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Changing the way organizations change has become the fourth and perhaps most pressing challenge every organization faces today. This insightful and practical paper aims to describe a holistic, integrated approach organizations can use to build the necessary leadership capacity required to ensure changes are both successful and sustainable over time.

Five decades of using change management as the standard approach to helping organizations change have left a legacy of many more failures than successes. Integrating the essential components of strategy, change, transition and communication, the paper outlines specific actions leaders at all levels must undertake to lead change successfully throughout their organization. Insights are gained from decades of work with hundreds of leaders in changing organizations around the world.

This integrated approach ensures the desired results are achieved within the given budgets and timelines, people come through the changes no worse off and the organization as a whole fulfills its strategic mandate. That is accomplished through the work of competent leadership continually dedicating time and effort at addressing the fourth challenge their organization faces – changing the way they change.

The most important competency every organization requires today is the ability to change and evolve to keep pace with the fluid, dynamic global environment. Old habits are no longer up to the task. This integrated approach to leading change builds the necessary leadership skills to help organizations learn how to sustain change successfully.

Follows on from and develops the arguments presented in an earlier Management Decision article ‐ “No such thing as ... a ‘one best way’ to manage organizational change” (Burnes, 1996a). Begins by examining Burnes’ (1996b) Choice Management ‐ Change Management model which, in particular, draws attention to the influence on the choices an organization makes of the context in which it operates. Then moves on to discuss Miles and Snow′s (1978) classification of organizations into four strategic types. From this, argues that the choices an organization makes, regarding what to change and how to change it, will be significantly influenced by its strategic type. Concludes by maintaining that, on the one hand, organizations can create a virtuous circle whereby they can influence or control the circumstances in which they operate through the changes they make and how they make them. However, on the other hand, organizations can find themselves in a vicious spiral of decline and stagnation through an inability to control their own destiny and inconsistent and unsuccessful approaches to change.

Takes a social constructionist view of organizational change focusing on how to engage the multitude of internal and external stakeholders. Argues that current models of change often leave people feeling demoralized and presents appreciative inquiry (AI) as an aproach to organization development that deliberately focuses attention on learning and dialogue about what gives life to an organization. Explains AI principles and the 4‐D model for positive change. Provides some examples of this.

This article reports the results of a study on management development practices in US service and manufacturing organizations. Data and statistical analyses from a sample of 433 middle and front‐line managers from 59 different US service and manufacturing organizations are reported which examined: What specific management development practices are most important from a manager’s perspective to improving their performance in rapidly changing organizations; and, are managers actually getting the development experiences they need to be effective in these organizations? Among the top ten important practices identified by managers as improving their performance, focus, feedback, and learning (e.g. problem solving, new communication and leadership) by experience are re‐occurring themes. The results also point to startling differences between the management development experiences they want and what they are actually getting from their organizations. Based on the data a series of lessons for improving the effectiveness of managers is provided.

Change is often brought about by an organization’s old ways being shown to be ineffective and inefficient in the currrent market environment. For most organizations this is usually found out too late in today’s rapid pace of Internet speed change. Organizations must approach change just as the most successful “techno‐individuals” have, by constantly reinventing and making minor changes, so they are always positioned for the next wave of change in the marketplace. Their workforces then view change as a phenomenon to embrace and not fear. It is normal to change if one is always doing it. Organizations must ask themselves “What do we need to change to be a fierce and flexible force in our marketplace?” “How have we changed this week? How must we change next week?”.

The question of who is in charge of change is often met with confusing answers in changing organizations. That confusion is accompanied with a correspondingly poor ability to sustain change successfully. The purpose of this paper is to outline what is required to sustain constant, complex change and most importantly, who must be accountable.

Drawing on three decades of practical experience helping organizations change, it has become clear that unless a very small handful of groups inside a changing organization see themselves and are seen by everyone else as ultimately in charge of change, the organization will not be successful at sustaining constant change. The paper clarifies who those three groups are and what specific things they need to be accountable for to enable the organization to improve its ability to change successfully.

