Balancing Acts: A Human Systems Approach to Organizational Change

By James Conklin

Balancing Acts offers consultants and managers a simple, powerful way to think about change, and ascribes a four-phase iterative process for implementing change. Reviewing change initiatives from different types of organizations, Balancing Acts confronts the problems and pitfalls head-on that often arise during workplace transitions. Conklin explains why organizational change can be so difficult, and shows that by balancing a set of competing psychological and systemic challenges, interveners will increase their chance of success.

Conklin shows that human groups function as complex systems, and that a change initiative is not a linear progression toward a predefined result. Instead, change is an iterative process that involves a search for feasible and useful solutions. The book's central argument is that while leading or supporting this search, consultants and leaders must balance four critical concerns: confrontation and compassion, participation and observation, assertion and inquiry, and planfulness and emergence.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1487540272
• ISBN13: 9781487540272
• Release Date: October 2021
• Publisher: Rotman-Utp Publishing
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 1.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.2" x 9.1"