Change Journey Background And Intro

The Change Journey Map
A Tool for Managing Complexity in Organizations

We all carry images of organizations in our mind. Most of us still believe an organization is a machine.
please watch the following video clip…

The reality is different. Organizations are complex social systems.
(from: zeno on Flickr)

What makes an organization a complex system?
All people have individual concerns, purposes, and circumstances.
All people in an organization make many unsupervised decisions, every day.
All people in an organization are connected in different ways to other people within and without the organization.
There is a close to infinite number of external and internal influence factors that shape the destiny of the organization.
Social systems have a strong urge to protect their integrity.

1. All people have individual concerns, purposes, and circumstances.
Before you continue, please read more about this model of human needs of Manfred Max-Neefhere.
Subsistence
Freedom from Want
(Income/Livelihood)
Protection
Freedom from Fear andAbuse
(Ground Rules)
Identity
Freedom To BeProud of Yourself(Self-Esteem)
Affection
Freedom fromRejection
(Dignity/Teamwork)
Creation
Freedom to Create YourOwn Future
(New Ideas)
Freedom
Freedom fromCoercion
(Autonomy)
Understanding
Freedom fromUncertainty
(Information Access)
Leisure
Freedom fromExhaustion
(Stress Reduction)
Participation
Freedom fromExclusion
(Inclusivity)

2. All people in an organization make many unsupervised decisions, every day
Ask yourself:
How many decisions do I take every day?
How many decisions of my staff can I control?
How accurate can I predict the compounded effect of those decisions?
What is, honestly, the expectancy range of what will happen tomorrow, the day after, and beyond?
Before you continue, please read more about decision making in uncertain times here

3. All people in an organization are connected in different ways
image from: Delta7

4. There is a close to infinite number of external and internal influence factors
Each day, a lot of things happen
in your organization
in your community
in the local economy
in the international economy
in politics
in families of your organization’s members
in your brain
…
Each of these happenings add to uncertainty. No computer can calculate the effect of these compounding influence factors.

5. Social systems have a strong urge to protect their integrity
An organization can be compared with a cell. The main purpose of the cell is to survive and to reproduce.
HumbertoMaturana and Francisco Varela called these self-protecting and self-generating behavior “autopoiesis”.
Any organization tries to make sure that it is not corrupted, which can easily happen in a change process. This is often felt as “change resistance”, but it is a natural behavior.
Here is some reading for you to do before you proceed:
Autopoiesis(Wikipedia)Autopoeisis in the business organization (PDF)
Autopoiesis in virtual organizations (PDF)

How to deal with complexity in organizations?
Source: Cognitive Edge
Most change processes aresituated in the left quadrant (complex), few are in the knowable sphere, some are in the chaos sphere and none are in the known sphere.
This is why the effect of an intervention into a system cannot be predicted.
The quicker we accept that, the easier we can find strategies to cope with it.

The Change Journey is a radical approach to change.
It is based on the emerging new paradigm which assumes that change in organizations does not follow a linear path from A to place B. What happens in a change process is largely unpredictable and rarely plannable.

There are hundreds of different change management models.
None of them guarantees success.
Why don’t you let the organization come up with their own model? The Change Journey is a process that facilitates the design of an organization specific change model.

The Change Journey Map is a tool for facilitation of dialogues around a team’s or organization’s specific Change Journey.

The Map as 23 places. Each of the places has some questions attached that are meant to inspire dialogue. The questions come along as a card deck. For example:
The Mall of Human Needs
What do we know about the needs, concerns and circumstances of our people?
What prevents people from freely expressing their needs?
How do all make sure that concerns, purposes and needs of our people are acknowledged, respected and taken care of?
Where do we experience resistance to change which might be an expression of unsatisfied needs?
What other questions do we need to ask?

As a Change Practitioner, you can use the Map to
facilitate a dialogue with a team or a whole organization,
let them define their own change model,
help them by choosing the right tools for initiating and sustaining a change process.
The Change Journey and the Change Journey Map are neutral to other models and methodologies – all of them can be incorporated and applied for the implementation of a specific change journey.

How can you get involved?
Sign up for our platform www.changejourney.org
Contribute to the knowledge + practice base
Come see us at one of our global workshops in summer 2010 (Ammersfort/NL, Brussels, London, Berlin, Sydney, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York). Dates, venues and more places will be announced soon!
In our workshops, we will hand out licenses for Map , a soft copy for printing high quality Maps and other supplementary material

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Change Journey Background And Intro

by hnauheimer on Mar 11, 2010

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Change Journey Background And Intro — Presentation Transcript