Emergent Insights Integral approach to change management includes recognising and working with several key aspects of changing environments and how people adapt to change. Each of these aspects can be applied separately or together for greater depth of understanding to assess the potential for change, the need for change, and to design effective change management strategies.

Dimensions of Change

Integral theory identifies at least four key dimensions of change. They are the personal subjective, the cultural or inter-subjective, personal behavioural, and inter-objective or systems and institutional dimensions. Change in any one of the dimensions needs to be balanced with appropriate change in the other three, otherwise undue stress, imbalance and eventually overwhelming resistance to change occurs.

Forces of Change

Change occurs for many reasons. Understanding the key drivers of change, the attraction of their intended outcomes, and the nature of the resistance to change is essential for effectively designing and targeting change management strategies and in formulating specific tactics. Another key aspect that is often overlooked under the pressure to change, is an examination of what needs to stay the same and what needs to be included but modified to effectively accommodate change.

Types of Change

Different types of change meet with different challenges and require different change management strategies. Some changes require minor incremental adjustment, while others require a substantial stretch of systems and people to accommodate new functionalities. Another order of change is transformational and fundamentally reorders business processes and systems and the way people identify with, relate to and behave within them. Identifying both the actual nature of intended and unintended types of change that can result from change management strategies themselves, as well as normal operational pressures and dynamics, is essential for effectively designing and targeting appropriate change management strategies.

Change Motivation

Values Intelligence theories like Spiral Dynamics provide frameworks for assessing the openness of individuals and groups of people to different types of change. They also serve to identify the reasoning styles or 'whys' that need to be provided to ensure that an organisation is positively motivated toward the desired change.

These and other aspects of Emergent Insights Integral change management approach go far beyond common approaches in sophistication, making often confusing and frustrating situations understandable, and importantly, workable.

Emergent Insights change management approach draws heavily on Integral Operating Systems and Spiral Dynamics to provide a grounded and comprehensive means for assessing, designing and implementing change management strategies.