Stephen Billing’s Blog

Planned change models (so-called "n-step models" of which Kotter’s 8 step model is the most well known) assume that change can be controlled. By carrying out the steps the desired change will be manifested in the organisation. Because change is seen as predictable, the key lies in detailed planning.

Alvesson and Sveningsson in their book "Changing Organizational Culture" say that while this logic might explain the popularity of these approaches, these planned change models reveal little about how change emerges from interactions between those involved in the organisation. These models pay little attention to how people interpret the change efforts, nor how they relate to these based on their interests, backgrounds, jobs and how they will be affected by the change.

In these models, the complexities of real life organisational change are reduced to simple recipes (e.g. remove obstacles to change) in which how people interpret the change is rendered of little consequence in comparison to the "vision" of the top managers.  There are many obstacles that arise in change initiatives that could not have been foreseen, because they arise from how people respond to the change initiative, and that is something that cannot be controlled by the top managers and change designers.

Planned change models do not have a very good explanation for how these complex dynamics result in unexpected turns of events, some of them positive to the desired change and some of them not.

That is where I see the complex responsive processes theory of Ralph Stacey to be so helpful. According to this theory, organisations are complex patterns of interaction, i.e. these patterns exhibit properties of complexity in that novelty can emerge from the interactions, as can familiarity. Culture change is then about trying to foster new or different patterns of interaction, rather than the familiar. For example, in trying to become more customer oriented, then you would try to create conversations out of which new understanding of what it means to be customer oriented would emerge. This would entail discussing what it means to be customer oriented, in the face of conflicting values or principles, such as cost effectiveness. What if delighting the customer meant spending money or incurring cost? In those circumstances what should a staff member do?

You cannot design the overall patterns of interaction (which is what planned change tries to do) because you are a human being and you cannot step outside of human interaction yourself and design the interactions of others. All you can do is participate in human interaction so you have to be thinking about how you are interacting with others, because that is all you have.