Episodic change

Weick and Quinn (1999) defined the metaphor of episodic change as the inertia-prone organization in which the pace of change is “infrequent, discontinuous, and intentional” (p. 365). This is “second-order change” through which outside agents create leverage to change meaning systems and schema, meaning that the organization takes action to replace past practices with new strategies, structure, skills, and people (p. 365). Reviewing academic literature on change, Weick and Quinn (1999) concluded episodic change is a consequence of failed leadership. In short, the organization suffers a loss, makes plans to change, implements the plan, then deals with unintended consequences—which often leads to more episodic change. Rather than a continuous growth cycle, the organization that celebrates continuous cycles of episodic change cannot effectively adapt, often accelerating a downward spiral with each episodic change attempt.

Concluding that all episodic “change starts with failure” (p. 381) can miss common organizational realities. Although some failures may trigger some changes, emerging and urgent threats, looming government regulations, market opportunities, and new ideas can also trigger episodic change initiatives. These and other change triggers are responses or attempts to influence environmental factors. In such cases, the failure could be in the lack of plan or action, not in triggering a change initiative. Threats to and opportunities for the organization can be disruptive (Schermerhorn, Hunt, & Osborn, 2007), but leaders can enhance adaptability by creating resilient organizations (Hamel & Välikangas, 2003) that can act quickly to reduce negative consequences, turn disruptions to advantage, or capitalize on new ideas and opportunities. In short, failure is not the only trigger for episodic change; rather, episodic change is the transformational change that organizations implement to address failed leadership, environmental threats, or emerging opportunities.

Theoretical foundations

The perspective that sees change as an episodic process has dominated organizational behavior since Kurt Lewin (1951) proposed a change model that saw social behavior as the product of two opposing forces. One side strives to maintain the status quo, an equilibrium state maintained by individual resistance and group conformity. The other side pushes for change toward the desired state. Lewin proposed that driving change in individual and social behavior is a function of reducing the forces maintaining the status quo while strengthening the forces for change. This process has three basic steps: Unfreeze, Move, and Refreeze.

• Unfreezing involves shaking up the status quo by increasing the driving forces that direct behavior away from the status quo while decreasing the restraining forces that attempt to maintain the status quo.
• With the status quo disrupted, change agents can “move” behavior and processes toward the desired state.
• Finally, once the behavior is at the desired state, change agents “refreeze” the new behavior to maintain it over time.

Through the unfreeze-move-refreeze framework, episodic change becomes a foundation of planned processes that organizations and people use to recognize and close the gap between the way things are and the way things should be. For example, John P. Kotter (1996) expanded Lewin’s model to provide a practical eight-step plan that organizations use to transform and control people, processes, and markets, as follows:

• To “unfreeze” an organization:
  • establish a sense of urgency;
  • create a guiding coalition;
  • develop a shared vision and strategy, and;
  • communicate the change vision.
• To “move” an organization:
  • empower broad-based action by eliminating obstacles, changing systems, and encouraging risk;
  • generate short-term wins, and;
  • consolidate gains and produce more change.
• To “refreeze” an organization: anchor new approaches in the culture;
• Monitor progress;
• Adjust the vision as required.

Limitations

A key limitation of seeing change as purely an episodic process is that “freezing” represents a new status quo that must be shattered again whenever the organization faces new threats and opportunities. Further, locking into episodic change prevents leaders from recognizing a vital point about change: organizations cannot not change; the status quo is an illusion that micro-level analysis shatters. Because episodic change models tend to be synoptic, they allow leaders to define a plan but fail to show what occurs between each stage of the plan.

Tsoukas and Chia (2002) argued, “Change is the normal condition of organizational life” (p. 567). In other words, change is constant. Ignoring the dynamic phenomena between planned events can encumber change by hiding the micro-level processes that influence strategic implementation. When leaders assume that change is an episodic process initiated by external forces, they may miss the non-linear micro-processes that inhibit or drive change, misunderstand what happens in a change process as it happens, and mistakenly consider the organization to have a stable status quo. To address these problems, Tsoukas and Chia proposed shifting the perspective of change as a characteristic of the organization to seeing organization as “an emergent property of change” (p. 570).

From this perspective, an organization becomes a set of conventions that balance a constantly changing context toward a pattern of evolution. As people face new realities, their beliefs, values, assumptions, and behaviors adjust. Change programs that adapt to context and individuals will be more successful. Leaders can encourage and provide a framework for change but plans for specific outcomes will not be as successful as change initiatives that recognize new patterns of thought and action, and then guide desired patterns toward institutionalization.

Livne-Tarandach and Bartunek (2009) identified additional weaknesses of episodic change theory, as follows.

• First, the macro perspective of episodic change fails to consider time, dynamic phenomena, and individual processes that influence strategic change initiatives.
• Second, by not considering time, plans can become irrelevant and ineffective during changing circumstances; this contributes to an escalation of commitment to a failed course of action (Brockner, 1992) while the environment changes around plans built for a different environment. By assuming that all players share the same goals and understanding of change initiatives can obscure the individual agendas and group politics that influence organizational processes.