Hitt W, (1996) and Peters T & Waterman R, (1982) argue that global environmental pressures require todays organisations

to adopt and commit to the principles of: Excellence striving for the highest standards possible commensurate with available resources and the needs of all stakeholders and Self-Renewal - creating a framework which facilitates continuous innovation and rebirth so that the organisation is able to adapt to a continually changing environment. In fact the only constant feature of contemporary corporate life is change itself. Change will must and should occur, change needs to be viewed as a challenge for organisational managers and leaders, the way a group or an organisation responds to an attempt to change has an important effect on how the change occurs. (White K M, 1998, p 179) Duck, (1993) states that: Managing change in an organisation isnt like operating a machine or treating the human body one ailment at a time. Both of these activities involve working with a fixed set of relationships. The proper metaphor for managing change is balancing a mobile [] Managing these ripple effects is what make s managing change a dynamic proposition with unexpected challenges. (Duck, 1993, p. 110, 115) (Marquis & Huston, 2000) argue that initiating successful change programmes requires well-developed leadership and planning skills as the failure to reassess goals proactively in the light of changing organisational needs will result in misdirected and poorly utilised fiscal and human resources. This in turn will provide a stressful as opposed to stimulating and challenging working environment. Not only must leader/managers be visionary in identifying where change is needed in organisations, but the must be flexible in adapting to change they have directly initiated or have been indirectly affected by. (Iles & Sutherland, 2001) differentiate between planned and emergent change. Planned change is the result of conscious reasoning resulting bounded in rational decision making with the aim of making an identified change in culture in the organisation and/or change in the operating environment. Emergent change on the other hand is change, which occurs in a spontaneous apparently unplanned manner. (Proehl, 2001) suggests that emergent change can result in the following situations, which emphasise the systemic nature of change:
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where managers and other actors make a number of decisions apparently unrelated to any specific change issue(s) and then find that part of the organisation or its environment have changed in some way. Thus, change is emergent rather than rationally planned, however, such rationality may be embedded in tacit beliefs and assumptions concerning the culture and therefore may be not be as unrelated as they first seem. Such cultural assumptions focus the direction of the change process by drift enhanced by the detailed and dynamic complexity (Senge, 1990) inherent in contemporary systems, rather than by design; and where external factors (such as the economy, competitors behaviour, and political climate) or internal features (such as the relative power of different interest groups, distribution of knowledge, and uncertainty) influence the change in directions outside the control of managers. Even the most carefully planned and executed change programme will have some emergent impacts. Thus, it is important that change agents recognise that whilst change efforts will consist of logically rationally planned elements these will be influenced by emergent components. This highlights the importance of surfacing mental models and questioning underlying cultural assumptions, which bound decision-making within organisations and recognising that even the most carefully planned change efforts will be effected by systemic elements beyond the control of organisational managers and leaders. Ackerman (1997) differentiates between, developmental, transitional and transformational change. Developmental change is essentially concerned with error detection and corrections and focuses on incrementally changing components of organisational culture such as process improvement or skill development but does not in itself question the underlying cultural assumptions and beliefs. Transitional change is the focus of much of the literature and research (Lewin, 1951; Lippitt et al, 1958, Havelock, 1973; Kanter, 1983; Beckhard & Harris, 1987; Nadler & Tushman, 1989), and is rational approach to change management which goes beyond simply error detection and correction, in seeking to identify the cultural differences between the current state (the status-quo) and a known (identified) desired (future) state. The change effort is focused on developing strategies, which move the organisation (client system) in a

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direction, which is increasingly satisfying to its stake-holders (Burke-Litwin, 1992), in which mental models underpinning cultural beliefs and assumptions are surfaced and questioned as the basis of organisational learning and development (Senge, 1990). Transitiational Change has its foundations in the work of (Lewin, 1951; Lippitt et al 1958) who conceptualised change as a three-stage process involving: Unfreezing the existing organisational equilibrium, moving to a new position, and refreezing in a new equilibrium position. In his 1987 work on process consultation Schein (1987) built on Lewins (1951) work in suggesting that Unfreezing is concerned with; disconfirmation of expectations, creation of guilt or anxiety, provision of psychological safety that converts anxiety into motivation to change. Moving to a new position is achieved through cognitive restructuring, often through: identifying with a new role model or mentor and/or scanning the environment for new relevant information, building a new mental model and testing this in relation to exiting cognitive structures (mental models), Refreezing occurs when the new point of view is integrated into: the total personality and concept of self and into significant relationships. Transformational change is radical nature. It requires a shift in assumptions made by the organisation and its members. Transformation can result in an organisation that differs significantly in terms of structure, processes, culture and strategy. It may, therefore, result in the creation of an organisation that operates in developmental mode one that continuously learns, adapts and improve and exists in a symbiotic relationship with its environment (Pedler et al, 1996, Iles & Sutherland, 2001). Such an organisation will have developed the ability to adopt a systems thinking perspective (Senge, 1990) as the basis for engendering learning at individual, team and organisational levels on which such transformations are based. Today, systems thinking is needed more than ever because we are becoming overwhelmed by complexity. Perhaps for the first time in history, humankind has the ability to create far more information than anyone can absorb, to foster far greater interdependency than anyones ability can keep pace with. [.] Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing the structures; that underlie complex situations, and for discerning high from low level change. [] Systems thinking is the antidote to the sense of haplessness that many feel as we enter the age of interdependence. [] I call systems thinking the 5th discipline because it is the
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conceptual cornerstone that underlies all of the [other] learn disciplines, [Personal Mastery], [mental models], [shared vision], [and team learning]. (Senge, 1990, p.69) Other researchers (Argyris & Schon, 1996) label such learning as triple-loop or organisational deuterolearning, which results from the structuring of organisational inquiry to consciously facilitate the simultaneous single loop (error detection) and double loop (assumption testing) learning. This is synonymous with consciously undertaking developmental and transitional change (Ackerman, 1997) so that organisations consciously facilitate the ability to develop sustainable strategies for development which (Pedler et al., 1996) argue will lead to organisations being able to adaptively create their contexts.

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