Arthur M Freedman

Leading Radical Change in Complex Organizations Arthur M Freedman

It is abundantly clear that organizations in all industries, governmental agencies, NGOs, and military systems must constantly change to survive, if not flourish. The alternative to intentional, disruptive, radical organizational change is decline and death. The necessity for radical change may be either internal or external to organizational systems. Internal causes include changing employee demographics; new technologies, such as in robotics and IT (for example, enterprise resource planning [ERP] and customer relations management [CRM]); new executive management, policies, and strategies; catastrophic industrial accidents (the BP Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez oil spills, for example); defective product liability (such as asbestos and Takata airbags); restructuring and downsizing; and increased costs, outmoded products, and reduced revenues and profits. External causes include new government regulations; deregulation; national and global economic fluctuations (such as inflation, deflation, and stagflation); changing customer and employee demographics, including their interests, needs, and preferences; geopolitical upheavals; natural disasters (Hurricane Katrina, or the offshore earthquake that caused the tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown); increased competition; new markets opening up and historical markets drying up; international monetary fluctuations; and terrorism and massive movements of migrating refugees. Many organizations are confronted by multiple and simultaneous internal and external demands for radical, disruptive, unprecedented, discontinuous change. The intended result is nothing less than organizational transformation. This can be thought of as a system-wide, intensive, and extensive set of changes that enhance organizational performance and improve organizational health, such that these changes (as Bucy, Hall, and Yakola put it), "radically improve the important business drivers, such as topline growth, capital productivity, cost efficiency, organizational effectiveness, customer satisfaction, and sales excellence" (2016).