This article is the second of a series on Change management (you can find the other here).

So, how to change?

It Does not exist a simple and unambiguous way for a change. Rather it is to “build” an ad hoc changes on the different needs and different contexts.

The former managing director of Accenture in a previous interview (Outlook 2003) gave a further sense of the need to change: “[...change is] not only to initiate change for the customer, but take him in ongoing advanced projects [...]” .

It is not possible to think of initiating change and fail to accompany it, raise itand change what was originally thought. Interacting with the change is fundamental. The change is dynamic and constantly evolving. Must be dealt by adapting to the demands.

The complexity of systems (in the broader sense) requires tailored management of resources and the definition of clear and achievable objectives . The complex problem of change in the organization does not remain within the limits imposed by the design patterns or changes planned in response to environmental changes or quotas, but it becomes a skill of managing complex and mutating environments.

The variability and discontinuity of recent changes that we see is often not possible to predetermine the change in a specific way every organizational change ceases to be an act of decision and programmable and becomes more of the organizational dimension of becoming” (Kaneklin C. Aretino G., 1993).

The organization is conceived as a subject in a flow and, therefore, constantly exposed to the risk of chaos and disintegration: ”knowing how to tackle complexity and containing it is the premise of any organizational change that moving between order and disorder continually threatens chaos”(ibid.).

In this perspective, the unstable equilibrium of the organization is the result of a series of “disorganization recovered”, which hold within them a certain amount of disorder that arises when compared with their environment and therefore with its own history” (ibid).

The idea of ​​change itself contains the dynamic characteristic of the process. Suggests to think of phenomena such as mutation, transformation, change, innovation, renewal, change, development, progress, but even revolution, transformation, crisis, catastrophe, symbolically tied together in a dynamic cycle where the beginning is merely the end of a period.

The change then induces a “complex variation” in which it is recognized the value of growth and the value of rupture necessary to be able to change: the complexity appears as complementary between the beginning and the end.

Certainly, these cycles of change do not explain how this happens and what are the factors that characterize it.

The complex organizational thinking, through recognizing the limited nature of knowledge and the unpredictability of nature and self-development systems, avoids proposing optimal solutions, valid independently of the organizational context, history and specificity of the system and the entities that operate it

If we can not abandon by principle the concept of the system, we at least have to abandon the idea that this concept allows us to construct cause-effect chains that make the behavior of the variables predictable: we can at most aspire to models that explain the operation of a certain logic the system on a “post facto” basis.

The design then start looking no more as a general design of organizational structures, but as the design of relationships, rules, or the background in which organizational actors move and take on a provisional and contingent, open to continuous opportunity for reflection and adjustment.

“If is in crisis in the idea that the organization design means designing mechanisms of integration, maximizing predictability behavior, designing secure borders, the organizational intervention can be only the design of relationships between organizations, relations between the parties that interact in a certain time … design of something temporary rather than stable, attempting to influence the structuring processes rather than structures itself ’” (Vino A.,1990).

Giving up the idea of ​​designing a stable and a priori, it gives up also the idea of finding an optimal solution and the use of an incremental approach, which aims to resolve the points of local crises, to increase the manageability of defined processes and subsystems ”(ibid.).

The relationship between organization and environment are described with the concept of “structural coupling”, which illustrates the movement of co-evolution and mutual influence between organizations and environment. The representation of the organization-environment relationship has no meaning if we read it in terms of input / output, which assumes that changes in the environment determine the influence resulting in a predictable change in the system. ”More than input we have to speak of disturbances that select (but do not determine) the paths of evolution of the system, which, in turn, selects the paths of evolution of the environment (and ’this fact the notion of coevolution ) “(Mastrogiuseppe P., 1991).

Next time we will focus on change management techniques.