making-sense-of-change-management

3Organizational changeThis chapter tackles the issue of organizational change. How does theprocess of organizational change happen? Must change be initiated anddriven through by one strong individual? Or can it be planned collectivelyby a powerful group of people, and by sheer momentum, the change willhappen? Perhaps there is a more intellectual approach that can be taken.Are there payoffs to understanding the whole system, determining how tochange it, and predicting where resistance will occur? On the other hand,maybe change cannot be planned at all. Something unpredictable couldspark a change, which then spreads in a natural way.This chapter addresses the topic of organizational change in three sections:• how organizations really work;• models and approaches to organizational change;• summary and conclusions.In the first section we look at assumptions about how organizations workin terms of the metaphors that are most regularly used to describe them.This is an important starting point for those who are serious about organizationalchange. Once you become aware of the range of assumptions97