I have spent the last decade working on enterprise technology and business process improvement initiatives as part of an organizational change management team. As a result, I had a hard time appreciating the theories and perspectives mentioned in the change management articles for this unit.
In particular, I struggled with the fact that the multiple change theories discussed in the articles by Al-Haddad and Kotnour (2015), Biech (2007) and Weiner (2009) failed to include an organizational change model, Prosci, which is currently being practiced around the world.
Prosci is a change management company that provides related training, research, and consulting services to corporations. The company compiles an annual best practices guide for change management based on a robust global survey of organizations undergoing change. It has also developed the ADKAR model of change, a change management toolkit, a change management maturity model, and many other resources for organizations.
I suspect the oversight of Prosci in the literature is because Prosci’s research does not meet the research criteria demanded of academic publications; however, I believe research conducted using real organizations and real change management issues is more relevant than theoretical readings.
For example, I learned the “ready, willing, and able” concept on-the-job, and I appreciated the simplicity that the phrase embodied. Years later, I am now discovering the theory behind the phrase. Weiner (2009) unnecessarily complicated this approach in his discussion of change valence and change efficacy; it was not until he defined organizational readiness as “a state of being both psychologically and behaviorally prepared to take action (i.e., willing and able)” (p. 2) that I was able to connect my professional experience with theory.
In practice, I typically follow Prosci’s ADKAR model when developing change management plans for my clients. ADKAR stands for awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. Though each stage could include multiple change management interventions, I use typically map awareness to communication activities, desire to leadership activities, knowledge and ability to training activities, and reinforcement to performance support activities.
I have also read Kotter’s Leading Change (1996), Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese (1998), and Boston Consulting Group’s The Change Monster (2002). Each of these books has informed my understanding of change management.
A senior change management practitioner once told me that no matter what goes right during a change initiative, lack of leadership support would guarantee a project to fail. She said she would never accept a client contract without first meeting with the executive sponsor and confirming he or she was fully committed to supporting the change initiative.
Her comments speak to the importance of leadership in managing change. Biech’s (2007) change model talks about the need to harmonize and align leadership; Weiner (2009) talks about how leaders need to communicate and act consistently in support of change; Al-Haddad and Kotnour (2015) draw on the leadership discipline as part of their change management literature review. While Al-Haddad and Kotnour (2015) do not explicitly mention leadership in the taxonomy of change literature or systematic change method, the need for effective leadership during change is woven throughout their discussion.
While I understand the connection between leadership and change management, I am having a hard time making the connection between change management and digital learning environments the way I think these readings are intended. I see digital learning environments as being used in support of larger change management initiatives, not as a driver of change itself. While education technology trends are appearing such as the movement toward open access publishing, massive open online courses, and more flexible learning management systems, I see these changes on quite a small scale compared to the other enterprise projects I work on. These issues would be more prominent in K-12 and higher education and would require significant leadership support to create change in those institutions, but I see changes to digital learning environments as far more incremental and easier to manage in the corporate world.
References
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. 235.
Weiner, B. J. (2009). A theory of organizational readiness for change. Implementation Science, 4(67).
Prosci (2018). People. Change. Results. Retrieved February 15, 2018, from prosci.com