The other week I wrote a paper on implementing a change management program for our course on Change Management at Danube University and our professor Gabriella O’Donovan. This is how I began the paper, by defining what change means to me:

To me change management is a problematic term because it implies that change can be managed and that change comes in singular. My worldview suggest that change is a complex pattern of many small and big fluctuations in the will of individuals and collective masses of people emerging simultaneously, sometimes dependently sometimes seemingly independent of each other.

When you create a change management program you have recognized that people of an organization needs to be educated, inspired and empowered to address a certain change; e.g. to implement a culture of innovation and creativity. But it does not address the fundamentals of change, that change cannot be tamed; that change looks different from different people’s perspectives and that change itself changes.

The new change management program quickly becomes yesterday’s news and falls into oblivion, because there are new changes to address. The change management program just becomes something new to hold on to, because your employees never actually personally learned how to approach change on an individual level. They were only taught to deal with a specific topic; to implement a service culture, a culture of ethics, of innovation or creativity. Whenever you try to maintain the status quo you loose your flexibility and may miss out on the possibility of catching a competitive advantage that could be lurking around the corner.

I believe what you really should do is to build organisations encouraging hunger for change and new solutions, readiness to embrace the moment and challenge given rules and to foster intelligent leadership. Most people would probably gasp for air only by reading this, perhaps imagining a predator feeding of change – for the sake of change. That is not how I see it. I see a vivid, healthy and balanced organisation with huge potential. Perhaps because the contrast is very strong in comparison to most old, rigid, slow organisations that don’t even shiver at the sight of change – because they cannot even recognize it anymore.

Back to here and now. I do believe that change management programs are good – you just have to know exactly why you are doing them – and I would add extra encouragement of embracing change on a higher level – because then and only then can there be real change, and a collection of competitive advantages writing a long and successful history of your organization.

Photo: Wether can’t be tamed either… But you can create strategies and readiness for different kinds of weather. Most of the time… Foto: Evelina Lundqvist, Andaman Islands.