The risk of becoming too steeped in any one framework is you start to be “subject” to that framework, you can only look through its lens, not at the lens. I recommend trying to hold a handful of frameworks in your mind simultaneously in order to maintain flexibility.

Change is a word that is connected to a broad spectrum of emotions. You might embrace or resist change or the word simply makes you cringe. You might see the need for change in your organisation or you might even be tasked with a specific project that relates to change - I invite you to take a step back and think about your own perspective on change:

• How do you see change and how is this impacting your work?

• How does your personal perspective on change differ from your organisations’ perspective?

• What are the benefits and shortcomings of different perspectives?

The bad reputation of change is connected to its history and the rise of change management in the 1990s and 2000s. Let’s take a brief (and incomplete) look at the beginnings of change management.

1. The invention of change management

Interestingly, many change management models are derived from grief studies. Management consultants observed that employees undergoing organisational restructuring showed emotions and behaviours that were similar to people who were diagnosed with a terminal disease.

In 1982 it was a McKinsey & Company consultant who published a change management model in the journal Human Resource Management. This publication was the starting point of a new industry - allowing management consultants to re-brand their engineering services as change management.

Over the following years academia picked up on this trend and several change management models were developed - adding a scientific foundation and legitimization to a growing industry.

The change models developed in the ’80s and ’90s followed the dominant management paradigm which can be characterised as engineering-minded, process-oriented, and target-focused. Note: The term ‘Human Resource Management’ is a good exemplification.

Popular and well-known change management models are:

• John Kotter's 8-Step Process,

• The Prosci ADKAR Model,

• Change Management Foundation and Model,

• Unfreeze - Move - Freeze,

• Plan-Do-Check-Act, and many others.

Most change models from that time are characterised by a sequential, repeatable process to induce and manage a period of transition in order to reach an improved future state of relative stability.

Benefits

• Provides easy to follow step-by-step models for managing change

• Change management is an empowering concept, it makes us feel in control

• An extensive change management toolkit, methods, and certifications provide guidance and evoke a feeling of mastery

• Change management speaks a language many executives can connect with

Shortcomings

• The mechanical and linear perspective oversimplifies the inherent complexity of change, neglects complex relationships and second-order effects

• The distinction between people who drive or induce change (changemakers) and people who are merely recipients of change lacks justification

• The extent to which one can control and manage change is overestimated and connected to the scientifically proven fallacy of illusion of control

• Too much emphasis on change management tools and methods stands in the way of seeing the bigger picture

Traditional change management has a problem, it simply does not work so well in practice. As Harvard Business Review and the inventors of change management McKinsey & Company now point out, roughly 70% of all change projects fail. How is this possible with this wealth of knowledge, dedicated institutes, scientific research, and thousands of change management books for sale on Amazon alone?

Perhaps the management paradigm that was popular at the time has skewed our perspective on change. Let’s look at a paradigm that matches the current management zeitgeist and gets increasing attention in organisations.

2. The rise of the VUCA World

VUCA is an acronym – first used in 1987 by the U.S. Army War College to describe the more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous multilateral world perceived as resulting from the end of the cold war. In essence, VUCA makes it more difficult to make predictions about the future; change is not only ever-present, its magnitude and impact are also non-linear. This is bad news as humans aren’t very good at dealing with non-linear effects.

While VUCA is a recent concept, the idea of our world undergoing constant change is not new - in fact, it’s ancient wisdom reflected in many cultures around the world (e.g. Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.). It’s more likely that the industrialisation of the world in the past century made us believe that we have full control over our environment (see the illusion of control). Accepting change as being ever-present, non-linear, and unpredictable means it cannot be managed directly using linear management processes.

Then something changed 😉, we invented a technology that is non-linear, connected, and complex: digital technology and subsequently the internet was born, characterised by exponential- and network effects. Therefore it makes perfect sense that it was a group of software developers who stated a manifesto of agility in the 1990s in order to better respond to changing requirements and new insights gained in the design process.

