Emergent Change

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Planned Versus Emergent Change

To provide perspective, change often is deliberate, a product of conscious reasoning and actions which is commonly referred to as planned change. In contrast, change sometimes unfolds in an apparently spontaneous and unplanned way. This type of change is known as emergent change.

Planned Change Controllable There is a clear beginning, middle, and end Driven by management Promise success and draw a line under the past Slow Time-consuming Often resistance Out-of-date by time implemented

Emergent Change Continual process of experimentation and adaptation Multi-level and cross-organizational change (messy) Interation Manager's role is to keep culture so that good change can occur Messy, sometimes inefficient Need to let go of management's controlling behavior Effects often unpredictable

Besides the above characteristics, there is a deeper distinction that bears revealing. Change can be emergent rather than planned in two ways:

• Managers make a number of decisions commonly unrelated to the change that emerges. The change is therefore not planned. However, these decisions may be based on unspoken, and sometimes unconscious, assumptions about the organization, its environment and the future (Mintzberg, 1989) and are, therefore, not as unrelated as they first seem. Such implicit assumptions dictate the direction of the seemingly disparate and unrelated decisions, thereby shaping the change process by 'drift' rather than by design.
• External factors (such as the economy, competitors' behavior, and political climate) or internal features (such as the relative power of different interest groups, distribution of knowledge, and uncertainty) influence the change in directions outside the control of managers. Even the most carefully planned and executed change program will have some emergent impacts. This highlights two important aspects of managing change.

This highlights two important aspects of managing change.

• The need to identify, explore and if necessary challenge the assumptions that underlie managerial decisions.
• Understanding that organizational change is a process that can be facilitated by perceptive and insightful planning and analysis and well crafted, sensitive implementation phases, while acknowledging that it can never be fully isolated from the effects of serendipity, uncertainty and chance (Dawson, 1996). An important message of change management literature is that organization change is not fixed or linear in nature but contains an important emergent element as identified in complexity theory.

Not for the faint hearted.

Emergence as a process is order arising out of chaos. For many organizations, to even acknowledge that they have a hidden chaos that seems to be preventing them from being more effective is taboo. Emergent change tests the executive maturity level of the organization to even consider that higher-order complexity arising out of chaos in which novel, coherent structures coalesce through interactions among the diverse entities of a system is a worthwhile pursuit. For them, emergent change resembles insanity. Yet, how many executives continue to practice the very definition of insanity by using the same behavior and logic over and over again while expecting a different outcome. Emergence occurs when the individual, team, and organization interactions disrupt, causing the system to differentiate and ultimately coalesce into something new and dierent.

Evolution of Emergent Change

Through the revolutionary approaches by Social scientists Fred Emery and Eric Trist who created a "Search Conference" and Consultants Kathleen Dannemiller, Chuck Tyson, Alan Davenport, and Bruce Gibb who created Large Scale Change they laid the groundwork to a completely different approach to change. Emergent change became a critical aspect of organization change and development by (1) working with the whole system, and (2) involving the people of that system in finding their own answers. In short, it became a means for harnessing the emergent capacity of the organization to reveal itself sufficiently to become a higher functioning organization.

Need for Emergent Change

Emergent change is needed when an organization senses it is out of sync with itself. Nothing clear or visceral, yet a sense of something missing. Often this sense of something missing can occur when the organization has grown quickly, lost significant people through attrition or lay-off or experienced losses. The common symptoms are that people talk more about surviving and less about thriving, or how far behind they are instead of the bright outlook ahead. The impact is that the organization is not aligned with itself. Individuals have difficulty getting on the same page, so misunderstandings can abound and result in unnecessary mistakes.

The Impact

Through Emergent Change, people develop a better understanding of the roles, responsibilities and realities of others throughout the organization. Separate departments and groups connect and strengthen their interactions and interdependencies creating powerful awareness and cultural shifts that positively influence behavior. People are empowered through the knowledge of the complete organization and make better decisions when they understand cross functional interchanges within the context of the whole organization.

Dawson, S.J.N.D. (1996) Analysing Organisations. Hampshire, Macmillan. Mintzberg, H. (1989) Mintzberg on Management: inside our strange world of organisations, Chicago, Free Press.

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