edf40wrjww2CF_PaperMaster:Desc
4 OD PRACTITIONER | VOL. 38 | NO. 1 | 2006
ORGANIZATIONS IN TODAY'S competitive, global business
environment are required to be optimally responsive to
continuous change, or die trying. The results of this
challenge have not been encouraging. Many organizations that
were listed among the Fortune 500 in the 1980s and 1990s are
no longer in business because of their failures to adapt to the
changing marketplace (Beer & Nohria, 2000). The rate of failure
of many organizational change initiatives such as Total Quality
Management, Business Process Re-engineering, leveraged
buy-outs and other acquisitions, and large IT initiatives suggests
that even when the will exists, those in power in organizations
lack the knowledge required to manage change effectively.
In an attempt to increase the experience of success, and
avoid extinction, business enterprises today have grabbed at the
many tools and techniques that have been willingly offered by
consultants. Each has promised that their pet process will be the
path to the Holy Grail. However, my twenty-five years of consulting
experience and constant reading of the prodigious
change management literature have revealed something else.
These pet processes inevitably fail to establish a systemic perspective
on change that balances the contributions of the social
and economic systems.
As is the case in any system, when imbalance is introduced,
self-correction results. To date, the self-correction has
included failures in the attempts to introduce change because, I
maintain, a critical component, i.e., the social system, has been
considered only as an afterthought. John Kotter said it best