lists three types of change assumptions: static, dynamic, and dynamical. How would you relate this new knowledge/discovery to what you already know and have experienced? Attached and below are more in

Static Change In the old days, we taught two kinds of change. The first made some simple assumptions: • An object stays still until I move it. • It will stay where I put it. • It will resist. • The amount of resistance will depend on how heavy and smooth it is. • No unexpected or unknown forces work against me. • The direction I push is the direction the object will move. • If I have pushed one object, I’ve pushed them all. This kind of change was understood prior to Newton’s time, and it is very important to some engineering techniques even today. Teachers and textbooks call this static mechanics, and in human systems dynamics we call it static change. Sometimes it is very effective to think about change in human systems as static change. These assumptions are close enough to reality when you’re changing safety standards, physical relocation, illegal or criminal behavior. So change initiatives that share these assumptions are effective for similar circumstances and outcomes. The problem is many of our change practices and consulting interventions hold tight to these assumptions, even when most human systems do not match them anymore. We refer to static change when we talk about applying pressure, overcoming resistance, setting clear objectives, defining the vision, moving beyond current practice, pushing through the period of change. Even getting out of the box is a static change metaphor. None of those things is bad, but they only work when these static change assumptions are a close enough description of the real world. Consider the change strategies and tactics you know about and use. Do you make these static change assumptions? When you do, how well do they work? When do they work? More importantly when and where do they not work?

Dynamic Change The second kind of change inspired Newton and continues to inspire much of modern life today. It is called dynamic change. It makes very different assumptions about the process and objects of change. • An object that is moving will keep moving in the same direction until I do something. • If I know enough history, I can predict the future. EBSCOhost - printed on 10/24/2020 8:03 AM via UNIVERSITY OF CHARLESTON. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Adaptive Action  53 • When I know enough about its beginning, I can predict when and how a change will end. • I don’t control everything, but what I don’t control I can at least understand. • The harder I push the more it will change. • Predictable paths lead to predictable ends. • If I’ve thrown one object, I’ve thrown them all. • I can recognize predictable, sequential, and unavoidable stages of change. This is a great set of assumptions. They won the Olympics, built the U.S. interstate highway system, and got us to the moon. They also form the foundation for most change management theory and practice today, either explicitly or implicitly. Project timelines, milestones, stages of change, strategic planning, getting and staying on track, hitting our numbers and holding momentum are all based on a metaphor of dynamic change. Consider all the change pundits you know or know about. How do their techniques rely on these dynamic assumptions? How do your expectations and the expectations of your clients depend on these same assumptions? How do these assumptions influence your expectations of yourself and your clients? The critical question, though, is when are these assumptions really true of individuals, teams, or organizations? Have you ever seen a real project, a real learning process, or a cultural change initiative that passed neatly through a series of stages, worked exactly like any previous project, or responded only to forces you knew or controlled? Even though the real world doesn’t match any of these assumptions, we talk about it as if it did because (until recently) that was the only way we knew to talk about change. Is it any wonder that our theory and practice of change do not fit the experiences of our clients? Is it any wonder that we are disappointed more than we are affirmed in our expectations for organizational change? Should we be surprised that our clients, or at least our clients’ employees, grow cynical about the most recent “flavor of the month”? Change interventions based on dynamic change assumptions simply will not work in a real world with people who do not act like billiard balls or streams of water from garden hoses. One of our colleagues, an experienced change practitioner shared her experience, which may reflect your own. For many years, she knew that change was not dynamic. She didn’t expect to predict or control the change process. She followed her intuitions to meet clients’ needs, but she always felt a little guilty. She felt guilty because everyone who was supposed to know all of the theories—as well as highpriced consultants—said dynamic strategies were supposed to work. If they did not work with her clients, there must be something wrong with her clients or with her. She, and maybe you, knew there had to be another way EBSCOhost - printed on 10/24/2020 8:03 AM via UNIVERSITY OF CHARLESTON. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 54  G. H. EOYANG to talk about the intuitive change practice that had to break so many rules for it to work so well.

