Stephen Billing’s Blog

Think of change participants, not change recipients. Those who are your targets of change actively reinterpret your change initiatives in the light of their own background, expectations and work tasks.

Recent posts have been critical of the standard planned change "n-step" approaches (e.g. here and here).

What are the alternatives to planned change? Recent interest has been growing in thinking of change as a process or processes, emerging from myriad local interactions.

The process view is interested in exploring change as a continuous (rather than episodic) and unpredictable process, without any clear beginning or end. Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that this means that organisational change is seen as a result of a variety of operational and administrative decisions made on a daily basis. These decisions are quite ordinary and are made in the process of adjusting to political struggles, shifts in power differentials, and adapting to changes in the priorities of others.

The process view, while acknowledging that managers are striving to accomplish planned change also considers that plans are always modified and reinterpreted in unpredictable ways.

As the plans of the top managers are set in motion, they interweave with the plans of other individuals in the organisation, who reinterpret the change initiative in the light of their own issues, background and concerns. Power relations inevitably are a part of this, and an understanding of complexity, human beings and social interaction will assist those seeking to change their organisations.

Here is something very important. "We need to move away from reifying change as something done to and placed on individuals, and instead acknowledge the role that change recipients play in creating and shaping change outcomes," as Balogun says in her interesting 2006 article (subscripton only unfortunately).

In the above passage the word "reifying" means seeing something as a thing, a physical object, when it is not. For example Balogun is suggesting that change is not actually a phsical thing, but it is common to treat change as though it were a thing. The moment it is seen as thing, it becomes frozen and immobile, whereas change is anything but, by definition.

So, we need to think about change as being something that the recipients of change are actively involved in. Not just in the sense of "we have to involve them in our change, engage their hearts and minds" which amounts to little more than manipulation – manipulating people emotionally so that they go along with our designs for them.

This is important for you as a leader because if you are thinking of organisational change as an active process involving top managers and "change recipients" then you would design your meetings with them quite differently from what you would do if you thought that your job was to persuade them or provide them with positive messages, which is what most road show approaches do. And then we wonder why 75% of change initiatives are reputed to fail.