Managing Change Enquiry and Action

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□Introduction

Learning and development are central to change management as most change projects involve people doing things differently. Major changes often mean that people need to go about understanding the nature of the organisation's processes, relationships with customers and clients and practices of delivery in different ways. Such changes mean that the change manager has to understand how people develop and what can be done to enable people to enact and understand the innovations that are aspired to (Antonacopoulou, 2006).

In this chapter, we explore the nature of reflection and reflexivity and the ways that change managers can challenge themselves to develop new understandings of who they are and what they do. We focus on the distinction between technique learning – the focus on specific, defined skills outcomes – and insight learning – the focus on developing new ways of conceiving reformatory personal change. We discuss how the alternative methods of learning and development can be integrated within the workplace and discuss the role of the change manager in selecting which methods to use to meet the demands of their situation (Easterby-Smith & Lyles, 2003).

In 2010, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development survey of learning and development methods reported to have found that there was an increasing integration of coaching, organisational development and performance management in which the aim was to increase innovation and effectiveness. Talent management was seen as a key driver of business, and 60 per cent of businesses in the survey were investing in talent management. This included in-house courses and coaching. In addition, mentoring schemes were on the increase, along with learning on the job. However, in 2014 the Brandon Hall Group 2014 Learning and Development Benchmarking Study reported that the trends of learning and development were changing and organisations needed to use adaptive learning principles with consideration to mobile technology and adoption of social learning tools. In this chapter, we compare and contrast some of these approaches and offer guidance on how they might be combined fruitfully. We start by discussing approaches to learning and explain the model of learning for technique and insight.