The unit 2 readings certainly expanded my understanding of leading change in an organization and the history behind organizational development (OD).  Al-Haddad and Kotnour (2015) give a thorough summary of the history of change giving particular focus to Kurt Lewin, who conducted research on change in the fields of sociology and psychology in 1946 and began the movement of OD and change management.  In terms of changing in our ever evolving digital environment, I think that Feldstein (2017), who writes about achieving an interoperable digital learning platform to replace (or at least have a symbiotic relationship with) learning management systems, makes some very salient points that can be applied to the larger issue of leading change in the digital age.  He notes that our understanding of digital environments has evolved to a point where a there is an expectation that any technologies we use should not only work together, but should complement each other.  This means that any method for change that is adopted should be open ended and allow for the integration of future advancements.  Although this is a fantastic idea, I’ll bet it has IT directors pulling their hair out on a daily basis.

After reviewing the many theories that were part of the readings, I find myself leaning towards the Six Step and the Six Sigma systematic change methods (Al-Haddad and Kotnour, 2015) as I generally don’t like to over complicate things.  These two theories have more generalized steps but still encompassed most of the elements of more complicated theories such as the nine steps of Process Reengineering (Al-Haddad and Kotnour).  For example, the first four steps in the Process Reengineering model are all about identifying the process and defining the problem in your organization.  This to me is too prescriptive and might pigeonhole your thought process.  In contrast, the first step in the Six Sigma method is to define the the issue you would like to repair in your organization and seems to incorporate the first four steps of Process Reengineering.  Although this is very broad, your direction is left more open and I believe this allows for more independent thought and exploration.  It also does not surprise me that the theories I selected were both systematic approaches to change as I tend to like a more structured framework rather than a conceptual one.

Leadership plays an important role in managing change and the first step in this is making sure your organization is ready for change.  Two critical aspects of this are to make sure your organization has a shared resolve and the collective capacity to do so (Weiner, 2009).  Having the shared resolve means motivating people to be committed to pursuing the courses of action required to implement the organizational change.  Collective capacity (change efficacy) refers to the individuals shared beliefs that they have the collective ability to organize and execute those courses of action (p. 2).  Another important aspect is to make sure that the change you are planning to make is not vastly different from the existing organizational culture.  If it is too much change all at once disconnects will be created, employees will not believe their leaders and this will result in an unsuccessful implementation (Biech, 2007).  

Weller and Anderson’s (2013) discussion regarding resilience was intriguing to me as the thought of measuring a system’s capacity to “absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change” (p. 3) never really occurred to me.  They go on to further place emphasis on the fact that the ability to retain identity and function is a key piece to a systems digital resilience.  Reflecting on this I realized that our colleges recent transition to mobile learning could be a resilience test.  Even though resilience was not formally investigated, our college underwent a major change to move to teaching with technology and the result seems to have been a success.  We utilized technology to change some of our teaching practice, but retained the the underlying foundations of teaching and learning (p. 3).  The only thing that scares me a little bit about our colleges transition is I am not sure that resilience was consciously thought of from our leaders, the change seemed to be motivated because going mobile was cutting edge at the time.  I am not sure that any thought was given to maintaining the core foundations of teaching and learning…I hope I am wrong about that though…

Resources

Al-Haddad, S., & Kotnour, T. (2015). Integrating the organizational change literature: a model for successful change. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 28(2), 234-262.

Biech, E. (2007). Models for Change. In Thriving Through Change: A Leader’s Practical Guide to Change Mastery. Alexandria, VA: ASTD.

Feldstein, M. (2017, May 28). A flexible, interoperable digital learning platform: Are we there yet? [blog post].

Weiner, B. J. (2009). A theory of organizational readiness for change. Implementation Science, 4(67).

Weller, M., & Anderson, T. (2013). Digital Resilience in Higher Education. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning.