EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE MANAGEMENT – A COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEM & SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONIST PERSPECTIVE

Managing change could be one of the most, if not the most, common daily activities performed by managers/practitioners of modern organizations. From the advent of Taylor’s (1911) scientific management and Lewin’s force-field approach (1947), most change management models and typologies (such as discussed by Kanter et al (1992); Ford and Ford, 1994; Van de Ven and Poole, 1995; Kotter, 1996; Morgan and Sturdy, 2000; Luecke 2003 etc.) were developed upon the basic assumption that change could indeed be managed and controlled (Sturdy and Grey, 2003). Such deterministic, mechanistic and planned perspectives could be significantly challenged if our organizational realities were to be observed through the lenses of Complex Adaptive System (CAS) and Social Constructionism (SC). Within the purview of CAS and SC, organizations’ actions, which were delivered through its free-willed actors, were essentially unpredictable and hence difficult to control and manage. This thesis research was conducted to investigate how, by adopting the CAS and SC perspectives, could the author’s change management practice be impacted through a first-person inquiry action research (AR) approach in the context of a real-life workplace change management project. Due to a dearth of similar work, particularly within the areas of CAS and SC, the expectation for any significant findings was not high. Nevertheless, the data collected managed to demonstrate the usefulness of incorporating the CAS and SC perspectives into one’s change management practice (in addition of traditional and foundational change approaches). In particular, continual iterations of sense-making and sense-giving, which the author has termed as “sense-exchanging”, had been observed to be a key action trait throughout the inquiry. The author has achieved significant sustained learning from this AR experience and further believes that through sense-exchanging, managers/practitioners could yield greater impact, in terms of enhanced agility in managing challenging situations, sensitivity toward alternate/weakened/silenced voices/mindsets and leadership in building trust and alliance, when managing change in their workplace