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Realising changes in organisations requires investment in terms of time and money, but most important in terms of people's attention, reflection and energy to do things differently. Not everybody will accept the intended changes with the same level of willing. People are busy, are more or less content with the way things go or have other priorities. In other words: change is not happening only because someone says it should happen. People change (their habits or working methods) because they believe in the necessity. Because they feel the sense of urgency.
That sense of urgency is not equally clear for everyone in the organisation.
The crucial activity in change is to induce people to do things differently. In most cases this means also a change in organisational culture: in values and norms and in habits and working methods they once developed and agreed to. Culture is a powerful force in the organisation. If the intended change follows naturally the way people are used to do their job, then the characteristics of the organisational culture can be used completely. But if the intended change requires new cultural aspects, then the change will be more difficult to realise. Not because the workers are on beforehand unwilling, but because a change of the organisational culture will fail if it is only based on a declaration of intent. If compelling reasons to change are lacking, then a relapse in old habits is most likely.
Organisational culture can be considered as the personality of the organisation. Like in the case of someone's personality, one can change some aspects of behaviour, but structural changes are far more difficult to obtain and require deep investments. Far reaching changes are only feasible if people feel the urgency to change. (Comparable with psychotherapy: clients can only bear the burden of a therapy if they consider the burden of their suffering heavier.)
An example of a change like that is the change over to market oriented working methods, a process of conversion for a lot of institutions in the non-profit sector in Western countries. Being market oriented requires another attitude. Concepts like price quality ratio, measuring output or getting the targets are abominations to those workers in the non-profit sector who work with their clients (or on a topic) from a feeling of solidarity. Such workers can only be motivated to change their working methods if they have a sense of urgency, for instance because the survival of the organisation is at stake.
Far reaching changes need a clear external necessity. The management (or the change agent) has to make visible and perceptible that change is needed in order to survive.
Sometimes such an external necessity is clearly present. For instance because the subsidy is reallocated or finished, because the clientele is changing or because of an increase in complaints.
The existence of a necessity to change may be clear for the change agent, but sometimes it has to be made visible and perceptible for other people as well. Sometimes it is needed to look for changes in the outside world that can act as motivators for changes inside the organisation.
One way of doing it is benchmarking. Benchmarking is a method of investigation in which products or services are compared with those of another (peer or competitive) organisation. Benchmarking can reveal the (lack of) quality of the own organisation, in comparison to similar organisations. Such results can mean a threat for the future, certainly if competition will play an important role in the future. So benchmarking can help prove that performance should improve (in order to keep joining) and that it can improve (others can do it, so why don't we?)
Sometimes the external necessity is caused by changes in the outside world, may it be a threat or an opportunity.
Some institutions are able to change by seizing opportunities. An organisation for instance seizes the opportunities to change its profile thereby promoting the stream of a new segment of the market. Or an organisation develops in a relatively simple way a new supply and puts it on the market that seems ready for it (a training preventing work-stress for example).
Other organisations are more likely to be motivated by rising threats: aggressive competition, decreasing profits, threatening reduction. External threats, like increasing competition or decreasing subsidy are not always experienced as the most powerful motivating stimuli. The first reaction to such threats is rather anger, defence or paralysis. The skill of the change agent is to bend such (understandable) reactions to external threats towards a certain level of enthusiasm. For instance by showing that such a threat can offer new perspectives. For example: a situation of intensified competition offers the opportunity to concentrate more than before on the own core competence.
Finally: the urge for change can be underlined by pointing to relevant trends and developments. We mention some examples of trends that can stress the external necessity for the introduction of gender specific health care: