The Meaning of Change

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the thing I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”  The Serenity Prayer, Reinhold Niebuhr

Many a thesaurus provide the following synonyms for change in its noun format: “alteration, difference, metamorphosis, modification, mutation, permutation, revolution, transformation, transition, transmutation, conversion, substitution, exchange.”

Change means making things different. Smit & Cronje define organisational change as a process in which any organisation takes on new ideas to become different.

The reality is that organisations undertake change in response to changes in the environment. These changes can involve minor alterations or routine changes which do not affect the organisation as a whole, often referred to as reactive change or change involving the entire organisation or a major part of it, where organisations anticipate future events, called planned change. Regardless of the scope and magnitude of change, most organisations experience change in a negative way, as Firth humorously illustrates with the following remarks:

Change is a big thing for organisations because:

• “They’ll” resist it;
• Major disruption is going to happen, which will cost us a lot of money;
• Change is complex in large organisations and just thinking about it will take up lots of our already over-stretched time. Not thinking about it enough will cost us even more;
• We’re not very good at it, on a personal or group level;
• It’s not clear whether the unknown future might turn out worse than the present known;
• We’re just not sure;
• Even if we do ok with this change, we just know there’ll be another one coming soon;
• Change initiatives in organisations like ours have produced job losses, anger, resentment, higher stress, loss of trust, confusion and have brought out some of the darker sides of people’s nature – deceit, guilt, envy, hatred. Why on earth would we bother to do it again? And, biggest thing of all,
• We’d much prefer if it weren’t happening.

In the next paragraphs we will explore those things that cause organisations to change, whether in reaction to or in anticipation of, as well as the nature and types of change.