Ten widely held assumptions about organizational change

Set out below are ten widely held assumptions about the nature and leadership of organizational change. These present a neatly packaged view of managers’ ability to plan, organize, and control the process, in ways that promise to deliver the sought-after outcomes with confidence and predictability.

This is an attractive proposition for managers, whose performance is likely to be assessed, in large part, on their ability to deal with the challenges of change.

Attractive. But illusory.

Unhelpfully, these assumptions bear little relationship to the complex social reality (or “wiggliness”) of organization that managers experience every day. Alongside each of these ten assumptions, I’ve therefore offered an alternative perspective. These are based on a wiggly world view of organizational dynamics. And on the “muddling through” nature of real-world management practice.