This document discusses various paradoxes that arise during organizational change efforts. It presents 12 pairs of tensions or contradictions that change leaders must navigate, such as visible vs invisible changes, planned vs emergent changes, and certainty vs uncertainty. For each tension, it provides a brief explanation of how both sides are important to consider during change. The overall message is that productive change requires addressing contradictory demands and imagining how they can be united creatively rather than seeing them as oppositional forces. Change involves balancing many paradoxes to achieve unusual insights and initiatives.

1. Organizational Change Tensions
How Creativity Can Emerge from Conflict

2. Productive Paradoxes in
Leading Change
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Visible vs Invisible
Planned vs Emergent
Efficiency vs Effectiveness
Episodic change vs Continuous changing
Stability vs Turbulence
Incremental vs Revolutionary
Partial vs Holistic
Consulting vs Commanding
Changing Processes vs Changing People
Pain vs Progress
Requirement for Change vs Readiness to Change
Certainty vs Uncertainty

3. PARADOX
• When two properties that are in tension
are both :
– A large shrimp
– A loose knot
– An anticipated coincidence
YES
NO
YES
MAYBE
• A paradox is an opportunity to imagine
how two “apparently” contradictory ideas
can be “united” in ways that provide both
unusual insights and creative initiatives.
• The Chinese symbol for crisis is made
up of two words. They are pronounced
“wei ji” wei means “danger or peril” and ji
means "opportunity or crucial point.“ So
“wei + ji” equals danger + opportunity.
NO

4. Productive Paradoxes in
Change: Visible vs Invisible
• Organizational change often involves
employing visible resources and actions
to alter invisible attributes (motivation,
desire for excellence, innovative ideas).
• Often that which is visible receives
greater attention than it deserves while
that which is invisible receives less
attention than it deserves.
• Sometimes invisible results may be
more profound than visible results.
• Organization change models seek to
make the invisible, visible by
hypothesizing how the invisible may
work.
More
Important
Less
Important
Process
Output
Visible
Invisible
Input

5. Productive Paradoxes in Change:
Planned vs Emergent
• Organizational change ALWAYS involves two
stages: the anticipated outcomes + planned
interventions AND the unanticipated outcomes
+ the unplanned interventions.
• Effective change requires both the power of
intellect in planning change initiatives and the
power of intuition in responding to change
responses.
• “First stage” emergent outcomes may be
negative – a key decision is whether to
continue or to change our course of action –
success can sometimes initially look like
failure.

6. Productive Paradoxes in Change:
Efficiency vs Effectiveness
• Organizational change wrestles with the
need to both achieve goals AND to do so
with the appropriate economy – almost
always there are some degrees of tradeoff.
• Change management needs to take a
“long” view – the most efficient way to
accomplish something in the short run may
create results that make achieving
effectiveness in the long run more difficult.
• Because “efficiency” involves many
internally controllable factors, while
effectiveness involves many externally
uncontrollable factors, organizations
sometimes focus on efficiency at the
expense of effectiveness .
Effective
Ineffective
Efficient
Celebrate
Investigate
Inefficient
Investigate

7. Productive Paradoxes in Change:
Episodic vs Continuous
• Organizational change involves
both focused targeted change
and change that helps increase
an organization’s capacity to
continuously adapt.
• Organizations are always
changing – the issue is will
those changes be purposeful or
accidental and desired or
undesired.
Desirable
outcomes
Undesirable
outcomes
Purposeful
change
Celebrate
Recalibrate
Accidental
change
Investigate

8. Productive Paradoxes in Change:
Stability vs Turbulence
• Organizations and the people in them
essentially seek the security of stability –
through enforced rules and established
procedures organizations seek to provide the
predictability that both internal and external
stakeholders want.
• For both people and their organizations to
thrive, they must be open to the very
turbulence that is both unpleasant and
resisted.
• Balancing the desire for stability and the need
for change that causes turbulence requires
leadership that is both sensitive and insistent.

9. Productive Paradoxes in Change:
Incremental vs Revolutionary
• Organizational change
involves both small, serial Advantages
changes and large impact Disadvantages
changes – there are
advantages and
disadvantages with both
evolutionary and revolutionary
changes.
• The timing and force factors
are key variables change
leaders must carefully
recognize and diagnose.
Evolutionary
change
Revolutionary
change

10. Productive Paradoxes in Change:
Partial vs Holistic
• Change managers should carefully
consider the breadth and depth of their
planned organizational changes. Both
partial changes of targeted processes
AND whole changes of entire systems
have their advantages and
disadvantages.
• There are some organizational conditions
when partial changes are the only
reasonable course of action due to
various individual, interpersonal and
institutional barriers. Even so, partial
changes should be conducted with the
longer run goal of changing the entire
system if needed.
Partial
change
Advantages
Disadvantages
Holistic
change

11. Productive Paradoxes in Change:
Consulting vs Commanding
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Change managers in many organizations
must play both the role of working WITH
(consulting) and working OVER
(commanding). Time and circumstances
may call for different roles at different
stages in the change process.
Commanding does not have to me
“shoving people around.” Commanding
means to clarify objectives, to make
decisions, to allocate resources.
Consulting means to invite people to think
through the changes that need to be made
and how they may be made in the best
way. Consulting takes time and energy but
may well increase commitment and
communication.

12. Productive Paradoxes in Change:
Changing processes vs
Changing people
• Process changes and people changes are
always interrelated. Changes in the WAY we
do things always impacts WHO does those
things. And, of course, those changes are not
necessarily all positive. Even apparently
necessary process changes may be hindered
by misperceptions and miscommunication.
• It is easier to change processes than to
change people – the former deals with the
logic of how something is done, while the
latter impacts emotions and relationships.
• The way we change processes (command vs
consulting, timing, resource provision) will
impact the receptiveness of people to the
change.

13. Productive Paradoxes in Change:
Pain vs Progress
• The initial steps of any change may be very
painful
– Individuals may be pressured and uncertain
– Relationships may be strained or broken
– Institutional momentum and inertia may result in
conflict and mistrust
• Effective change managers deal with the
inevitable pain of progress by admitting the
reality of the pain while pointing to the
eventual benefits of the progress.
• Change managers cause pain in order to
bring about progress. The absence of pain is
not inherently beneficial nor is the presence
of pain inherently harmful.

14. Productive Paradoxes in Change:
Requirement for change vs
Readiness for change
• Change managers must often encourage
organizational members to change before
they are ready to change – that is the
need for change may not coincide with
the desire to change or the perceived
necessity to make that change.
• Change leadership involves creating a
sense of urgency – a felt need to change.
• It may take some time to create within an
organization both the capability to change
and the commitment to that change.

15. Productive Paradoxes in Change:
Certainty vs Uncertainty
• Certainty and uncertainty arise from
multiple sources –
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Availability of information
Familiarity with the issues
Previous success and failure
The unknowable and the unpredictable (black
swans)
• All change efforts involve degrees of
certainty and uncertainty - effective
change leaders seek to avoid the
arrogance of being overly certain and the
paralysis of being overly uncertain.