13. Complexity and Management of Change

At first sight the increasing complexity of organizations suggest that management of change will be correspondingly more complex. Seen through the conventional lenses of management of change the modern organizations being more complex are more complicated to change in perception. The butterfly effect in chaos theory suggests that small interventions may result in large changes in the system. This effect does not satisfy the idea of planned change and complex organization is still about achieving set objectives. The increasing dynamic complexity of the economy implies that the episodic management of change, in which an adaption is followed by a period of equilibrium, now is obsolete. The increasing complexity with its higher causal density in organization implies two transformations of the conventional management of change. The first is that not only the capability for continuous adaptation, following the cybernetic concept of control, is integrated in the design of the organization, but that continuous (proactive) adaptation is one of its processes. The second transformation is that the conventional management of change is being replaced by systemic change. In systemic change the executives identify the few (new) critical system parameters of the organization, to be changed in order to facilitate the members of the organization to work in new ways. No large-scale intervention is needed. This follows the old Interactive Perspective Model from organizational behavior, that the context is more influential in defining behavior as are personal attributes. But now the context is more complex as in the past.