Leadership Organizational Change And Sensemaking

Organizational change literature often focuses on the leaders role in giving sense to others of the need for change and there is a plethora of models and recipes on how to influence employees thinking about change, organizational design and performance. Notwithstanding this ready supply of advice, research has shown that up to 90% of change programs fail to deliver their expected outcomes. One of the reasons for this which has been neglected in the literature is that successful change in thinking starts with how leaders first make sense of the need for change and the challenges this poses to their own thinking. This book surfaces the elements behind leader sensemaking that add to or detract from their ability to critically question their current thinking. Leaders and interventionists have lacked practical and pragmatic advice on how to influence the process. This book is the culmination of 10 years of research spent working with leaders in organizations as they interpreted the need for change and made choices about engaging, or not, with transformational change methodologies. It reveals nine elements of sensemaking displayed by organizational leaders as they grapple with challenges to their current orthodoxies about how to lead and organize in times of change. The book shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of leadership, change, and organisational development.

Organizations are constantly evolving, and intelligent leadership is needed during times of transformation. Change leaders must help people become aware of, understand and find meaning in the new things which arise — they must oversee a sensemaking process. Addressing this need, Effective Organizational Change explores the importance of leadership for organizational change based on sensemaking. Combining a theoretical overview, models and conceptual discussions rich with in-depth examples and case studies, this book uncovers what it is that leaders actually do when they lead change through sensemaking. It presents the most current sensemaking research, extends earlier work by developing the concept of ‘landscaping’, and provides guidelines on how leaders can drive sensemaking processes in practice. This book is for undergraduate, postgraduate and MBA students of organizational change, as well as managers embarking on change projects within their organizations.

Organizational change literature often focuses on the leaders role in giving sense to others of the need for change and there is a plethora of models and recipes on how to influence employees thinking about change, organizational design and performance. Notwithstanding this ready supply of advice, research has shown that up to 90% of change programs fail to deliver their expected outcomes. One of the reasons for this which has been neglected in the literature is that successful change in thinking starts with how leaders first make sense of the need for change and the challenges this poses to their own thinking. This book surfaces the elements behind leader sensemaking that add to or detract from their ability to critically question their current thinking. Leaders and interventionists have lacked practical and pragmatic advice on how to influence the process. This book is the culmination of 10 years of research spent working with leaders in organizations as they interpreted the need for change and made choices about engaging, or not, with transformational change methodologies. It reveals nine elements of sensemaking displayed by organizational leaders as they grapple with challenges to their current orthodoxies about how to lead and organize in times of change. The book shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of leadership, change, and organisational development.

Applies an invaluable sensemaking framework to organizational change in both a practical and accessible way, to present an instructive and informative view on the implications of change in the business world today.

The teaching of organization theory and the conduct of organizational research have been dominated by a focus on decision-making and the concept of strategic rationality. However, the rational model ignores the inherent complexity and ambiguity of real-world organizations and their environments. In this landmark volume, Karl E Weick highlights how the `sensemaking' process shapes organizational structure and behaviour. The process is seen as the creation of reality as an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people make retrospective sense of the situations in which they find themselves.

Although many organizations see the need to transform and to reinvent themselves, for far too many leaders, "change" and "failure" are virtual synonyms. In fact, most organizational change efforts fail. But that needn’t be the case, and help is at hand. Leading Positive Organizational Change, an alternative way to think about organizational change and development, is a strategic, learnable discipline that can re-energize and re-imagine your enterprise, and release the potential for change – delivering a positive, creative future and breakthrough bottom-line results. Written by an award-winning expert in positive organization development and change leadership, this book provides executives, change leaders, and change leadership teams with a step-by-step guide for collaboratively crafting and executing a change strategy that aligns with organizational objectives so as to fuel their future. With a strong science-backed and field-tested "how to" approach, and with a radical focus on organizational positivity, super-flexibility and renewal, collective design thinking and applied imagination, this highly practical book features: A ToolBox of 30 powerful, imaginative (and time-saving!) tools for you to use in practicing leading positive organizational change and carrying through your change program – with example templates and worksheets, concise notes and ideas from numerous complex global projects. Lead-ins to each chapter that are a fundamental feature of the book, representing a springboard to a chapter and serving the purpose of awakening interest in the topic. Dialogic Reflection for Professional Team Development, at the start of each chapter, that enables you (and your team as a whole) to reflect on and discuss some thought-provoking questions, linking to the chapter and helping to contextualize your learning. Industry Snapshots that explore current issues and trends in one of the fastest-growing professions and industries – coaching and consulting. Windows on Practice that demonstrate how issues are applied in real-life business situations, offering a range of interesting topical illustrations of positive change leadership in practice, relating the core concepts of the book to real-world settings. Summary Propositions, at the end of each chapter, that recap and reinforce the key takeaways from the chapter. References to help you take your learning and development further. Tkaczyk’s engaging, reflective, task-based book equips the change leader and leadership teams with the skills needed to navigate chaos and the unexpected, to renew your business and create winning change. This action-based workbook can be used in a variety of business settings, among others, executive leadership team meetings, organization development and change consulting, design-led strategy retreats, human resource development consultancy, executive 1:1 and team coaching, leadership boot camps, design thinking workshops and sprints, innovation labs, and executive education and MBA courses – as a handy additional text in either an organization development and change or human resource management class. It can also be used in a flexible strategic transformation program – with the flow of the change execution process mapped within the context of a specific change initiative.

