7;Each of the functions can be seen as essential to managing emergent or planned change, however it is the balance of skills and knowledge combined that produce a successful change manager.With these points in mind we then consider organisations and their nature.Organisations – their nature and culture.Organisations are living social organisms, each with its own culture, character, nature, and identity. Every organisation has its own history of success, which reinforces and strengthens the organisation’s way of doing things. The older and more successful the organisation, the stronger its culture, its nature, its identity becomes. They are "communities of people with a mission" (Putman, 1990 in Buchanan and Huczinsky, 1991), not machines. The basic nature of a living social organism is naturally more fundamental, deeper in the hierarchy, and therefore much more powerful than business work processes, financial systems, business strategy, vision, supply chains, information technology, lean manufacturing, marketing plans, team behaviour, corporate governance.All of these phenomena are important. But they are less fundamentally important than the basic nature of organisations as living social organisms. This critically important reality must be where any intervention starts. When this occurs, the intervention has a chance of working. To enable this managers must be able to combine their knowledge of the above systems with response ability. If we look at Figure 1, it demonstrates the fine balance required by a manager to remain agile, allowing him/her to manage a changing organisation whilst taking into consideration the infrastructure of the organisation. Agility is an important skill for a manager to possess, if he/she is able to reach this point then they are more likely to be manage change efficiently.Fig. 1 (Schneider, B. 1997.)Whether a particular change will work or not is related to the extent to which the idea behind it ...
