Change & development processes
Change & development processes
This domain tests planned change, organization development (OD), resistance, and innovation. Questions ask you to sequence an intervention and choose a resistance strategy that fits the source.
Planned change
Lewin's model is unfreezing, moving, and refreezing; force-field analysis weighs driving against restraining forces. Kotter's eight steps are urgency, guiding coalition, vision, communication, empowerment, short-term wins, consolidation, and anchoring. Action research cycles diagnosis, data collection, feedback, action planning, implementation, and evaluation with client collaboration. OD interventions include survey feedback, team building, process consultation, job redesign, TQM, and appreciative inquiry (discovery, dream, design, destiny).
Resistance and innovation
Resistance sources include habit, fear of the unknown, economic threat, selective perception, and group norms. Kotter and Schlesinger's strategies are education and communication, participation, facilitation and support, negotiation, manipulation, and coercion; each has costs. Planned change is not the only form: emergent change arises from local adaptations, and punctuated equilibrium alternates stability with radical shifts. Senge's learning organization uses systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning.
Worked example
An ERP rollout stalls: leaders announced the system by email, skipped training, and saw no early benefits. Applying Kotter, the missing pieces are urgency built from data, a coalition of operations and IT, a clear vision of why the old system fails, participation in design, and a visible short-term win such as faster month-end reporting. Force-field analysis would also reduce restraining forces (fear of job loss) rather than only increasing pressure.
Traps
Refreezing is not always possible in turbulent environments; continuous change may be more realistic. Resistance is not automatically irrational - it can signal a bad plan. OD is not merely training; it is planned, data-based, collaborative improvement. Appreciative inquiry studies strengths and possibilities, not deficits. Change is rarely a simple linear sequence.