Strategy Choices and Impact: Assignment of week 18

1. How can using the Change Kaleidoscope and Force-field analysis help an organization to deliver its intended strategy?

Change Kaleidoscope and Force-field analysis are the major tools which are used to assess the change within an organization. Both the tools have got positive and negative features. The positive features assist change and the negative features resist change.

Change Kaleidoscope

The change kaleidoscope is a diagnostic framework. It can be particularly useful in a context sensitive change process, which one can argue is the case in this management project.

The kaleidoscope contains an outer ring concerned with the organizational strategic context. There is a middle ring that has the features of the change context. Finally there is an inner ring which contains the design choices that can be made.

The change contextual features are aspects of the organization to do with its culture, competences and current situation. These are all issues that need consideration before selecting the change approach.

Below you find a short theoretical description of each one of them:

• Time: How much time does the organisation have to achieve this change? Is it in a short term crisis or is it concerned with long-term strategic development? Are stakeholders, such as the stockmarket, expecting short term results from the change?

• Scope: Is the required outcome realignment or transformation? Does the change affect the whole organisation, or is it only concerned with a particular division or department?

• Preservation: To what extent is it essential to maintain continuity in certain practices or preserve specific assets? Do these practices and/or assets constitute invaluable resources, or do they contribute towards a valued stability or identity within an organisation?

• Diversity: Is the staff group concerned diverse or relatively homogeneous in terms of its values, norms and attitudes? Are there many subcultures or national cultures within the group? Are there different departments or divisions or is it one particular staff group? With whom or what in the organisation do different staff groups identify – their team, job, department, division or the whole organisation? Are there professionals who identify more with their profession than their organisation?

• Capability: How capable or competent is the organisation at managing change and how widespread throughout the organisation is this capability? How much change has the organisation and its individual staff experienced in the past? Is there an expertise at an individual level for handling change?

• Capacity: How much cash or spare human resource is there to divert towards the change?

• Readiness for change: Are staff aware of the need for change? If they are, how willing and motivated are they towards the change? How much support generally is there for the change? How much understanding is there for the scope needed?

• Power: Where is power vested within the organization? For this change to be successful, who are the major stakeholders within and outside the organization whose support must be canvassed? Is the unit needing to change part of a larger group or is it relatively autonomous?

The kaleidoscope does not give predictable configurations that lead to more formulaic change recipes. The eight contextual features remain the same but they are constantly reconfigured to produce different pictures for each organizational change situation. Certain features lead to certain design choices, but the potential permutations are endless.

The eight contextual features of the change kaleidoscope are: