scoring abilities should have taken decades or centuries based on past player performance. Through capability and permission, they have changed people’s expectations of what it means to be a great player.
Episodic change
When change is episodic, organizations are inertial and change is infrequent, discontinuous, intermittent, and intentional. Change is driven top down. It is often a new programme of work or a change in strategic direction.
By the time this form of change is delivered, the information about the environment, competition, consumer, customer, and emerging technologies that informed the decision to change are no longer relevant. The world has moved on.
Episodic change is an occasional interruption or divergence from the equilibrium. It tends to be dramatic and driven by external events. Episodic change reflects the failure of the organization to adapt to a continually changing environment.
If the people within the organization have little capability and permission to initiate and drive change, where and when it is needed, change will continue to be reactive to external events.
Sporadic change
If people do not have the permission to initiate and drive change, the capability to do so is worthless. We can’t have one without the other.
When change is sporadic, it takes on a scattergun approach and change is not targeted where it is needed.
We can equip everyone in the organization with the capability to identify, initiate, and drive change so that the organizations can thrive in the face of constant change.
However, if everyone has to ask for permission, the rate of change will happen at irregular intervals in time and in isolated instances. Change will be non-continuous and infrequent.
Emergent change
Without the capability to identify and drive change, giving people permission to do so is pointless. Giving people permission to lead change but not enabling them to do so, will result in a frustrated and disengaged workforce.
Emergent change addresses the need to be responsive and adaptive. Change is constant but without the change capability it will be a fraction of something bigger. It will be messy and inefficient.
Constant change
If an organization is to thrive in the face of constant change, it needs energy and ideas from the whole of the organization. Everyone, at every level in the organization, must be in the business of leading and driving change.
The competitive advantage lays in the ability to constantly change in order to meet the demands of an ever-evolving market, competition, customer and consumer demands, and emerging technology. Everyone in the organization needs to be equipped with the capability and permission to identify, initiate, and drive change.
It is only through constant evolution that organizations will survive.
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