Dynamics of Change – Rock Around the Clock
Contents
Dynamics of Change – Rock Around the Clock
Compliance and corporate social responsibility, skills shortages, changing demands of Millenials and other sociological cohorts (Gen X,Y,Z), significantly changing power and market relationships, digitalisation, rock‐around‐the‐clock globalisation and disruptive technologies are creating disruptions in established processes and business models. Multiple logics and multiple goals generate internal contradictions; these grow exponentially and increase in intensity. Organisation, leadership and consulting respond with structural adaptation and even more fluid arrangements: with agility, scrum, diversity, new work, post‐bureaucracy, flat hierarchies and workship; with design thinking, lean start‐up and lean strategy, rapid prototyping and customer‐oriented innovation; change of a higher order, organisational rebellion, ambidexterity, simultaneity and inclusion of extremely contradictory process and communication cultures are – for now – all the rage!
Thus, the difference between the environment and the internal constitution of organisations appears increasingly fragile. Internal complexity and uncertainty are increasing as a result of influences and uncertainties that are being processed internally in a quasi‐professional manner – to the best of knowledge. At the same time, the pressure of expectations on companies regarding their goals and purposes is increasing, and leadership is overwhelmed by the discrepancy between its own doubts and the role expectations. Leadership is supposed to radiate certainty especially where it knows about the uncertainties, and management is characterised by professional ignorance. (Weick, 1985, 315, 341).
Consequently, the main thrust of established leadership and management literature, consultancy and their practice is to react to structural changes and accelerated speeds of change with structural adjustments and even more fluid arrangements. (e.g. Exner & Exner, 2017; 2018). In their joint practical implementation, leadership and consultancy advance the further fluidisation of organisations – together they push the flywheel of change again and again. And with an ever‐increasing number of strokes, they simultaneously generate the acceleration of their own environments in their cooperation. – Always in the hope of running before the wind which was generated by their own activism.
Hans Rusinek (2021) describes »the tirade of the disruptive future in the world of work« as omnipresent. Change is reverently passed around like a blessed object and has such radiance that it is time to bring it into the light of theology. »Luxuriant in pomp and austere to heretics are the liturgies of change: when there is preaches of the trinity of transformation, revolution, and disruption there’s worship and no discussions. … Then we experience … the type of change manager who can unquestioningly change and turn off pretty much everything that might have been good: clear career paths, stable workplaces, a common concern. The hymn of change breeds fearful compliance.«
