The Change Capacity of Organizations: Interpretations of Five Configurations and Implications for the Practice of Organizational Change (2001)

An article about patterns in the results of the survey. Five configurations are distinguished: innovative change, yearning change, difficult technical change, clumsy change and cynical change.

Comprehensive organizational changes are often complex, and many organizations fail to attain the results they were hoping for. Identifying and defining an organization’s capacity to change – and using that information to intervene in a change process – can be a big help to the progress and completion of change processes. This study on change processes demonstrates the existence of different configurations in the capacity of organizations to change. The article describes and explains the configurations observed, discusses the significance of those findings, and points out the importance of communicating the research results to organizations in change.