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- Written by Brent Duncan, PhD
Change literature identifies a wide assortment of change targets in organizational settings, like strategy, people, relationships, processes, and technology (Seo, Putnam, & Bartunek, 2004). Perceiving an organization as a dynamically complex social system can help to focus limited change resources on three targets: individual, group, and culture. These dimensions of an organizing system are not separate parts but also are dynamically inter-connected dimensions that build on the previous level: individuals form the group; individuals and groups form the culture. However, this influence does not only radiate from individual to group to culture but dynamically interacts among all social dimensions within an organization’s boundaries, affecting the organization’s ability to adapt to the environment outside of its boundaries.
Starting with these assumptions, this section will explore the following:
- Emerging understanding of targets for social change in organizational settings;
- Common intervention approaches for each social dimension, and;
- The viability and risks of isolating dynamically inter-related parts of an organizing system for intervention.
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- Written by Brent Duncan, PhD
Organizational development practitioners are shifting from episodic change to continuous change processes to enhance adaptability in increasingly turbulent environments. Although some researchers tend to present episodic and continuous change processes as mutually exclusive, both appear to be different perspectives of the same phenomena:
- Episodic change processes provide a macro-level perspective on planned processes leaders implement to address failings, threats, or opportunities.
- Continuous change provides a micro-level perspective on the unplanned change processes that naturally occur through the dynamic interaction of people, processes, technology, and the environment.
This article compares episodic and continuous perspectives on change, concluding that understanding the definition, theoretical foundations, and practical applications of both provides leaders with a more complete picture of change that helps them to manage adaptability in turbulent environments.
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- Written by Brent Duncan, PhD
Although traditional organizational change writers have seen resistance as a hurdle for management to overcome, contemporary authors are providing a glimpse of a new perspective that sees resistance as a functional force for driving effective and lasting change. In this paper, I will review some of the traditional literature that sees resistance as a hurdle and consider traditional strategies change agents use to overcome resistance. I will also consider emerging literature that sees resistance as a natural and necessary part of the change process to identify methods for tapping resistance as a positive force for implementing organizational change. As the applied exercise for the course, I will analyze examples from personal experiences in change processes through the perspective of classical and emerging literature.
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- Written by Brent Duncan, PhD
In “The Art of Continuous Change: Linking Complexity Theory and Time-Paced Evolution in Relentlessly Shifting Organizations,” Shona Brown and Kathleen Eisenhardt (1997) explored how organizations continuously change in dynamic competitive environments. They found that successful organizations engage in three key practices.
- Encourage product improvisation by combining limited structure, priorities, and responsibility with extensive communication and autonomy.
- Explore the future by experimenting with cost-effective probes.
- Connect the future to the present.
Brown and Eisenhardt integrated their field research with complexity theory and time-paced evolution to offer a model that describes how successful organizations dynamically change high-velocity competitive environments.
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- Written by Brent Duncan, PhD
Seo, Seo, Putnam, & Bartunek (2004) offer the concepts of duality and tension to explain the implications of different change practices and better understand the dynamics among the assumptions of different OD perspectives. Dualities are the polar opposites that work against one another. Dualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive alternatives, but “the choice to focus on one of the poles creates a tension and difficulty to enact both ends of the continuum simultaneously.” This section summarizes critical perspectives that have guided the field of Organizational Development, including the central debates, epistemological assumptions, strengths of weaknesses, and focus of each.