Change management from Theory to Practice

Change management theories and methods have been a hot topic for decades in strategic management, change implementation, and innovation implementation. Nowadays, in the information and technology industry, we see trends, such as, the digital transformation, digitization, automation, Digital Experience, and Customer and Citizen-centric approaches that lead to infinite change motives in the organizations and society that lead to new innovations.

Moreover, Change management projects have many different themes, for example, quality improvement, process improvement, re-engineering, reorganization, and organizations restructure. Although most of the organizations are trying to align with new trends and apply new changes effectively, the reported successful applied change projects were few and under specific circumstances and context (Kotter, 1995).

Change management is not only a theory, it is a practice that we can use not only in the organizations but within our daily lives, for example, pursuing a job or an academic scholarship, or even changing family habits. These types of motives, goals, or dreams lead to actions and a lot of hard work to satisfy these motives. I partially agree with (Dunphy 1996) who stated that:

“The basic tension that underlies many discussions of organizational change is that it would not be necessary if people had done their jobs right in the first place. Planned change is usually triggered by the failure of people to create continuously adaptive organizations”

(Dunphy 1996 as cited in Weick & Quinn, 1999)

In order to make people do their jobs right at any organization, their organization should empower them, the executives and managers should prepare those people and align their priorities with the organization strategy, and ensure that those people have the right capabilities to perform their jobs in the right way and to the intent expectation.

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