Organizations and societies are facing extreme challenges that require action (IPCC, 2021). The UN's sustainability goals, demographic change, and the green shift are knocking on the door, while traditional education, and ways of leading and managing this development, often fail to keep up. Organizational Change, Leadership and Ethics challenges leadership orthodoxy, assumptions, and myths currently preventing the further development of theory and practice. It encourages intelligent disobedience in support of greater leadership capabilities and capacity in organisations and societies. As such, the book is written for everyone who wants to be MAD – to Make A Difference - students, scholars, and practitioners alike. Chapter 5 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

This book explains how change encompasses many different phenomena, occurs in a variety of ways, and can have widely divergent causes and driving forces. It also helps to develop a constructive theory dealing with planned organizational change. The book is divided into two main sections. Part 1 discusses how organizations can tackle change actively in order to meet the new challenges they are facing. The author provides an analysis model based on four elements: driving forces, the content and scope of change, the process of change and the context of change. Part 2 addresses how an organization can implement a planned change. Emphasis is placed on how those who are responsible for implementing the change – the change agents – can apply various change strategies, and how planned change processes can be managed. The author shows how various change strategies and different ways of managing change can be equally effective, but in different situations. The book uses an interdisciplinary outlook, and it is based on research in the fields of psychology and sociology as well as political science and economics. The extensive references to source materials also mean that it is useful for anyone who would like to study organizational change in more depth. Dag Ingvar Jacobsen is the author of several books in the fields of organization and management, political science and methodology. He is co-author of the book Hvordan organisasjoner fungerer (How Organizations Function), which is one of the most frequently read books in Scandinavia about organization theory. Jacobsen is a professor at the University of Agder, and is a very popular speaker.

The purpose of this study was to explore the ambiguity created by the continuous reconfiguration of a business model change initiative, the sensemaking perspective (Weick 1995, 2005) of organizational leaders in response to that ambiguity, and any unintended outcomes resulting from those sensemaking activities. To accomplish these research objectives, a single case study was conducted with a small technology firm during a period of intense and continuous reconfiguration of its business model in response to market feedback collected from a series of industry trade shows. Data collection included interview data, office documents related to the change effort, bi-weekly information requests, and public communications including website descriptions and press releases. The data yielded descriptions of ambiguity created by the continuous reconfiguration of the business model change effort, of the sensemaking activities undertake by leadership in the face of ambiguity, and of the unintended change outcomes traceable to the leaders senesemaking. The data contributed to the researchers findings that the continuous reconfiguration of the organizational change effort does contribute to ambiguity, and that such ambiguity did have an effect on the implementation of the change, leading to some unintended outcomes. These findings are relevant to business model change literature which recommends continuous reconfiguration as a means of dealing with rapidly changing markets, and will be useful to workforce education and development researchers and practitioners in broadening their understanding of organization change in relevant contexts.

Alma Harris The ?eld of school leadership is currently preoccupied with the idea of distributed leadership. Few ideas, it seems, have provoked as much attention, debate and c- troversy. Whatever your position on distributed leadership, and you cannot fail to have one, it is irrefutable that distributed leadership has become the leadership idea of the moment. Yet, it is an idea that can be traced back as far as the mid 20s and possibly earlier. So why the interest? Part of the answer can be found in a move away from theorizing and empirical enquiry focused on the single leader. This shift has undoubtedly been fuelled by structural changes, within schools and across school systems that have resulted in - ternative models or forms of leadership practice. Evidence highlights how those - cupying formal leadership positions are increasingly recognizing the limitations of existing structural arrangements to secure organizational growth and transformation (Fullan et al. , 2007; Harris et al. , 2008; Chapman et al. , 2008). As a consequence, many heads and principals are actively restructuring, realigning and redesigning leadership practice in their school (Harris, 2008). While the terminology to describe such changes varies, the core principle is one of extending or sharing leadership practice. While scholars have long argued for the need to move beyond those at the top of organizations in order to examine leadership (Barnard, 1968; Katz and Kahn, 1966) until relatively recently, much of the school leadership literature has tended tofocusupontheheadortheprincipal.