Managing Change Enquiry and Action

□Introduction

Regardless of the change model adopted, the principles remain the same. Each model is a diagnostic method that aids the change manager in determining the mindset of individuals to make sense of what needs to be changed and to know how to achieve that change.

This very act is a social construction of reality in organisations. The success of change can often be related to how the social construction of realities occurs in conversations and the stories shared in organisations. The significance of conversations and stories in organisational change is considerable, as they become the supporting rationales and required stability for change to occur. Change managers and agents often use stories as conversational tools to understand individuals and their sense of change (Bushe & Marshak, 2014).

It is very common for problems and successes in change management to be traced back to communications. Communications in organisations mainly take the form of conversations and stories. Many reports of failure in change management claim that there had been insufficient or ineffective communication, with the result that people did not know what they were meant to do or felt excluded. However, communicating clearly is only part of the answer. When we are communicating about complex matters such as change, people often do a lot of sense-making, in which they can understand quite different things from the same set of words (Brown, Stacey & Nandhakumar, 2008). For example, a leader might explain clearly that the changes will lead to greater customer satisfaction, but different members of the organisation might interpret this as meaning, for example, that there will be less autonomy for employees because they will have to follow customer demands, that the new approach will lead to better profits, or that the statement is merely rhetoric and the leader does not really care about customers; there are, of course, many other possible interpretations (Sims, Huxham & Beech, 2009).