Organizational change management and implementation strategies

Organizational change is a complex process, with deep implications company-wide. As such, in order to best implement organizational change, one needs to primarily understand the organizations, as entities. The best theory for the organization proposes an open-system approach, in which the organization continuously interacts with the external environment. This is correct, particularly in the present, when globalization has imposed a system where entities world-wide are interconnected and relate to one another in exchange processes.

Branding the organization as an open system brings about several different characteristics, including importation of energy, output, negative entropy or integration and coordination. The comparison that the authors make is interesting and appropriate: the organization does embrace all these elements, just like a living organism. As an additional argument for this approach, an organization is, after all, made up essentially of human resource, which brings added value and allows it to be competitive on the market. As an entity formed of human resource, it should reflect many of their biological characteristics.

The approach fundaments the idea that organizational change is thus a systemic process, meaning that organizational change will not target a limited, niche element of the organization. It will be a radical process, one where change will target a significant dimension, which will trigger change on a large scale. The author's bring into discussion Capra's three criteria for understanding life (pattern, structure, process), all of which are applicable to an organization.

Taking all these into consideration, one can assume two types of organizational change: revolutionary and evolutionary. If revolutionary change exists in many other areas (economic, political, biological etc.), in the case of organizations, it is equivalent to a consistent and fundamental strategic reorientation, by which the organization proposes different objectives, a different approach to reaching those particular objectives or something on this line.

Evolutionary changes are rather assimilated to a long and complex transformation process. The authors mentioned that as much as 95% of all organizational change processes are a result of evolutionary change. It seems natural that this is so, for several arguments. First, an open system adapts to changes in the external environment of which it is a part of. This is usually a long evolution, just as much in the case of an organization as in the case of a human being. Some theories refer to continuous rather than evolutionary change to suggest this adaptation process.