouraged

• Combination of experimentation, risk and

trust is used to convert opportunities into
results.
b. Emergent Change: Renewal

• Change is based on the principles of the

ecosystems. As explored by Hurst (2002)
“Modern business organizations advance
strategically by accident, economically by
windfall and politically by disaster. This does not
mean that events in organizations are random
or capricious or unmanageable”
• Views change as continuous, sometimes smooth and incremental,
sometimes rapid and discontinuous

• Renewal requires destruction

• Capacity to self organize

• Crisis serves to erase parts of the organization’s memory. It is

imperative that organization is creative and bold rather than planful.

• Crisis galvanize organizations into action.

c. Emergent change: Complexity theory

• It suggests that organization is not an entity, but

an ongoing self-referencing process of gestures
and responses between people. People are
constantly engaged in interactions with each
other, from which overall behavioral patterns
emerge. This way of thinking is known as
complex response processes perspective.
• The need to look for patterns means paying attention to
patterns of interaction between people.

• Issues of power relations in organizations.

• Existing system needs to be disturbed.

• Patterns may change because people have the capacity to do

what they think is best.

• Importance of understanding nature of leadership.