CONTINUOUS CHANGE – A

PART OF STRATEGIC CHANGE

INTERVENTION
Continuous change

Continuous change implies that the post change stage in an

organization maintains a linkage with the pre change stage. For
example, change happening in various business processes by way
of continuous improvement leading to the evolution of the same
process.
Why do we need Continuous change?
 Intervention that enable organizations to change themselves continually.
 These change processes are still being developed and refined .
 Helping in facing highly turbulent times , such as firms in high technology,
entertainment , fashion and bio technology industry where technological
changes are rapid and competitive pressures are difficult to predict .
 Interventions extend transformational change into a nonstop process of
strategizing , designing and implementing dynamic capabilities.
 Continually adapt , Innovation and learning
 Address both content of strategy formulation and the process of
strategy implementation.
 Click icon to add picture
Dynamic Strategy making

 It combines OD’s traditional human

process focus on relationships among
organization members with strategic
management’s customary emphasis on
strategy and organizational design to
help manage strategic change

 Speed , breadth , flexibility ,

empowerment , simplicity , unity

Type to enter a caption.

Self Designing Organisation
 Mohrman and Cummings developed the self design intervention
 Focus on continual transformation and built in capacity
 Involves cycles of diagnosing , designing and implementing
activities
DEMANDS OF TURBULENT ENVIRONMENT
 Coordinated organisation response for a VUCA world
 Change is evident. So anticipation of change is important and thereby formulate
new strategies and which will lead to new behaviour to change the organisation
systematically ( Who moved my Cheese?)
 Measures to be taken by Executives- Formulate strategies, set clear vision, and
the middle and lower level will create structures, procedures, and behaviours to
implement strategy.
 Prescriptions of change- “be more nimble”, “go global”
 Learning by doing and on-site innovations.
Application Stages

 Clarifying the strategy (description of breadth , aggressiveness, differentiation

and explains how they are changing)
 Laying the foundation (acquiring knowledge about how the organisation function,
valuing corporate values that guide change process, determining what needs to be
changed)
 Creating the design criteria
 Designing (what needs to be refined and modified for the change)
 Implementing and assessing (involves on-going cycle of action learning, changing
structures and behaviours, assessing progress and making necessary
modifications)
Organizational learning
 Organizational learning(OL) enhances organization’s capability to
acquire and develop new knowledge.
 Self-design: changes behavior by changing organization design
OL: changes behavior by changing the way people solve problems
and address opportunities.
 Emphasizes the structures and social processes that enable
employees and teams to learn and share knowledges.
 Organizational learning: An integrative framework

Competitive
Organization learning Knowledge management
strategy

Organization Organization learning

characteristics: processes: Organization
a) Structure a) Discovery knowledge:
b) Information systems b) Invention a) Explicit Organization
c) Human resources c) Production b) Tacit performance
practices d) generalization
d) Culture
e) leadership
Characteristics of Organizational learning
 Structure emphasize team work, information sharing,
empowerment
 Information system facilitate rapid acquisition and sharing of
complex information to manage knowledge for competitive
advantage
 Human resources reinforce new skills and knowledge
 Organization culture encourages innovation
 Leaders model openness and freedom to try new things while
communicating a compelling vision
Organization learning processes:
 Single loop learning
- Most common form of learning
- Aimed at adapting and improving the status quo
 Double loop learning
- Generative learning
- Questions and changes existing assumptions and conditions
 Deutero-learning
- Learning how to learn
- Learning how to improve single and double loop learning
Discover theories in use:
 Dialogue: it involves members in exchange about how they currently address
problems, make decisions and interact with each other and relevant
stakeholders.
 System thinking: a set of concepts and tools for detecting subtle but
powerful structures that underlie complex situations.
 Left-hand, right-hand column: it is a situation where a person interacts with
others in a way that produced ineffective results.
 Ladder of inference: a tool that aids in understanding how concrete
experiences are connected to assumptions and beliefs that guide behavior.
Knowledge management interventions:
 Generating knowledge:
- Understanding and identifying the knowledge that will create the most value
for the organization and mechanism for increasing that stock of knowledge.
- Develop ways to acquire or create that knowledge
 Organizing knowledge:
- Putting knowledge into a form that organizational members can use readily
- Codification relies on information technology and the development of
databases where knowledge can be accessed and used by appropriate members.
- Personalization focus on the people develop knowledge and on how they can
share it person-to-person.
Knowledge management interventions:
 Distribution knowledge:
- Developing mechanisms that enable members to gain access to needed
knowledge
- Use and reuse
Built-to-change organizations:

