This week I am invited to join the discussion of a very interesting company of people announced as 'a diner by the sea: the future of change'.

I have been in the change business for 35 years. The job of a management consultant consists of creating many changes for and with his clients and I have always had a preference for this side of the profession.

Changing an organization is a delightful and Young profession. Delightful, because there are still many variations to the theme, each newly published book may contain yet another “real truth” and the science is still all over the place.

It, therefore, comes down to much practical knowledge and experience as well as personal skill to get a message across in a convincing manner. Such a situation also results in many meetings of the kind I am joining this week. For one never knows how differently change should be dealt with in these times of crisis.

Abundance
Anyone with a clear mind and working experience on a managerial level in an organization of substantial size can say sensible things about change. And in a time that required sharp steering to keep one’s head above water, many understand that change should be dealt with in a different manner from dealing with change in times of abundance.

Right now, in the present, change for many of us means the following:

• be quick and alert
• meetings with stakeholders are shorter and more powerful, less time for extensive procedures and joint decision making
• Being able to bring and actually bring bad news and doing this in a human and professional manner
• “Outside the box” thinking, apply real creativity to find new solutions. For: there is room to actually implement
• Besides cost cutting, also pay attention to growth; after the recession wanting  to be a winner and actually being a winner
• demand visible and concrete leadership
• to narrow the

focus to the “core business” and managing this.

Does this list have anything to do with the future of change?? I don’t think so. Change is actually always determined by the context. Designing the right way to get from A to B always depends on many factors that must be discovered and weighted again and again.

Continuous change
A recession is no more or less than a crisis situation in which many organizations find themselves and in which similar factors are relevant. Yet there remains something to be said about  “the future of change” .

First, a constant factor of our time is that the life cycle of organizations and the way they operate is becoming increasingly shorter. Many organizations are, actually, continuously changing. Although this was something that would be complained about until recently, it is now considered by many as a fact in their working life. People are getting used to it and are getting better at dealing with change.

This means that change is something that takes place constantly and does not just occur in a certain situation that happens only now and again. For change professionals the challenge is to prepare an organization and its employees this fact. “Your work is not just your work, but also the – continuous – change of your work.”

Worn
An second important element with regard to the future of change is involving and coaching of people, ideally all people in the organization. The time that management determines and decides (and such without joint decision making) is gone for good. Terms like employee assertiveness and employee participation have already become worn-out phrases.

The realization that a successful change is a joint change that involves everybody that requires a joint operation, before, during and in retrospect, has become generally accepted. What seems to be lacking in many cases, is how to make this insight work. This involves combining management, the guts to do it together and knowledge of “how to tackle such an issue”.

The “future of change” is about learning to change in this manner by management, support and all those involved inside and outside the organization.