What is unplanned change in an organization?

An Excerpt From Bill Pasmore’s Leading Continuous Change: Navigating Churn in the Real World

Change is constant, multifaceted and, at times, overwhelming. To meet this challenge, Bill Pasmore offers four keys to help leaders decide the most effective ways to focus change initiatives in Leading Continuous Change: Navigating Churn in the Real World (Berrett-Koehler, 2015). The following excerpt about organizational change has been excerpted from Chapter 1: “Riding the Coaster.”

The field of organizational development was conceived by behavioral scientists as a way of helping organizations introduce planned change. Changes to work practices, strategy, organizational design, mergers and acquisitions, and so forth were too often resisted by those whose help was required for them to succeed. Kurt Lewin, the most widely recognized progenitor of the field, in the 1940s and ’50s laid out the basics of what became the backbone for change work in organizations. His model was simple and intuitive. It called for leaders to (1) “unfreeze” the organization by clarifying the need for change; (2) introduce change using highly participative methods that allowed others to see for themselves the logic and necessity of change and even to contribute to the design of the change itself; and (3) “refreeze” the organization by institutionalizing new ways of working through the adoption of new methods, policies, and procedures that would not allow it to relapse into comfortable but ineffective ways of operating.

Later others added to Lewin’s three steps. It was recognized, for example, that before the leader could help others change, the leader himself had to be committed to the change. If a leader refused to acknowledge the clear need for change, engaging him in learning about the threats or sharing with him the results of careful diagnoses could increase his readiness to act.

If a leader had difficulty getting her staff on board with the change, techniques were developed to understand people’s concerns and address them. Using surveys to gather opinions and then summarizing the data so that it could be discussed by leaders and employees in a search for solutions became an extremely popular approach. In other cases, when the implementation of good ideas failed to happen, reward systems were realigned to provide incentives for desired new behaviors. Over the years literally hundreds of techniques and approaches for managing change were invented, ranging from individual coaching to large-scale interventions involving thousands of people simultaneously. Despite the proliferation of approaches to managing change, the planned change success rate has remained stuck at around 30 to 40 percent.

John Kotter’s eight-step model, introduced in 1996, became the most widely cited roadmap for changing organizations:

1. Increase urgency.
2. Build the guiding coalition.
3. Get the vision right.
4. Communicate for buy-in.
5. Empower action.
6. Create short-term wins.
7. Don’t let up.
8. Make change stick.

Kotter’s approach followed Lewin’s basic framework, which is premised on a linear notion of how single changes occur.

But at about the same time that Kotter’s model was published, others were questioning whether Lewin’s linear, single-focused thinking could still be applied successfully to the world we live in today. Peter Vaill was among the first and most vocal to articulate this alternative point of view. His 1989 book, Managing as a Performing Art: New Ideas for a World of Chaotic Change, struck a chord with beleaguered managers who could not keep up with the changes occurring around them. Just as one change was introduced, another was needed, and often that change required undoing something the previous change had accomplished. Under these circumstances orderly steps and one-at-a-time sequential changes went out the window. One explanation for why all the tools and techniques that were devised to help with change were not actually helping is that there was simply too much change going on. Tools designed to manage one change at a time could not keep up with the constant interruptions that came from the need to change course continuously.

What Vaill called “permanent whitewater” we refer to here as complex, continuous change, that is, a series of overlapping, never-ending, planned and unplanned changes that are interdependent, difficult to execute, and either cannot or should not be ignored. Organizations facing triple-C can reach the point of change saturation in which the many important changes that must be undertaken can no longer be addressed through parallel, linear, sequential change efforts. Changes start falling off the plate because there are not enough resources to address them, and organizational performance suffers as more effort is put into transformation and less is left over to support ongoing operations. What is a leader living in a world of complex, continuous change to do?

This excerpt about organizational change was published with permission from Leading Continuous Change by Bill Pasmore (Berrett-Koehler, 2015).

Read the next excerpt in this series: Implement Change Programs to Build Productive Workplaces

Check out the full series from Leading Continuous Change: Understanding and Leading Successful Continuous Organizational Change

Photo courtesy of Viktor Hanacek.

B the Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.

What is unplanned change example?

How do you manage unplanned change in an organization?

What are the benefits of unplanned change?

What is planned change in organizational change?