 One of the newest continuous change interventions involve intentionally

designing an entire organisation for change and not stability – Lawler and
Worley’s approach
 Many change efforts are unsuccessful not because of human resistance, but
because most organisation features assume stability leads to effectiveness.
 Ability to change constantly is the best sustainable source of competitive
advantage
Design guidelines for B2C organisations
Traditional organization
Strategy:
a) Most strategy process rely on
static, short term views of the
environment.
b) Environmental scanning
tools(SWOT, industry
attractiveness models)
Design:
a) Focuses on efficiency over
effectiveness
b) What do we do well?
Change organizations
Strategizing:
a) Dynamic views of strategy
b) Alternative scenarios and
contingency planning
Designing:
a) Focuses on effectiveness over
efficiency
b) What do we need to learn
Application stages

This intervention is mainly for organizations having problems adapting to complex and
rapidly changing environment.
1) Reframe culture as a facilitator of change
 This stage addresses the organizations culture-the established set of core
values,norms,beliefs shared by organization members.
 To move toward a change-friendly culture, it requires approaches that require high
involvement interactive sessions where relevant stakeholders openly discuss about the
organizations culture and how it can be reframed to be more change friendly.
 Attention is directed at creating and redefining values to help the members see
change as necessary and neutral.
Application stages

2) Redefine organization design components for flexibility

 The second step in moving to B2C is to design and implement components with flexibility
in mind
 It emphasizes on flat, lean and flexible organization structure such as process, matrix
and network design.
 Key objective in B2C structures is Maximum Surface Area
 B2C human resource practices are geared to selecting, developing, and managing the right
talent for change.
 Rewards play a key role in motivating and reinforcing change in b2c organizations.
 B2C designs also shift the basis of rewards from jobs to people.
Application stages
3) Build an orchestration capability
 An orchestration capability enables the organization to implement changes in
strategy and design.
 Activities involved in building change capability into an organization:
-Hiring people with change management skills and training existing managers and
employees to acquire those skills
-Organization effectiveness function is created with competencies in strategic
planning, organization design and change management.
-Learning by doing
 Redefinition of leadership (shared leadership throughout the organization)-to
keep the change process moving forward.
Application 1 – Dynamic Strategy making at Whitbread plc

 It is one of Britain’s leading organizations, with a strong presence in the hotel

industry
 Whitbread was best described as a multiband, multidivisional organization
 They changed their strategy to give value to the stakeholders over management
 They came up with a 11 point plan that received a positive response.
Application 2- Self Design at Health Ways Corporation

 The senior leaders at health ways sensed the need to change their organization’s
design with respect to expected growth of its health plan business
 The organization design and development task forces were guided by the self
design strategy
 The first ODD task force used the knowledge and information generated in the
laying the foundation phase
 The second task force added details to each of the core processes
 The organization applied both the learnings from the task forces
Application 3 – Dialogue and Organization learning at DMT

 DMT is a small but global business that designs, builds and installs sophisticated
food processing systems.
 DMT adopted a socio-technical systems philosophy and introduced self managing
teams and other empowering structures into most of the operations function.
 The heir apparent to the founder of DMT had been reading and thinking about
the concepts of complexity and learning.
 The change leadership team and the OD consultant worked together to craft a
series of organization learning interventions that would involve a broader
segment of the population
Application 4 – Creating a built to change organization at
Capital One Financial
 Capital one, a leading financial services firm and a top issuer of credit cards in
the USA has built an organization that does not view change as an unwanted
intruder.
 The robust strategizing enables capital one to test and learn how best to
compete in a constantly changing environment
 To adapt quickly to any setbacks, the company has developed an agile organization
 Change capability- with the help of a group of HR generalists and line managers,
they created a unique approach to change management
THANK YOU