The Past, Present and Future of Change Management: Part 1

Update Feb 2016A couple of years ago (May 2013), I gave a talk to the College of Organisational Psychologist Community of Practice on the topic of The Past, The Present and the Future of Change Management. In the last couple of weeks we have seen some great additions to the re-telling of Change Management's History. The content of my talk is lower down in this post. First Tim Creasy, Chief Innovation Office of Prosci has just published this article on the History and Future of Change Management on LinkedIn. As part of the talk, I tackled the Future in the post. Fun to compare the two no? The consistencies are comforting, the divergence worth a conversation. I suspect more is consistent than divergent though. I wonder what that says about our profession? And then Danish change agency Workz have just published this terrific visual on the history of change management. It's a great conversation starter and they have generously provided it for you to download and make into a poster. Enjoy!Back to my original post...Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with the College of Organisational Psychologist Community of Practice on the topic of The Past, The Present and the Future of Change Management. Here’s the gist of what I presented, or part one at least.The PastOne of the things I hear frequently is people talking about change management being new. I think if we look at history and the organisation we see that change management is not really new at all. Even today, one of the claims that is often made is “The only constant is change”  (Heraclitis date). Niccolo Machiavelli noted: “…there is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things…” –“The Prince (1513)If you trace the evolution of management theory, you will see that each paradigms of management dealt with change management albeit often with a singular focus.  Scientific Management dealt with task focused change,  Weberian reform dealt with structural change.  The Social Technical Systems (STS) and Human Relations era dealt more with changing systems and people.What is perhaps new is the focus on change management as a profession and the charging of money for the knowledge in how to change companies.  I would argue that this practice emerged from the 1980s and we can thank the Big 6 consulting groups and Darryl Conner (one of the industry’s most influential change management expert) for the commodification of Change Management intellectual property.It was at this time too, that many of the “seminal” works emerged ad gained purchase within in the field (Kotter, Senge).  The nineties saw Positive Psychology start to create strong influence in the field and by the 2000s, we had a wide proliferation of change models, and frameworks in existence.  This period also saw the multiplying of change initiatives – while once an organisation might go through a major change once every 3-5 years, the tempo of change increased so that by the next century most organisations were undergoing continuous changes concurrently.By way of illustrating some of the core concepts that have dominated the past in change management (and are pervasive in the present), I have called out the the burning platform, the change curve, change readiness, change resistance and change communication as illustrative of what the change management profession has dealt with.Here's the slides (whitmans sampler part 1) for this part. Next week, I’ll post Part 2 (The present). In the meantime, what aspects of the past do you think are missing here?