Q1. Referring to a case study in your course work or your own organizational experience, explain sense making approach to change.

Sense-making is consistent with the interpreter image of managing changeas it alerts managers to the different influence that interpretations of change can have. Sense-making is: A social process of meaning construction and reconstruction through which managers understand, interpret, and create sense for themselves and others of their changing organizational context and surroundings (Rouleau and Balogun, 2010, p.955). Sense-making treats organizations as being in an ongoing state of adjustment to changing circumstances (rather than ever being frozen (in a state of inertia). Sense-making rejects the idea of change being able to be managed through a standardised change management program. Standardized change programs do not trigger the drivers for change and are therefore ineffective. Sense-making model provides an alternative approach to the OD school. Weicks (2000) point of departure is to argue against three common change assumptions: The first is the assumption of inertia. Under this assumption, planned, intended change is necessary in order to disrupt the forces that contribute to a lack of change in an organization so that there is a lag between environmental change and organizational adaptation. He suggests that the central role given to inertia is misplaced and results from a focus on structure rather than a focus on the structuring flows and processes through which organizational work occurs. The second assumption is that a standardized change program is needed. However, Weick (2000) says that this assumption is of limited value since it fails to activate what he regards as the four drivers of organizational change. o Animation (whereby people remain in motion and may experiment, e.g., with job descriptions). o Direction (including being able to implement, in novel ways, directed strategies). o Paying attention and updating (such as updating knowledge of the environment and reviewing and rewriting organizational requirements). o Respectful, candid interaction (which occurs when people are encouraged to speak out and engage in dialogue, particularly when things are not working well). These drivers emerge from a sense-making perspective that assumes that change engages efforts to make sense of events that dont fit together The third assumption is that of unfreezing, most often associated with Kurt Lewins unfreezingchangingrefreezing change formula. Unfreezing is based on the view that organizations suffer from inertia and need to be unfrozen. However, if change is continuous and emergent, then the system is already unfrozen. Further efforts atunfreezing could disrupt what is essentially a complex adaptive system that is already working (Weick, 2000, p. 235). If there is deemed to be ineffectiveness in the system, then his position is that the best change sequence is as follows: Freeze (to show what is occurring in the way things are currently adapting). Rebalance (to remove blockages in the adaptive processes). Unfreeze (in order to enable further emergent and improvisational changes to occur). Change agents are those who are best able to identify how adaptive emergent changes are currently occurring, many of which often are dismissed as noise in the system.