Leader Sensemaking and Change
Leaders make sense of and engage with transformative organizational change through a complex process primarily driven by their own sensemaking. This process is not straightforward and is influenced by their existing beliefs, experiences, and the social context, according to Ronald Skea, author of “Leadership, Organizational Change, and Sensemaking (2021)”. Successful change in thinking begins with […]
What Sensemaking During Crises Teaches us About Change
Crises are characterized by low probability/high consequence events that challenge organizational goals and defy easy interpretation. In his 1988 study of leader sensemaking Karl Weick introduces and explores the concept of enacted sensemaking in the context of organizational crises, arguing that the actions taken to understand a crisis can paradoxically worsen it. Drawing on examples […]
Sensemaking: A Primer
“Sensemaking” has become a critical concept in organizational change, particularly within lean and complexity-aware approaches. It refers to an ongoing process through which people identify, interpret, understand, and create meaning when faced with ambiguous or changing circumstances. In other words, sensemaking is how individuals and groups make sense of what is happening around them, especially […]
The Trust Factor
Highly experienced change Implementation practitioners widely emphasize that high-quality relationships, including trust, are a — if not the — critical factor for achieving positive implementation results. They describe trust between themselves and stakeholders, as well as among key stakeholders, as foundational for successful implementation and the sustainability of successful programs and practices. Recently, many experienced […]
Rethinking Change Leadership
Over three decades ago, Rost (1993), an education academic, highlighted the existence of a “mythical leadership narrative.” He suggested that while significant progress appears to have been made in leadership study that, in reality, his own attempts to encourage a paradigm shift in understanding leadership were largely ignored. A similar situation might be occurring within the […]
What is Change Adoption, Anyway?
Change adoption has been variously defined in a multitude of publications and posts, but there appears to be considerable misunderstanding regarding what adoption truly entails and when it is perceived to have occurred. Is it a process? An outcome? Or is it a state? Research by Lines and Vardireddy (2017) investigates how change management practices […]
Digital Transformation — If the shoe doesn’t fit…
What clearly distinguishes Digital Transformation (DT) from ordinary change management work is the unique nature of the digital technologies that drive true organizational transformation and the interconnected, turbulent environments they foster. And yet, many change practitioners consider traditional change management to be synonymous with transformation. It is patently obvious, however, that business as usual does […]
Is It Really Transformation?
It is generally agreed that the adoption of digital technologies, termed digital transformation, fundamentally alters organizations. And we hear a lot about organizations undergoing these digital transformations, so much so that the term has practically become synonymous with change in general. But the reality is that many organizations struggle to move beyond incremental optimizations of […]
Unusual Politics
Traditional research emphasizes politics as illegitimate behavior that is non-sanctioned, exploitative, manipulative, self-serving, and ultimately harmful to individuals and organizations. As a result, many change agents dismiss politics as a manipulative and disruptive force within an organization. But dismissing the political nature of organizations may lead to miscalculations. Denying the need for political skill may […]
More Accomplishment, Less Behavior
We hear it uttered by change practitioners all the time: behavior must change before the organization will change. Most often, such utterances are ill-informed and superficial. Time is spent trying to identify usually “bad” behavior and lagging measures are used to track its eradication. Even when the focus is on the “good” behavior we seek, […]
Shaping Readiness
Communication plays a crucial role in how employees react to organizational change. It can determine whether change recipients show positive reactions, like change readiness, or negative reactions, like perceived resistance. In short, reactions to change emerge and are shaped by the interactions between change agents and change recipients. A 3-part study by Endrejat, Klonek, Müller-Frommeyer […]
Beyond Resistance: Cultivating Change Enablement
Change engagement is a positive psychological state that employees experience when they are enthusiastic and willing to support, adopt, and promote organizational change. It is considered a more proactive and motivational expression of positive change-related attitudes than other constructs such as openness to change or readiness for change. When employees are appropriately engaged, organizations are […]