Organisation
Driving change: why the same approach does not work everywhere
Building an organisation and changing one look similar, but they are two different crafts. When you build, you add something that was not there. When you change, you have to let go of or revise something that already stands, including the habits, interests and sensitivities that have grown around it.
That explains why so many changes stall. Not because the plan is wrong, but because the way it is introduced does not fit the situation.
There is no single right way to change
Dutch change scholars Leon de Caluwe and Hans Vermaak brought order to this. Their core message is liberating: there is no single right way to change. There are five, and they differ not in technique but in what they assume about people. About why someone starts to move.
They gave each a colour, so you can talk about it without falling into jargon.
Yellow: people move when their interest moves
Yellow sees the organisation as a political arena. You change by bringing interests together, forming coalitions and pooling power toward an achievable goal.
Strong where real opposing interests exist and nothing moves without support. The trap is endless negotiation while nothing substantive changes.
Blue: people move when the outcome is fixed
Blue is the world of the rational plan. You define a clear result in advance and deliver it through project management, with milestones and measurement points.
Strong for bounded, predictable questions. The trap is that resistance, emotion and chance get organised away, when those often determine the real work.
Red: people move when something is offered in return
Red persuades through the instruments of people management: rewards, recognition, attention, career prospects. The underlying idea is an exchange.
Strong for motivating and retaining people. The trap is assuming everything can be solved with a reward.
Green: people move when they learn something new
Green equates changing with learning. You put people in situations where they develop new behaviour through reflection and feedback.
Strong for lasting change in behaviour and culture. The trap is time: it takes long, and it falls short where there is hard conflict or a deadline.
White: people move on their own, if you let them
White assumes everything is already in flow. Change is a self-organising process in which you mainly remove blockages and use the energy that is already there.
Strong in turbulent situations with plenty of initiative. The trap is that too little direction remains.
Worth knowing. The authors have become steadily more careful with their own model. In the first edition the colours were streams to choose from. Later they called them beliefs. Now they present the colours as social constructions to play with, precisely to stop people from putting themselves or their colleagues in a box.
War colours and peace colours. De Caluwe draws one more distinction that explains why some combinations clash. He calls yellow and blue war colours: both assume steering imposed from outside. Red, green and white are peace colours: they assume movement coming from within. Yellow and blue combine well, and so do green and white. The widest gap sits between those two groups.
What decides which approach fits
None of the five is better than the others. They are tools. Which one fits depends on four things: the situation, the goal, the client, and the change agent.
That last one is often forgotten. Everyone has a preferred colour they reach for too easily, and usually one they are allergic to. Anyone who looks at every question through the same lens gets resistance they do not understand.
A reorganisation asks for something different than a cultural shift. The first benefits from a tight plan, the second from room to learn. Swap those two and you get stuck.
How deep does the change reach
Alongside the question of how you change is the question of how deep. Not every change reaches equally far.
First-order change takes place within the existing frame. You do the same thing better, faster or cheaper, without questioning the rules.
Second-order change does touch that frame. The underlying assumptions, structures and rules get revised. That is real transformation, and immediately more uncomfortable, because the familiar footing disappears.
Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch described that distinction in 1974: first order is variation within a system that itself remains unchanged, second order changes the system itself.
Argyris and Schon added a related layer in 1978 with single-loop and double-loop learning. Do you learn within your assumptions, or do you learn to question the assumptions themselves? That is not a development of Watzlawick but a parallel track that lines up remarkably well.
Bartunek and Moch added a third order in 1987: developing the capacity to renew yourself again and again. Learning how to learn.
A connection that helps, but is not a law. Blue leans toward the controlled first order, while green and white fit the deeper second and third. That is useful to think with, but De Caluwe and Vermaak never tie their colours strictly to these levels. Doing so makes the model more certain than it is.
The question to ask yourself
The model is not a recipe. It is a way to have a conversation that otherwise does not happen.
When a change stalls, the first question is rarely whether people should work harder. More often it is: which colour are we actually using here, and does it fit what is going on?
A team that does not understand resistance is often using blue on a green question. A board that feels nothing is moving is sometimes using white where yellow is needed.
That conversation costs an hour. The change underneath costs months. It pays to keep that order.
Sources
- De Caluwe, L. and Vermaak, H. (1999). Leren veranderen: een handboek voor de veranderkundige. First edition; second edition 2006, a third revised edition has since appeared.
- Watzlawick, P., Weakland, J. and Fisch, R. (1974). Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution. New York: Norton.
- Argyris, C. and Schon, D. (1978). Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
- Bartunek, J. and Moch, M. (1987). First-Order, Second-Order, and Third-Order Change and Organization Development Interventions: A Cognitive Approach. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 23(4).