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

The underpinning theorySTOP AND THINK!Q 3.6Reflect on an organizational change in which you were involvedthat failed to achieve hoped-for results. What were the balancingforces that acted against the change? Use Senge et al’s ideas toprompt your thinking.Stacey and Shaw, complex responsive processes: political,flux and transformationThere is yet another school of thought represented by people such asRalph Stacey (2001) and Patricia Shaw (2002). These writers use themetaphor of flux and transformation to view organizations. The implicationsof this mode of thinking for those interested in managing andenabling change are significant:• Change, or a new order of things, will emerge naturally from cleancommunication, conflict and tension (not too much).• As a manager, you are not outside of the system, controlling it, orplanning to alter it, you are part of the whole environment.In Patricia Shaw’s book Changing Conversations in Organizations, ratherthan address the traditional questions of ‘How do we manage change?’she addresses the question, ‘How do we participate in the ways thingschange over time?’ This writing deals bravely with the paradox that ‘ourinteraction, no matter how considered or passionate, is always evolvingin ways that we cannot control or predict in the longer term, no matterhow sophisticated our planning tools’.Our viewThis is disturbing stuff, and a paradox that sets up some anxiety inmanagers and consultants who are disquieted by the suggestion that ourintellectual strivings to collectively diagnose problems and design futuresmay be missing the point. Shaw says, ‘I want to help us appreciateourselves as fellow improvisers in ensemble work, constantlyconstructing the future and our part in it’. Stacey says of traditional viewsof organizations as systems, ‘This is not to say that systems thinking has132