Leading for Organisational Change

INTRODUCTION

I dwell in possibility

Emily Dickinson

Why You Need This Book

When I was fourteen, I got my first Saturday job in a little shop in Edinburgh that sold furnishing fabric. This job taught me how to match a coloured chintz lining to a floral, how to count in 64cm pattern repeats, and how to make a mean bacon roll. It gave me biceps to die for from lugging around big bales of fabric. It also taught me that people do not like change. The shop was owned by a brilliant female entrepreneur. She opened one shop, she opened another. She moved to bigger premises. She branched out from dress fabric into curtain fabric. She experimented with telephone ordering (there was no internet then). Every single time she tried anything new, one of the other women who worked there, or a customer, would suck their teeth, say how much they'd preferred things the old way and darkly predict the imminent demise of the business. That was in 1991. The business is still going strong.

Since then, throughout my entire career, I have been around businesses that are about to change, are changing, or have just changed. And yet the whole rhetoric around change implies that it is an aberration. The very language we use pathologises change and implies it is something to be feared, dodged, and if not dodged then minimised and managed. If this is true, then it is bad news indeed, because we read everywhere that we live in VUCA times – that is to say, the world is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. ...