cameron and green making-sense-of-change-management

Organizational changeSenge et al say:Most serious change initiatives eventually come up against issues embeddedin our prevailing system of management. These include managers’ commitmentto change as long as it doesn’t affect them; ‘undiscussable’ topics thatfeel risky to talk about; and the ingrained habit of attacking symptoms andignoring deeper systemic causes of problems.Their guidelines are:• Start small.• Grow steadily.• Don’t plan the whole thing.• Expect challenges – it will not go smoothly!Senge et al use the principles of environmental systems to illustrate howorganizations operate and to enhance our understanding of what forcesare at play. Senge says in his book, The Fifth Discipline (1993):Business and other human endeavours are also systems. They too are boundby invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully playout their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves,it’s doubly hard to see the whole patterns of change. Instead we tend tofocus on snapshots of isolated parts of the systems, and wonder why ourdeepest problems never seem to get solved.The approach taken by Senge et al is noticeably different from much ofthe other work on change, which focuses on the early stages such ascreating a vision, planning, finding energy to move forward and decidingon first steps. They look at the longer-term issues of sustaining andrenewing organizational change. They examine the challenges of firstinitiating, second sustaining and third redesigning and rethinkingchange. The book does not give formulaic solutions, or ‘how to’approaches, but rather gives ideas and suggestions for dealing with thebalancing forces of equilibrium in organizational systems (resistance).What are the balancing forces that those involved in change need tolook out for? Senge et al say that the key challenges of initiating changeare the balancing forces that arise when any group of people starts to dothings differently:129