Chaotic Complex Change

Change is an important topic in management and organizational development. Much has been written to describe, learn and utilize change.

Change in Three Steps

It is worth addressing a popular simple model, attributed to Kurt Lewin who is widely considered the founder of organizational development, called Change in Three Steps (CATS): Unfreeze, Change, Refreeze. [This was not actually an established theory in Lewin’s work, but developed later based on his ideas.]

Shortly after his death in 1947, the first edition of Human Relations of the Tavistock Institute published an article by Lewin called “Frontiers in Group Dynamics: Concept, Method and Reality in Social Science; Social Equilibria and Social Change”. Lewin’s approach of social psychology applied to social settings is characterized by trying to establish its scientific value, depicting the organizational dynamics according to fields as in the natural sciences. He was also advocating democratic values within social settings, as more effective, and to serve as a safeguard against racist and tyrannical influences.

In the article, Lewin describes ‘Changing as Three Steps: Unfreezing, Moving, and Freezing of Group Standards’. During unfreezing and moving, problems rise, and prejudices must be removed. The change force is countered by a resistance force. Reducing the resistance force is necessary to instate the change efficiently, because bringing change introduces a new foreign field into the environment and creates new resistance forces. He also deduced by experiments that group decisions, as opposed to the individuals on their own, will facilitate change more effectively than individuals.

Edgar Schein of MIT in his article ‘Kurt Lewin's Change Theory in the Field and in the Classroom - Notes Toward a Model of Managed Learning’ (1995), elaborates the CATS concept of change: Unfreezing includes disconfirmation, which is a dissatisfaction of circumstances, and then anxieties by the parties involved in the face of change having to learn and adapt. To help them endure the changes, measures should be taken beforehand to provide a sense of safety for those involved. This is done by reducing anxiety before introducing the changed concepts, discussing new ideas and showing models of the new, and then providing affirmation and encouragement for adopting the “cognitive redefinitions”.

Chaos and Complexity

Another set of theories regarding change are known as chaos and complexity. These also use metaphors from the natural environment to describe change, however, contrary to Lewin and Schein, the force fields are assumed to be too complex to determine essentially.

This approach is concerned with the ability to affect change as opposed to knowing. Unlike the classic scientific Newtonian approach which deduces concrete figures and calculates the dimensions of the field empirically, and unlike the economic industrial machine approach of Taylor by that same logic - the logic of chaos and complexity emphasizes rather the need to unlearn, to release control, to manage dialectically within reality and not presume to dictate it.

In other words, one cannot predict the unpredictable. The terms management and organization are inherently paradoxical, because change is not calculated but embraced.

A natural environment is made up of layers upon layers of overlapping ecosystems, and so the idea of an organizational ecosystem bubble as a separate definitive entity is senseless.

Having said that, actually within nature what appears as chaos and lack of order, if viewed by a different perspective or prism, shows incredible order, beauty and progress. Reality is a jungle, but the jungle has its rules.

Chaos theory considers other metaphors of time, nature and change, such as the seed and the butterfly effect. Small actions, small changes, may breed big changes, eventually, and when we execute one measure of action or intended change, we don’t really know what that action will breed, as it may relate to another chain of reactions.

Change happens all the time, perpetually, whether we plan it or not, and whether we partake in it and interact with it and influence it. What we often call changes are actually milestones of change, markers of the accumulated effect of change.

Training or preparation for directing change in a complex environmental system should be dialectic, which means we can plan but these are very loose plans, they are ideas, and we are constantly doing one thing, re-evaluating the surroundings and the ramifications of the last action, then responding again, in a constant cycle of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which becomes the next thesis.

Agents of change should learn to interpret and discern the forces, fields and many layers of ecological subsystems. They should learn how to handle situations of anxiety and improvisation, as so often agendas are promoted and then agendas evolve and are fleeting.

In other words, change and process are more about dynamic interaction with chaos and complexity, then they are about control, order, and calculated results.

An extreme expression of this approach would view chaos not as a negative factor and obstruction to development, but as something natural and amoral to be embraced, incorporated and utilized.

Theory of Change

An additional set of ideas, somewhat unrelated to the above, is called Theory of Change. Created by researchers less affiliated with mainstream organizational development and less concerned with internal processes of organizations, Theory of Change deals more with social impact, effective policy, and community action - in other words, external measures.

Theory of Change breaks down to a model, an exercise generated in a facilitated group activity, where the process of influence is mapped out, starting from the intended goal, and then traced back by minor steps, with arrows between each step laying out the rationales and assumptions along the way.

Also marked in detail are points of intervention in order to cause the intended step, and a system to evaluate whether each partial outcome is achieved is planned so that the process can be monitored and adapted along the way. Strategic mapping for the sake of impact is also called a logic model, or outcomes pathway.

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