Planned change has dominated the theory and practice of change management since Lewin’s work. Those who study organizational change through this lens see change as moving from one fixed state to another through pre-planned steps. That is, change agents deliberately design, initiate, and implement change to anticipate or respond to alterations in the environment or to pursue new opportunities. Planned change, which may be distinct from the usual activities of the organization, is a formal procedure that is introduced and actively management by managers or consultants. Organizational Development (OD) approaches to planned change encourage opportunities for participation in the change effort by recipients of change. However, this participation is typically expected to occur within the framework of the designed change. Lewin’s three stage model of unfreezing, movement and refreezing often underlies planned change accounts. In the unfreezing stage, driving forces within the organization provide disconfirming information that shows discrepancies between the organization’s desired state and its current state to reduce potentially resisting forces. In the movement stage, driving forces focus on developing new behaviors, values, and attitudes that may differ substantially from prior habits and established set of behaviors, thus highlighting planning that is detached from the past. In the final stage, unfreezing, supporting mechanisms stabilize the organization at a anew state of equilibrium that is often devoid of explicit attention to the organization’s past.
A second important perspective on organizational change that has appeared at least since the 1980s in as emergent, processual approach. This approach is not particularly well known in planned change circles but is very important. Processualists advocate organizational change as an emergent process and suggest that change is continuous, unpredictable, and essentially political in nature. It is argued that emergent change consists of ongoing accommodation, adaptations, and alterations that produce fundamental change without a priori intentions to do so. It has also been suggested that emergent change in the process by which patterns of global-level structures arise from interactive local-level patterns. Emergent approaches to change emphasize that change should not be perceived as a series of planned linear events within a given period of time. Rather, it is best viewed as a continuous, open-ended process of adaptation to changing circumstances and conditions. When emergent processes are involved, change comes from the ongoing activity of organization actors as they respond to problems and opportunities. This is an informal process where changes are made as problems occur or opportunities for improvement are discovered, often as part of normal daily activities. Emergent change emphasizes bottom-up action rather than the top-down control usually associated with planned organizational change. The pace is change is depicted as so rapid and complex that once it begins, it is impossible for management or other change agents to identify, plan and implement every action required. The responsibility for change is more devolved and requires change sin the roles played by management, who become more facilitative than controlling. According to the advocates of the emergent approach to change, it is the uncertainty of both the external environment and the internal environment that make this approach more appropriate than the planned approach. To cope with complexity and uncertainty of the environment, these advocates suggest that organizations need to become open learning systems where strategy development and change emerges from the way a company as a whole acquires, interprets and processes information.
From the discussion above it is clear that there are generally two types of change – planned and emergent. Planned change is considered to be formal while emergent change is considered to be informal. Planned change takes the top-down approach while emergent can take bottom-up approach.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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