Deborah Nystrom
Ron Koller & Deb Nystrom
Ron Koller
Anyhow, the audience was fairly young … many people in the late 20s and early 30s.
And then he said it …
Change management is a relatively new field having only been around for the past 20 years.
Nobody even blinked. It was if they all believed that the illustration below was true … a field with as many leaves as this tree, but with almost no roots.
The problem is that nobody in the room either knew how wrong this statement was or didn't have the energy to correct him.
The reality is that the field of organizational change has been around at least as long as Lewin published his article on Unfreezing-Change-Refreezing in the late 1930s. He wasn't alone. Change management scholars Shaul Oreg, Maria Vakola, and Achilles Armenakis published a 60-year review of organizational change studies in February of 2011. Notice another reference from the 40s:
The real roots of change management look more like this …
