informal coalitions

Facilitating change #10 – Operating in the ‘real world’

We are now approaching the ‘home straight’ on this ‘back to the future’ review of my 30-year-old paper on organizational planning (“At last,” I hear you say!). Here, we will consider the proposition that planners – and, for our present purposes, change facilitators - should adopt a realistic rather than rational perspective of the dynamics of organization (see footnote).

Facilitating change #9 – Striving for consistency?

In the previous post, we looked at how business planners (and, by extension, those leading and facilitating change) set out to affect the future in organizationally beneficial ways. The definition of the specialist planning role in my 1980 paper, which triggered this series of posts (see footnote), included the intention to "… affect the future of the [power] station in a consistent and realistic manner and in line with the organisation’s objectives".

Here, I want to focus on the stated aim of achieving consistency. As in previous posts in the series, I’m looking to see if any parallels exist between the points I made back then and the informal coalitions view of organizational dynamics.