Today, agile principles are being applied way beyond their origin in software development - entire organisations desire to become more agile and move away from top-down management and hierarchical decision making.

Benefits

• A more humble perspective on change, recognising that we don’t have as much control

• A complex, systemic and interrelated understanding of change

• An extensive agile toolkit, methods, and certifications provide guidance and evoke a feeling of mastery

• A fast and iterative approach that integrates planning and execution (in traditional change management planning and execution are separated)

Shortcomings

• Being recipients of change neglects our human ability to create meaning and shape our world

• Responsiveness is reactive, it lacks drive, direction, and purpose

• Too much emphasis on frameworks, tools, methods, and certificates

• Unclear if and how agile principles that were made for software development apply to complex human systems - organisations

As we can see history repeats. What started with some IT nerds stating some basic principles has been monetised with training courses, certificates, methods, and tools and turned into a full-blown agile industry.

A major shortcoming of the VUCA paradigm and associated agile approaches is that it is responsive to change but it doesn’t actively drive it. Being agile means being able to adapt to a changing environment. While this is a valuable skill, especially for slow-moving organisations, it’s not sufficient as it lacks direction, strategy, and purpose.

Let’s look at a third paradigm of change.

3. Growth & development

Growth and development is a very popular paradigm for change as it connects deeply with our human needs and desires and it can be observed in all aspects of life. Unlike responsiveness, growth follows a direction - ideally forward, upward, and at an accelerated speed. Our entire society and worldwide economy is based on the paradigm of growth & development (see how we differentiate between developed and developing countries). It’s clear why growth & development is so appealing; organisations embrace change if it’s heading in the ‘right direction’, they want to become more successful, attract better talent and increase their market share. Growth & development is such an integral part of our reality that I find it the most difficult paradigm to critically reflect on.

Growth & development feels great and perhaps it’s even necessary, but it comes at the price of not always being sustainable. And I’m not talking about how we’re exploiting our eco-systems in search of more. Let’s stick with organisations and look at how growth & development surface; take for example senior leaders acting as role models by working 70+ hours a week, or managers trying to read 50 books a year in order to fuel personal growth and career development. None of that is bad, it just might not be sustainable in the long run.

Growth & development is a fundamental principle of life. But, and we prefer to forget this, so are stagnation and decline. All living things, systems, societies, and organisations go through both, phases of growth & development and phases of stagnation and decline. We’re better off to recognise and accept this duality. Then, and I believe only then we can build organisations that are truly beneficial for humans, our society, and our planet.

Benefits

• A desirable perspective on change. Growth & development is a psychological human need

• The paradigm aligns well with how we built our society and economy

• We don’t have an extensive toolkit for sustainable organisational change yet, promising concepts exist (donut and circular economy, post-growth frameworks, etc.), and its principles might impact how we build and run organisations in the future

Shortcomings

• Organisations that grow too big too fast concentrate power and money, create monopolies and harm our economy

• Too much focus on personal development and self-optimisation can lead to burn-out and decreased performance

• Humans are finite beings living in a finite world, yet many of us have adopted a belief in unlimited growth & development

What’s some specific advice for change in organisations?

• There’s no silver bullet for organisational change - keep experimenting with what works for your organisation

• Be wary of organisational change experts - or anyone who thinks they found ‘the one solution’

• Make use of the non-linear nature of change - small initiatives can have a huge impact (leverage effects). Most likely you don’t need expensive company-wide change programs

• Looking at change from a lens of duality means there are always things that don’t change - let’s put some more emphasis on the good things that we want to keep and maintain

• Use the three paradigms presented to assess the dominant paradigm in your organisation - aligning your change initiatives with it is the easiest but not always the best way. If you’re brave and patient you can also work on shifting paradigms within your department or organisation.

Get in touch if you need help with anything change or culture-related in your organisation. Have a look at my other posts on innovation and strategy design.