Change Management

Change management is the set of actions that help the people affected by an organizational change understand it, learn what it requires of them and adopt it in their daily work. A new tool, a reorganization or a new way of making decisions only produces results once people actually work differently. Change management covers that adoption, alongside the project that delivers the change itself.

Two well-known models

The psychologist Kurt Lewin described change in three stages in the 1940s. The organization first unfreezes its current habits, then makes the change, then refreezes the new habits so they last. John Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School, published an eight-step model in 1995. It starts by creating a sense of urgency and forming a coalition to lead the change. It ends by anchoring the new practices in the culture.

What it involves in practice

Most of the work comes down to explaining why the change is happening, involving the people affected in its design, training them and listening to their objections. Resistance often points to a real problem: a step missing from the new process, or a workload nobody has counted. A team that treats objections as information can fix those problems before launch, which leaves people fewer reasons to work around the change.

Organizations that run on shared governance build part of this work into the way they decide. A proposal adopted by consent has been amended until nobody affected by it has a reasoned objection, so those people have shaped the change before it applies. Moving to a horizontal organization is itself one of the hardest changes to lead, since everyone's role and decision rights shift at once.