Does Continuous Change Imply Continuity?

Excerpt

The duality of continuity and change has conventionally been treated as a dilemma, i.e. either to be in continuity or to change. In the post modern concept of change management, this duality is reformulated as a paradox so as to deal with continuity and change side by side. In the context of strategic change, an interesting duality is of continuous change versus discontinuous 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. In contrast, discontinuous change would mean almost no relationship between pre and post change stages. Some prominent examples of discontinuous change are: business process reengineering, and blue ocean strategy. Business process reengineering works on a clean slate approach leading to fundamental change in the process design resulting in dramatic improvement in performance. Blue ocean strategy deals with innovative offerings that create new market space making the competition irrelevant. In both the cases, there is hardly any linkage with the pre-change stage. …