Social technological innovations are exploding across all segments of influence both personal and professional. Companies are now being confronted with the necessity to implement changes in strategy, structure, process and culture. Change is difficult if you don't remove constraints to change or have a clear path as to where the change will take you.
An organization's ability to effectively communicate and manage change is critical to the change creating desired results. People want to know why, how, when and specifically will it impact their environments. Unless and until people trust the intents of management changes will be resisted and the desired results cannot and will not be achieved.
Is Your Organization Ready for "Social Change"?
Dave Bouckenooghe and Geert Devos white paper titled READY OR NOT...? WHAT'S THE RELEVANCE OF A MESO LEVEL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF READINESS FOR CHANGE which says: Organizational change often yields limited success. Failure in many cases is due to the lack of motivation or readiness for change among organizational members.
The results indicated that the
individual perceptions of history of change, participation in decision
making, and quality of change communication were positively correlated
with readiness for change. These findings are discussed in relation to
previous literature.
Keywords: readiness for change, meso-level perspective, history of
change, trust in top management, participation in decision making, and
quality of change communication
Readiness is the cognitive state comprising beliefs, attitudes and intentions toward a change effort. When readiness for change exists, the organization is primed to embrace change and resistance is reduced. If organizational members are not ready, the change may be rejected, and organizational members may initiate negative reactions, such as, sabotage, absenteeism and output restriction. In fact, readiness for change is the cognitive precursor to resistance for change (Armenakis et al., 1993).
Has The Change Process Flipped?
The irony of organizational change theories of the past are they are centric to top down models. The "social movements of the web" have already created changes from the bottom up. This new dynamic puts the leadership of change in the hands of the people.
For businesses to adapt they'll need to listen and act according to the desires and expectations of the people. To fail to adapt or act accordingly could be very disruptive to your markets. Adaption requires Socialutions.
Get it? What say you?