Organization 21C: Someday All Organizations Will Lead This Way

Leading Organizational Change

A paradox of organization change is that we plan in a linear fashion—step 1, 2, 3 or stage A, B, followed by C, etc.—but in the implementation of the change we discover that the process is anything but linear. As I have stated elsewhere, organization change in reality is a nonlinear process.^[19] The change never occurs quite the way it was planned. As interventions are made, organizational members react in ways that are not entirely predictable. In other words, unanticipated consequences arise from the planned initiatives and interventions that then have to be addressed and managed. Resistance to the change is what we usually call these consequences, but organization change is not resisted by everyone. And resistance ...