Managing Change Enquiry and Action

The aims of this chapter are to:

• show how conversations and interaction fit into broader social and interactive context of organizational change;

• introduce narrative analysis and its relevance for managing change; and

• discuss transactional analysis as a way of understanding and planning interaction.

It is very common for problems and successes in change management to be traced back to communications. Many reports of failure 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 and Nandhakumar, 2008). For example, a leader might explain clearly that the changes will lead to greater customer satisfaction, but different members of the audience 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 (amongst many other possible interpretations) (Sims, Huxham and Beech, 2009). The interpretive process can impose quite different understandings, and hence prompt very different reactions. Therefore, it is important to understand how different interpretations are made and what might be done about this when leading change (Grant and Marshak, 2011).