Definitions of Change Management
"...Change management is a discipline that guides how we prepare, support individuals to successfully adopt change in order to drive organisational success and outcomes......change management is both a process and a competency..."
Prosci, 2023
As a process, it follows a repeatable path and uses a holistic set of tools to drive successful change; as a competency it is a set of skills that enables change to create strategic capability for increasing organisational effectiveness.
There are 3 levels of change in an organisation: individual, project and organisation/enterprise
(source: Prosci, 2023l)
Change can be described as experiencing something different.
The basic aim is to make a change in how an organisation operates in order to cope with a new and more challenging environment, ie to create a peak and agile-performance organisation
(change can vary from a small adjustment to a fundamental shift such as re-inventing an organisation)
OR
"Increasing the organisation's capability to adapt to and adopt new ways of doing business"
Scott Simmerman, 1997
Remember: countries and markets are restructuring; technological leaps create new competitive scenarios and radically restructure value chains; large organisations try to act like small ones; think globally, act locally.
Some relevant quotes
"Change is a process (the art of becoming) not an event..."
Patrick Dawson, 2005
"...The fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change."..Organisation today - has to be designed for change as the norm and to create change rather than react to it..."
Peter Drucker, 2001
"It has become a truism that the only constant is change; with one change overlapping with another, the time-frame to accomplish change is shortening"
Harvard Business Review, 1998
"Control the change or it will control you - you can resist change and win one or more battles, but you will lose the war"
Noel Tichy, 1999
"Three things can be said about change in today's increasingly competitive environment: it's hard, it's necessary and most people are bound to resist it"
Noel Tichy, 1999
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one that is the most adaptable to change"
Charles Darwin as quoted by Norman Augustine, 1998
"It's not the biggest who eat the small, it's the fast who eat the slow"
Gary Jackson, 2003
"An organisation is a web of interconnections; a change in one area can throw a different part of the organisation off balance. Managing these ripple effects and the unexpected outcomes is the challenge of change"
Harvard Business Review, 1998
"Change or die"
Jack Welch as quoted by Business Book Summary, 1993
"The question that faces the strategic decision-maker is not what his/her organisation should do tomorrow. It is what do we have to do today to be ready for an uncertain tomorrow"
Peter Drucker as quoted by AFRBoss, 2000
"...Good ideas are everywhere. Good judgment is a relatively scarce commodity...."
Al Gies, 1997
"...creative thinking at its best - meaning it was chock-full of failures and dead ends..."
Brent Schlender 2015
Management needs to be
"...more open to the talent of others, be inspired by and challenged by that talent, but also......inspiring them to do amazing things..." you can't do yourself plus make decisions with sincerity, depth of feeling and rationality.
John Lasseter (Pixar) as quoted by Brent Schlender, 2015
"...talk about the topic, not about who was right who is wrong. For a lot of people, their egos are tied up in an idea that gets in the way of learning. You have to separate yourself from the idea..."
Ed Catmull (Pixar) as quoted by Brent Schlender, 2015
"Given the choice between changing and proving that change is not necessary, most people will get busy on the proof"
John Kenneth Galbraith as quoted by AFR, 1999
"In the 1990s, the sea-swell of rapid, continuous changes in markets, customer preferences and technology has threatened to capsize countless organisations. Issues related to corporate culture - specifically culture-embraced change - are no longer interesting topics to think about when you have the time: they are matters of survival"
Lila Booth as quoted by Harvard Management Update, March 1999
"Change is the watch word of life. It is characteristic of living systems to continuously renew themselves. If you are not changing, you're dead"
Harvard Management Update, March 1999
"Why are there so few examples of companies that have been able to institute and sustain large-scale changes or to create a culture that continues to welcome change"
Lila Booth as quoted by Harvard Management Update, March 1999
"Environment has moved rapidly from change as the exception to change as the rule"
Scott Simmerman, 1998
"The priority is on agility, the ability to anticipate and facilitate change"
Taizo Nishimuro, CEO, Toshiba, Fortune, Aug 1999
"The organisation is a human community. It is a living system, like the plant or the teenager. There is no one driving it but there are many tending the garden"
Peter Senge et al, 1999
"If there's one essential quality that underpins success in a world of stupefying change, it's resilience - the capacity to adapt to radically new circumstances and emerge form the crisis not merely unbroken but substantially stronger"
Gary Hamel, 2001a
"the challenge of unpredictability can be met by remaining flexible at all times, recognising change as inevitable and an opportunity, and not locking yourself into a set path"
Michael Chaney as quoted by Catherine Fox, 2002
"if you keep going the way you are, you will miss the road of the future"
Charles Handy, 2002
"...change does not come from a slogan or a speech. It happens because you put the right people in place to make it happen..."
Jack Welch as quoted by Jack Welch et al, 2001
"when the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight.."
Jack Welch as quoted by Jack Welch et al, 2001
"...The nature of change itself is changing. Dealing with change is becoming an essential competence for survival, not a periodic or one-off program. No longer consisting of one-off, pragmatic initiatives, change is now an ongoing process in which new ideas are obsolete almost as fast as they are introduced..."
Anne Deering as quoted by James Nelson, 2006
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes"
Marcel Proust as quoted by David Osborne et al, 1993
"...Do you want to be the pebble in the pond that creates the ripples of the change...
Tim Cook as quoted by John Kehoe, 2015
Organisational change is
"...The practice of continually renewing an organisation's direction, structure and capabilities to serve the ever-changing demands of internal and external customers..."
Moran et al, as quoted by Z. Mohmood et al, 2013