Managing Polarities in Change Management

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order." --Alfred North Whitehead, Mathematician, Logician and Philosopher

Increasingly, an organization’s ability to respond and adapt quickly while providing increased stability in the midst of change is a great leverage point for achieving sustainable competitive advantage. But this is not about predicting or riding trends; change needs to be a lot more than that. Organizations can get caught in pendulum swings from one trend to another. Sometimes Human Resources professionals are responsible for flavor-of-the-month initiatives; other times they may be trapped by flawed strategies advanced by senior executives. Common examples of these traps include the following.

• Cultural shifts: such as from directive to participative management styles, or from hierarchical to team based management and decision-making
• Structural shifts: such as from more centralized to more decentralized operations (and back again!), or from downsizing to rehiring
• Strategic shifts in focus: such as from quality improvement to cost cutting or from product focus to customer focus.
  

Many change efforts follow a predictable pattern likely to lead organizations down paths filled with frustration, resistance, and ultimately preservation of the status quo. After compelling arguments are developed as to why change is needed, a plan for getting from “where you are now” to “where you want to be” is viewed as the solution, with implementing the strategy seen as the last step. However, if your vision of the future - the “where you want to be” - is a shift from one pole of a polarity to the other, your efforts are guaranteed to generate amazing resistance.