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Change Kaleidoscope: Change through a contextual lens
Management textbooks are full of strategies on how to assess your current organizational position and to help you develop a vision for the future but they provide very little advice as to how to get there, according to Julia Balogun, Professor of Strategic Management at Cass Business School.
At a CMA Centre Seminar at the Segal Center last year, Professor Balogun explored the issues around implementing change and stressed the importance of context in shaping an implementation strategy (or “change path”). Delegates were presented with a Change Kaleidoscope - a means of identifying the impact of contextual factors on the type of strategic change being proposed and the likely end result. Her central premise is that change agents need to distinguish between context enablers and context blockers. This assessment will determine both the nature of strategic change required and the relative ease of implementation. But what are these context enablers and blockers?
Time - How quickly is changed needed?
Scope - What degree of change is needed: transformational or realignment?
Preservation - What organizational resources and characteristics need to be maintained?
Diversity - How homogeneous are the staff groups and divisions within the organization?
Capability - What is the managerial and personal capability to implement change?
Capacity - What is the degree of change resources available?
Readiness - How ready for change are the workforce?
Power - What power does the change leader have to impose change?
Many organizations fail to recognize these enablers and blockers. The result is that while transformational strategies are often chosen by change agents, very few end up being transformational, in terms of values and behaviors changing. Professor Balogun argues that managers, when viewing strategies through the Change Kaleidoscope should identify the scope of the change by considering four strategic options:
1. Incremental Realignment: Adaption Strategy - less fundamental change implemented slowly through staged initiatives.
2. Big Bang Realignment: Re-construction Strategy - change that realigns the way the organization operates but in a more dramatic manner than adaption. Often forced and reactive.
3. Incremental Transformation: Evolution Strategy - transformation change implemented gradually through different stages and inter-related initiatives. Likely to be planned and proactive.
4. Big Bang Transformation: Revolution Strategy - transformational change via simultaneous initiatives on many fronts, in a relatively short space of time. Likely to be forced and reactive.
Because of the time and resources needed for transformational strategies, the common change path is from Re-construction to Evolution. Transformational strategies take longer as they need to reweave the technical, political and cultural sub-systems of an organization. In other words, change agents need to recognize that to change the way people think and behave means not only changing very observable systems but also identifying and changing organizational routines and rituals, myths and stories, symbols and power structures. In Professor Balogun’s experience this takes considerable time, resources and strong leadership.
Delegates at the CMA seminar were left not with change recipes but with tools to judge the relative strength of contextual enablers and blockers - key determinants of whether an organizational change initiative will succeed or fail.
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strategic change management…
Great post. My approach to strategic change management says the quality of the first five percent determines what happens in the rest of the process. This same principle applies to many situations….