Eras of Change Management: A History of the Discipline

In brief: Change management has evolved and grown over the past forty years. This tutorial presents four eras in the evolution of change management. The current era is marked by building organizational change management capabilities, creating a competitive advantage for companies who have embraced this approach.

Before 1990

The first era of change management occurred over a number of decades leading up to 1990. This era was primarily focused on understanding psychology and human behavior. Although the discipline of change management had not been established, contributions related to psychology and social dynamics helped build an understanding of how human beings experience changes happening to them and around them.

Kurt Lewin, a pioneer in social psychology, provided the notion of force fields and described three states of change in terms of unfreezing, moving andrefreezing. William Bridges, focused primarily on personal transitions and described the natural phases of a transition as endings, the neutral zone and the new beginnings. Psychologists like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Virginia Satir contributed insights on grieving and group dynamics, respectively.

Developments in this era shed light on the human experience and how individuals internalize change, but these insights had yet to be applied in an organizational context.

The 1990s

The second era of change management was marked by a significant shift, where an understanding of how humans experienced change moved into an organizational or business context. This is the era where change management moved onto the radar of managers and leaders throughout organizations.

During the 1990s, a number of seminal books were published on managing the people side of change:

• Todd Jick's Managing Change
• Daryl Conner's Managing at the Speed of Change
• Jeanenne LaMarsh's Changing the Way We Change
• John Kotter's Leading Change
• Spencer Johnson's Who Moved My Cheese

These works added an organizational perspective to the individual perspective of the previous era and served to bring change management as a discipline into the mainstream business vernacular. With new advancements in technology and globalization occurring at a rapid pace, organizations faced more change than ever before. During this era, key contributors to the discipline solidified the importance of managing the people side of change in support of projects and initiatives.

The 2000s

Following the emergence of an organizational perspective, the third era in change management was the 2000s, marked by a formalization of the discipline. The "people side of change" - sometimes considered soft and ambiguous - was refined with greater focus and rigor. Tools and processes aimed at supporting the people side of change emerged.

Linda Ackerman-Anderson and Dean Anderson released the Change Leader's Roadmap at the start of the decade, presenting a structured change management process. Prosci also introduced its 3-Phase Change Management Process (through the book Change Management: The People Side of Change) in the early part of the decade, providing a research-based, scalable process to apply on various projects and initiatives.

Toward the end of the decade, another element of "formalization" occurred with the launching of the Association of Change Management Professionals (www.acmpglobal.org). ACMP is a global organization working to advance the discipline of change management through conferences, networking and the establishment of standards and certification. The creation of an association of practitioners, along with the drive to create standards and certification, has helped formalize the profession.

As the practice of change management became more refined and driven by true deliverables and work streams, it gained credibility and recognition within many organizations. However, its application was still somewhat limited, even in organizations that embraced the importance and value.

2012 and beyond

Today we are in the fourth era of change management, an era in which change management becomes part of organizational DNA. Looking to the future, data from Prosci's 2013 benchmarking study identified two major trends in the discipline for the coming five years:

1. Continued formalization, evolution and refinement of the profession

2. A shift in focus from project-by-project application toward building true organizational capabilities

Leading organizations have undertaken this shift, making concerted efforts to embed and institutionalize change management. These organizations are establishing systems that make change management a required and expected element of all projects, increasing the consistent application of a common approach. Simultaneously, they are working to build "change leadership" competencies throughout the organization - from the very top to the most front-line supervisors.

Prosci calls the effort to build organizational change management capabilities Enterprise Change Management - or ECM. Currently, it is still the innovators and early adopters that are moving in this direction. However, data and experience suggests that in the coming years, more organizations will realize that their ability to "out-change" the competition is what will set them apart, and the discipline of change management will become a strategic differentiator.

Sumber : http://www.change-management.com/tutorial-cm-eras.htm