Dynamical Change In the past 30 years, since I taught school in rural Oklahoma, a new kind of change has emerged from many different physical, information, and mathematical sciences. It, too, is a natural form of change and goes by many names: nonlinear dynamics, complex adaptive systems, dynamical systems theory, complexity science, and chaos theory. Each of these titles represents slight technical differences, but all of them deal with unpredictable change. One particular aspect of these new sciences is called dynamical change, and its assumptions are quite different from those for static and dynamic change. • Change is happening at many different levels all around me at the same time. • The levels are connected and influence each other in ways I cannot predict. • A small change in one place can trigger large changes in distant places. • It takes lots of little and middle-sized changes before a big one can happen, but I cannot know exactly how many of which sizes are required or when they’ll come. • When I’ve seen one change process, I’ve seen only that one change process, and each one is unique. • I can never predict the exact time and place and shape of the next shift. • I cannot know all the forces that influence the change. • It looks like nothing’s happening for a very long time, then all at once the change breaks loose. These assumptions may sound very strange, even in relation to natural systems, but they are not. Avalanches, earthquakes, boiling water, tsunamis, chronic illness, climate change, seed germination, melting ice, embryo development, and molecular change are all believed to match these fundamental assumptions. The study of dynamical change is a bit complicated, as you can imagine, because each discipline has its own way of describing and explaining the phenomenon. Depending on who you ask this third kind of change may involve triggers, thresholds, tipping points, activation energies, self-organized criticality, power law dynamics, Pareto principle, inverse log functions, scale-free structures, resonance patterns, or dissipative EBSCOhost - printed on 10/24/2020 8:03 AM via UNIVERSITY OF CHARLESTON. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Adaptive Action  55 structures. What does it mean to say that an avalanche and fetal development are examples of the same fundamental theory of change? They are different in every way, but the processes of change are the same across the board. We like the mathematicians’ label for this process—dynamical change—because it is the most general. When our clients don’t want the technical term—or when they are working in a language where there is no such word—we simply call it “complex change.” These same patterns of dynamical change are perfectly obvious to me in my experiences of individual and collective change in human systems. • Individuals change, teams change, departments change, organizations change and industries change. The change in any affects change in all. • Top-down, bottom-up and inside out influences contribute to change over time. • Tiny changes or rumors can spark revolutions—or not. • When enough people “get” it, peer pressure takes over, and a tipping point is reached. • You cannot step into the same change project twice. • You cannot be sure whether, and you certainly can’t predict when or how, sustainable change will occur. • No matter how diligent you are, you can never know all of the factors that influence change in a particular place or time. • Breakthroughs are the key to all kinds of human change, including learning, innovation, personal transformation, violent conflict, and organizational culture shifts. All these dynamical assumptions match my experience of organizational change, but how many of them are explicitly captured in the theory or theory-driven practice of change consulting? While most contemporary writers have begun to alter their language to accommodate uncertainty and complexity, they often add this as a special case of predictable change. They do not represent it as a radically different theory of change. Even change theories that talk about complexity rarely provide practical advice for supporting dynamical change. Our old practices of change consulting and change management have been good enough in the past, why are they not working now? Why were static and dynamic understanding of change sufficient in the past, but not nuanced enough for today or tomorrow? The underlying conditions of organizations and their environments have changed. Organizational systems are a “close enough” fit for static and dynamic change when the system is bounded, responds to few influences, and has limited interconnections. Under such highly constrained conditions, a person or organization can appear to change in predictable, controllable, EBSCOhost - printed on 10/24/2020 8:03 AM via UNIVERSITY OF CHARLESTON. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 56  G. H. EOYANG old-fashioned, dynamic or static ways. Until relatively recently, communications, corporate structures, homogeneous workforces, local economies, government regulations, and many other factors constrained individuals and groups so that we appeared to change in static and dynamic ways. Now, these conditions have shifted for most people and most industries. We live and work in open systems driven by a multitude of factors and massive interdependencies. As a result, we can no longer rely on dynamic assumptions of stability and predictability. If we will successfully support our clients, we need to more fully understand and support dynamical change.