Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Evolutionary or Revolutionary Change?

In today’s business environment the challenge continues to be the ability of an organization to change and change quickly. Quick change transformations are critical to meet a demanding client base and tough competition. Baby boomers grew up wanting it “their way” and they bring this expectation to all product and service providers. As a result, change management consultants have been active assisting their clients in managing change. The challenge, however, is not managing change, the challenge is identifying the changes necessary to ensure the organization doesn’t simply survive but thrives.

Organizations face two types of changes, evolutionary and revolutionary. Evolutionary change is change that happens over time to ensure the survival of the organization. Evolutionary change is typically change brought about by either outside pressure or incentives. For example, many hospital and healthcare providers have evolved by transforming their paper medical record keeping to electronic medical record keeping due to external financial incentives. Retail and food chains typical evolve by outside pressure from competition. A new salad offering at one chain of fast food restaurants and invariably a salad offering is picked up by all the others. Whether healthcare, fast food, retail, or a service industry, evolutionary change keeps everyone in the game.

In contrast, revolutionary change occurs when organizations make radical transformations to their product or service in an effort to be on their game rather than simply in the game. These organizations engage in revolutionary transformations at key points of their evolution. Revolutionary change is when the organization anticipates a market change before it happens and views these potential market changes as a business challenge. Amazon is an organization that engages in revolutionary change. The advent of the Kindle was revolutionary to the book publishing and reading world. What was the result? The result was a new market share and increased profit margin. Amazon’s competition quickly engaged in evolutionary change, copying the Kindle with their own version of an electronic reader in order to survive and remain competitive. Amazon is just one example of an organization on their game. There are many other outstanding organizations that engage regularly in revolutionary change. It is revolutionary not evolutionary change that separates the winners from merely the survivors.

Sadly, many organizations are on the precipice of revolutionary change but have resisted initiating the necessary actions to facilitate the revolutionary change. We might look at their leadership. As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments.

4 comments:

  1. thank you for clarifying the example of revolutionary change that was my assignment for organizational design. thanks for saving my life
    suraj(Bangalore)

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  2. Very Excellent writing about topic. Thanks many thanks.
    Asad
    Form
    UK

    ReplyDelete
  3. This was a very good explaination....
    Working on a leadership paper, the change path I needed clarification on.
    Thanks much
    Kavi (WI)

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  4. The methaporical expressions 'Sadly, many organizations are on the precipice of revolutionary change but have resisted initiating the necessary actions to facilitate the revolutionary change.' needs further expansion as it really painted the picture of change dynamics with organization. True, leadership should be torched light upon if it does exist or not.

    Thank you for this painting in words.

    Key phrase here is - 'organizations walking ... on the precipice'

    ReplyDelete