People-cent­ric Stra­tegic Change Man­age­ment

Course content

In this course, we will critically explore different perspectives of how to work strategically with managing the challenge of transformational organizational change in a modern context. This course will therefore be focusing upon the actual change part - intended or not – in an overall strategic sense under Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA). This focusing upon people-centric and sustainable changes along with organizational resilience. Furthermore, we will dive into the countless challenges and paradoxes that change agents and organizations face when trying to change strategies, organizations, and behaviors alike. Frequently, Simultaneously and Velociously.

This course takes point in 3 basic levels of attention:

1. Developing a concrete toolbox to build and execute change processes, including applied AI experiments (What to do)  

2. Understanding the contextual settings that differentiates each change (Where and Why to do it).

3. Supporting strategic and reflective competencies in understanding people and analyzing change initiatives, paradoxes, and different perspectives (How to do it).

These 3 levels are to be understood as interacting, shaping the actual outcomes and consequences of the change process in question.  

The structure of the course 

We will start out by understanding the original planned and experimental approaches to change, followed by its main successor the generic instrumental approach, where we focus on how each can benefit the management of change in a modern context. Furthermore, we will supplement this by exploring what cannot be captured in these classical and dominant views by bringing in multiple perspectives from e.g., organizational development & culture, middle & top management, neuroscience, emotions, temporality, sense-making & social psychology, power, and complexity theory among others to give a more nuanced picture of managing the multiple challenges of change – and durable workarounds.  

The overall aim is hence to raise the change management practice from a pure planning and project-oriented approach to an overall strategic discipline with a focus upon sustainable changes, people and organizational resilience, that goes beyond the singular change project.

 
The course’s development of personal competences evolves from the 3 levels of attention to support the development of a reflective and context-sensitive change practitioner that focuses on both the change itself and the sustainability of the host organization. However, it also provides inter-personal competencies through its collaborative form and focus since most changes are performed in teams.