A Structural and Evolutionary Approach to Change Management

Organizational change management is concerned with realizing strategies using models, methods and prescriptions that seek to guide the three key elements of strategic management process: strategic analysis (what is our current configuration?), strategic choice (what is our desired configuration?) and strategic implementation (how to realize the desired configuration?). To address these strategic management issues, this paper presents an evolutionary and structural approach that uses a classification technique (cladistics) and a method from algebraic topology (q-analysis) to identify and understand different organizational configurations, along with the relationships and connectivity (change route) between a current and desired configuration. A simple example data set is used to introduce and describe the cladistic and q-analysis methods. This is followed by an application of the technique to a data set from the automotive assembly industry.