Planned Change events have been common for decades due in part to external environments that were relatively stable or were changing more slowly. This common context helped to create the ‘separate project’ approaches to how to lead, design, organize, and execute changes and it also supported the creation of planned change, where we could collect data, plan change steps, and carry them out mostly as planned. During these times, senior leaders tended to sponsor or fund changes and delegate to someone to lead the change work.
A lot has changed in the past few decades, which requires new thinking and practices in leading and executing organization change. The speed of most changes, the number of simultaneous changes, the significance of technological changes that affect how work is done, the increased forms of diversities in the workforce, the economic major shifts and volatilities, and the global interdependencies that have emerged as new realities. These multiple ways that our world is different are providing continuous changes and changes that have become part of necessary and regular work for many people. All environmental sectors are changing, our people are changing in many different ways, the competitive business world is changing with efficiencies and innovations, and our ways of leading and executing change needs to refresh and reinvent.
The significance of learning in change has also shifted greatly. When we understood our organizations, how all operated and functioned, our context was remaining mostly similar, and we believed we had right answers for most of the problems or situations we faced, we did not need to put a lot of effort into creating learning to give us new understandings, new ideas, and innovative answers. Then new forms of change rapidly became commonplace: digital transformations, rapid changes hitting harder and faster, volatile impacts of changes, multiple happening simultaneously and all coming with more unknowns than we have ever experienced.
Now we need to learn as part of our change processes. We can’t start off with a clear understanding of what is needed and how to execute it and we may not have many good ideas of how to lead these changes. It was similar when Organization Development was first starting and people like Kurt Lewin created action research as a way to collaborate with people in the system, with expertise and experiences, in collecting data, making sense and deciding on actions to experiment. Many challenges and problems didn’t have well-documented answers and needed a way to use the knowledge and skills of people closest to the work to innovate new ways to do something differently. And now we need to think the same way, with open minds, to learn what is new to us and new ways to take actions.