Change as a process, not an event

Module 2 rests on a single theoretical commitment, and it is worth stating before anything else: change is not a thing that happens to a team on a date. It is a process that unfolds over time, in a context, shaped by politics, interpretation and competing accounts of what is going on.

Planned change and its limits

The conventional frameworks are the ones most people have heard of. Kurt Lewin laid the foundations for planned approaches to change. Organisational Development built diagnostic methods on top. Dunphy and Stace developed a situational approach matching the style of change to the circumstances. John Kotter produced the widely used sequential model of leading successful change.

Dawson, Andriopoulos and Pattinson present these fairly and then set out the limitation that gives their own approach its name. Planned models describe change as a sequence that can be designed in advance and then executed. Real change, they argue, does not behave that way. It is processual: shaped by context, contested by different groups, redefined as it goes, and understood differently depending on where you stand.

They also foreground what they call the paradox of continuity and change — organisations are simultaneously staying the same and becoming something else, and treating these as opposites misreads what is happening.

This is directly practical. Any plan you write is a planned model. What actually happens is processual. The plan is not wrong to exist; it is wrong to treat as a prediction.

Resistance as authentic grievance

This is the most important idea in Module 2, and it reverses what most people assume.

The conventional treatment casts resistance as dysfunctional — something in the people that must be overcome by a sufficiently skilled change agent. Dawson and colleagues quote Collins's sharp observation about how this plays out rhetorically: workers who resist change are cast as psychologically ill-equipped, weak and fearful, while those who support or manage it are the go-ahead types with the right stuff.

Against this, they draw on Ford and colleagues' argument that conventional views tell a one-sided story. Resistance, they contend, can be a resource for better understanding the issues at hand rather than an obstacle. By assuming resistance is necessarily bad, change agents miss its potential contributions — increasing the likelihood of successful implementation, building awareness and momentum, and eliminating unnecessary, impractical or counterproductive elements of the design.

They add an uncomfortable observation: change agents sometimes attribute problems to "resistance" precisely in order to divert attention from their own failings.

Piderit's point completes the picture — resistance can be motivated by the best of intentions, such as trying to prevent an organisation from embarking on something damaging. Dawson and colleagues' own position is that people may resist on ethical grounds, from concern about consequences, or from real doubts about the viability of a strategy. They call the considered, well-thought-out version authentic resistance.

Translate this into a team. The member who keeps objecting to the new direction may be obstructing. They may also be the only person who has noticed something real. The question to ask is not "how do I get them on board?" but "what do they know that I don't?"

Commitment cannot be instructed

Dawson and colleagues' treatment of communication in change returns to the principle from Burke that appeared in Lesson 4's theory: the degree to which people will be committed to an act is a function of the degree to which they have been involved in determining what that act will be.

The distinction between communicating for compliance and communicating for commitment matters most at the moment a plan changes. Announcing a new direction produces, at best, compliance. Commitment requires that people have a sense of ownership of the need for the change — which means the reasoning, the evidence and the alternatives have to be genuinely shared, not summarised after the decision.

They also emphasise that change is made sense of through conversation. It is by changing daily conversations that people begin to think differently — which is a good argument for holding a proper conversation about what changed rather than sending a message.

Change is disquieting even when it is wanted

Clapham and Meyer make a point that softens a lot of self-blame. Our reactions to innovation, they note, are complex and two-sided. Innovations are exciting — new ways of interacting with the world, problems resolved, opportunities opened. They are also disquieting, because they involve embracing something unfamiliar, and change can be stressful, uncomfortable and frightening. The very requirements for producing innovation therefore generate resistance.

They also list the barriers that feed resistance to change, and the list is long and recognisable: personal habits, fear of the unknown, rigidity, suspicion, misinformation, apathy, closed communication, loyalty to the present system, lack of conviction, ambiguous objectives, fragmented authority, lack of incentives. Their summary line is the one to remember when it feels hard: change is a lonely business.

Barry Staw's framing, which they cite, explains why the difficulty is structural rather than personal. Most people tend to conform to norms, minimise risks, apply limited approaches and disengage when challenges recur. Creativity requires the opposite: going against norms, taking risks that may fail, approaching problems flexibly, and persisting despite obstacles. The requirements of creativity run against ordinary human tendencies. Nobody is failing by finding this hard.

Continuity and change together

One more idea to carry into the exercise. If continuity and change are a paradox rather than opposites, then the useful question during a difficult week is not "how much has changed?" but "what has changed and what has not?" — asked as two separate lists.

Dawson and colleagues' processual view holds that both are always true simultaneously. The mission, the team, the skills and the work already made are continuous. The concept, the plan and the timeline have changed. A team that can see both at once is considerably harder to destabilise than one that experiences change as total.