This is the most up to date, complete and concise publication on the colors of change. It is written for both practitioners and academics that want to go beyond the basics. Those who already know about this change theory are likely to be surprised to find there is more to both the model and its applications Read more…
The complexity of tough issues can only be handled effectively with intensive local participation. Such participation is not straightforward as people may shy away from the unfamiliar repertoires, unpredictable processes and inevitable opposition that come with the territory. This paper focuses on how to facilitate local ownership in a series of paradoxical interventions with sufficient depth and credibility. Read more…
International trade can make a huge difference towards sustainability, as over half of what is produced globally crosses national borders. Several of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals – such as realizing ‘zero hunger’ and ‘no poverty’, ensuring all have ‘decent work’, and taking ‘climate action’ – crucially depend on transforming the way international trade is organized. But international value chains are complicated, involving many different people working in diverse contexts that change over time. Therefore Read more…
This paper explores how action research takes place within and between four contexts: adding practical value, improving institutions, developing professions, and contributing to theory. We argue that action research is more than those activities conducted within these contexts: it is a process of handling the generative tensions in the boundary regions. Read more…
‘Learning to Change’ provides a comprehensive overview of organizational change theories and practices developed by both U.S. and European change theorists. The authors compare and contrast different approaches: five fundamentally different ways of thinking about change Read more…
A persistent stereotype of consultants is that of experts who have all the answers. However, the more complex problems are, the less consultants are able to provide ‘magical solutions’. Causal loop diagrams (CLDs) are a powerful tool to deal with issues characterized by content complexity and process complexity. Read more…
This article describes how, almost twenty years ago, we came up with a meta-theory of change, now referred to as the “color model,” and how that theory has developed over time. We look back, using Smith and Hitt’s four-stage model of theory development, to better understand how one creative idea took on many manifestations, became a robust theory and is now widely used. Read more…
This chapter presents a questionnaire that measures individual change preferences based on a meta-theory of five paradigms of change. We describe its construction and improvement over a 13-year period, during which time more than 100,000 people have used the test as an instrument for self-reflection.
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Complex issues require continuous change that is planned incrementally. This paper focuses on how such emergent change can be shaped through a process of small wins and explains how this may even use adversity to fuel the change. The research shows how planning is anything but an innocuous support activity for change efforts and describes how it can either frustrate or enable deep change. Read more…
Léon de Caluwé and Hans Vermaak present briefly five fundamentally different ways of thinking about change. Each of these represents a different belief system and conviction about how change works, the kind of interventions that are effective, how to change people, etc. They are labeled by color: yellow, blue, red, green, and white print thinking. Their color-model is based on their observations of current practices and existing theories about change. Read more…
This is an interactive test that helps you identify your convictions about change. The test results can be used to assess what type of change agent you are: what you are good at and what could be developed further. Read more…
The authors present five fundamentally different ways of thinking about change, each representing different beliefs systems and convictions about how change works, the kind of interventions that are effective, how to change people, etc. Read more…
Since a few years visual artists and designers in the Netherlands have banded together with organizations to adress social issues in a different way. They focus on complex issues where sensemaking and participation is key. During the last half year or so three more action research projects were taken on with lost of enthusiasm. The movement reported on this October at the Dutch Design Week. Read more…
Current reforms in for instance health care or community development in troubled neighborhoods, are brave attempts at social innovations toward a more sustainable society. Such innovations ask for the questioning, discarding and renewal of ingrained practices and their re-assemblage into novel forms of collective, coordinated action. Societal, macro – level transitions play out in organizational change efforts that are especially challenging because they need to address “wicked problems” that are complex and ambiguous in terms of both content and process and therefore defy the application of simple, short – term solutions. Instead, they require a multidimensional approach and the involvement of many actors with different interests, viewpoints and affiliations. Read more…
This case study presents reflections on a research intervention conducted at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The subject was the practice of administration. Its objective became to understand its “wicked problems” and to create action principles. It was an analytical research effort as well as a learning intervention. Read more…
Because of its apparent simplicity and luring strength-based stance, appreciative inquiry can be misunderstood as an attractive and easy to emulate technique. Such misunderstanding may cause slippage from thoughtful inquiry into a managerial tool to create motivational experiences at work rather than to engage with complex issues. Such slippage may ultimately turn the appreciative approach into another disappointing management fad. Fortunately, the prolific use of appreciative inquiry during the last decades provides us with rich experiential material for timely reflection, critique and renewal.
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The challenges consultants face warrant ongoing education. When those practitioners have 15- 30 years of experience dealing with messy realities, however, it makes little sense for faculty to teach clean-cut models in standardized curricula. Read more…
OD has an established tradition. There is a community of practice, academic research, handbooks in all sorts, development of new practices, lots of publications, proven methods. All seems fine. At the same time there is recurrent talk and publications expressing worry about the future of OD. Read more…
Causal loop diagrams can help in tackling complex issues effectively. Until the nineteen-seventies the literature focussed on the technique of such diagrams. Since then it has become evident that participation of stakeholders in making and applying such diagrams is desired to affect change. Read more…
Professionalism still is on the way up. However, the working methods of managers and professionals do not develop at the same pace. Professionals often seek out their workplace within an organisation but then proceed to act as soloists, which makes fragmentation, mediocrity and non-commitment the rule rather than the exception. The manager’s reflex dictates that he/she tackles problems with control and command, resulting in all sorts of conflicts. Read more…
There is no shortage of tough issues: whether it is collaboration between professionals, external oriented government, sustainable economy or development cooperation. They are characterized by complexity of different kinds: many factors and many actors are involved. It makes tough issues hard to pin down and impossible to eradicate. The dominant change repertoires are ill equipped for tough issues: clear division of tasks and responsibilities, minimizing conflicts, drawing up organizational missions, rolling out large-scale change programs Read more…
In this chapter we explore the most prominent clusters of theories for changing organizations and changing people. Managers and management consultants make use of the first set of theories while psychotherapist use the latter. Our assumption was that there would be considerable overlap between these sets of theories. Read more…
Given that more organizational change takes place unplanned than planned and more unsuccessful than successful, we think there is justification for reflection on why change does not work. This implies complexifying things rather than simplifying them: to search for hidden rules of the game, for informal processes, political mechanisms in organizations, etc. Read more…
[…] The authors identify and integrate a large and disparate literature, and, in the process, do a nice job both summarizing and advancing it. The text is supplemented by high quality tables and charts that provide easy-to-use visual summaries or aides for comparison. For American readers, the book introduces works from European scholars who may not be that well known. Read more…
People learn, all the time and everywhere. Yet it seems we all have our own images and ideas about what learning actually is. More importantly, we all seem to have our favourite approaches to learning, which we call upon whenever a learning situation arises. Read more…
For professionals involved in change management and students wanting to gain insight into the field, ‘Learning to Change’ is an excellent resource. The authors, Léon de Caluwé, and Hans Vermaak, take a theoretical and practical approach to the subject. Read more…
In the 80’s lead in the air was a real environmental and health issue. It was caused by many things like lead paint on houses, but mostly by exhaust gases from traffic. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave the University of Florida a grant to create a device that would measure lead content in air. During my studies at that university I participated in that research. The article shows some of its findings. Read more…