Many organizations attempt to in source or out source the responsibility for change to “change management” experts which usually leads to dismal results. The three essential groups that actually must own change are the executives, project teams and first level supervisors. Every other group involved plays a support function to those three groups who must be in charge of change.

When executives, project teams and first level supervisors align their efforts using an integrated approach to leading change, an organization significantly increases its capacity for sustaining successful change over the long haul. When an organization relies on external consulting firms, internal support functions or some combination of the two without having accountability for change resting with the three key groups, the capacity for change is compromised significantly.

Although change is a necessary part of organisational life, achieving a successful change is complex. Change readiness is a critical element in successful change implementation, yet studies assessing change readiness as an underlying mechanism in the link between organisational-level factors and successful change implementation are scarce, particularly in the African context. Accordingly, the present study examined the extent to which change readiness mediates the link between learning organisation and successful change implementation in the Ghanaian context.

The study utilized a standardized questionnaire to collect data from 364 participants, working in public and private universities in Ghana. The participants were selected via the convenience sampling strategy to complete the survey on the main variables at a single point in time. The study was purely quantitative, as path analysis – a form of structural equation modelling was employed to test the hypothesized relationships in the study.

The results show that both learning organisation and change readiness facilitated successful change implementation. Finally, it was observed that change readiness served as an important mediating mechanism in the link between learning organisation and successful change implementation.

Change readiness was found to explain the link between learning organisation and successful change implementation. Thus, it is important that managers and leaders of public and private sector educational institutions in Ghana invest resources into preparing and getting employees to accept, be committed to and ready for change.

The present study contributes to the scarce knowledge of the mediating role of change readiness in the link between learning organisation and successful change implementation in the African context.

To provide two possible approaches for enhancing organizational culture awareness and promote cultural change in public sector organization. These approaches include training and leading by example.

Literature outlining fundamental aspects of organizational culture is summarized, serving as a foundation for reviewing the potential value of training as a method for enhancing public managers' awareness of organizational culture. This is followed by an illustrated example of how the culture was changed in major department of a public organization through leading by example.

Training and leading by example can serve as effective methodologies for promoting culture awareness and brining about culture change in organizations.

The article highlights some interesting similarities and differences between cultures in public organizations and cultures in private sector organizations. The differences, in particular, reinforce the importance of training and leading by example to guide public sector employees through the complex dynamics often embodied within culture transformations in organizations.

While there are some important similarities between cultures of private sector and public sector organizations, the differences existing in public sector organization cultures create unique challenges for managers trying to evoke change. The article provides a unique perspective on applying training and leading by example to the context of public sector organizational culture.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a dynamic, multi-faceted and multi-temporal model of organizational change capability (OCC) to better grasp the complexity of this construct which is still mainly defined through its facilitating conditions rather than its own characteristics.

Building on the literature on organizational learning, punctuated equilibrium, continuous transformation, organizational ambidexterity and dynamic capabilities, this paper critically analyzes the OCC construct by challenging the ways it is currently studied.

This paper highlights that OCC contains five dynamically and temporally interrelated dimensions: learning from past change experience, managing continuous change, managing episodic change, managing change without compromising core organizational activities as well as anticipating future change. A set of propositions that link the construct to its facilitators and outcomes are also suggested.

This conceptual analysis shows that recognizing the existence of tensions in change management constructs is crucial to gaining a deeper understanding of the complexities that organizations are facing today. In addition, by proposing a model both in continuity with the literature by adopting a dynamic conception of OCC, but also in discontinuity by shifting the focal point of analysis towards the essence of the construct rather than its peripheral variables, this research takes a step forward to tackle the remaining misconceptions around the interpretation of change capability.

This chapter traces the author's journey of change research from positivism to pragmatism and how different types of “engaged scholarship” shape how we know and do change. It takes readers through the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of different types of research and how these were expressed in studies of planned change interventions, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), cynicism and its consequences, “soul work” and community building in business, organizational transformation, and the development of more socially and environmentally conscious people, purposes, and practices. The paper reflects on the author's research as it relates to regulatory versus radical change and whose interests are and might be served by change research.