Sustainable intentional change

Citation

Boyatzis, R.E. (2006), "Sustainable intentional change", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 25 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmd.2006.02625gaa.001

Sustainable intentional change

Life is change. We adapt to survive or we change to strive. The latter efforts are often toward higher social motives, like wanting to achieve, innovate, help others, or build caring relationships. Some of these desired ends feel basic to our emotional survival. Others raise us to noble purposes and our sense of purpose or calling. These changes can be called “intentional”. Some are conscious and others are not (i.e. autonomic). But they are intentional, and as such are desired and purposeful. Of course, not all change is intentional, some is accidental and some is externally imposed by other people, teams, political systems, or even nature. In such accidental or imposed changes, we decide how will respond. In this sense, our response to the imposed or accidental change is also intentional, or at least is within are ability to treat it as such.

While many of us, as managers, leaders, consultants, or citizens, devote a great deal of time and energy to invoking or resisting change. We thrive in the consequences or withdraw through defensive routines. Hardly a day goes by when we do not have to deal with intentional change or its consequences at every level of our existence, from choices about our individual behavior to our collective action at the country level. And yet, despite its presence in our lives, relatively few longitudinal, systematic studies have been done on change. Some theoretical development has occurred as a result of case studies of individual, team, organizational and country change. But intellectual development beyond case studies is rare. One of the reasons may be the complex nature of change itself.

Complexity theory has given us concepts and a perspective that make it possible to understand change in new ways. First and foremost, it allows us to observe that change, in particular intentional change, most often appears discontinuous. The result has been confusing both in terms of methods of analysis as well as interpretation of the data. But once discontinuity (i.e. the concept of emergence or catastrophic change) is allowed, we can see patterns in how sustainable changes occur. It also provides insight through the concept of tipping or trigger points for the changes. The articles in this Special Issue examine how we can use complexity theory and its component concepts to understand desired change and build a model or theory of intentional change.

Second, complexity theory offered the concepts of strange attractors. This first provided insight at the level of individual change, noting the effects of emotion, perception, behavior, and environmental reactions to the neuro-endocrine processes involved. It helped to provide a basis for linking streams of research from fields as diverse as medicine, biology, neuroscience, psychology, social and industrial psychology, sociology, stress, and philosophy.

Third, complexity theory also provides us with the concept of multi-levelness, or fractals and scale. Papers in this issue look at change at many levels of human, social organization, from the individual to dyads (in coaching) to teams to organizations to countries.

The theory of intentional change introduced in the first article began with work in the mid-1960s on change in graduate management students at MIT. It was further developed in longitudinal research and application in work with alcoholics and drug addicts, and their families, in the 1970s. At the same time, it was being applied and studied in organizational, community, and national change projects in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1980s and 1990s, intentional change theory was the designing concept behind efforts to help leadership and management development. Much of this work was focused on graduate professional students from those in their early twenties to those in their late sixties. In recent years, the group of faculty and doctoral students in the Coaching Study Group at Case have designed and conducted research on ICT in various settings. In this special issue, each of the articles describes results and/or concepts driving current research studies on sustainable, intentional change. We thank the editors of the Journal of Management Development and Emerald for their encouragement and support and the opportunity to offer these papers as part of their University Research Showcase Series.

Before we launch into the articles, we wish to offer a few words about the review process. As with any academic journal, we submitted each of the articles appearing through a rigorous process of peer review. All were originally written for this Special Issue of the journal. Because the articles are aspects of work already in progress, the authors knew others who were experts in the specific areas being addressed. Consistent with a current trend in journals of giving a choice to reviewers to be anonymous or named, the review process was chosen to be open (i.e. not a blind review) intentionally. We believe greater depth and quality of feedback can be made when people know the topic and can exchange critical as well as supportive feedback directly. Each article was reviewed by at least two to five published scholars in the field and at least five accomplished practitioners involved in change efforts at that level. In addition, each article was discussed at an early stage of development of the ideas and after both early and later drafts in a study group at Case Western Reserve University. The process has been exciting, provocative, and exhausting. We hope the reader enjoys the result.

Richard E. Boyatzis