The Use of Open System Approach in Managing Change Essay

The Use of Open System Approach in Managing Change - Essay Example It is to be noted that many changes are exciting, leading to new opportunities and challenges. When these changes occur too rapidly or demand too much of the individuals passing through the process of change, they can make individuals very uncomfortable (Heward, Hutchins, and Keleher, 2007, 170-178). Everyone has own assumptions about how organizations work, developed through a combination of experience and education. The use of metaphor is an important way in which one expresses these assumptions. Some people talk about organizations as if they were machines. This metaphor leads to talk of organizational structures, job design and process reengineering. Others describe organizations as political systems. Researchers have works on organizational metaphors, which are good starting points for understanding the different beliefs and assumptions about change that exists. Metaphors are important in the sense that this provides opportunity to think and deepen the understanding. Deep understanding allows, in turn, seeing things in new ways and consequently acting in new ways. One such metaphor is seeing organizations like an organism. This metaphor of organizational life sees the organization as a living, adaptive system. This suggests, that different environments favour different spec ies of organisations based on different methods of organising (Rowe and Hogarth, 2005, 396-405). When the organisation is conceived as a living, adaptive system, congruence with the environment is the key to success. According to this metaphor, in stable environments a more rigid bureaucratic organization would prosper. In more fluid, changing environments a looser, less structured type of organization would be more likely to survive. This metaphor represents the organization as an 'open system'. Organizations are seen as sets of interrelated sub-systems designed to balance the requirements of the environment with internal needs of groups and individuals. This approach implies that when designing organizations, we should always do this with the environment in mind. Emphasis is placed on scanning the environment, and developing a healthy adaptation to the outside world. Individual, group and organizational health and happiness are essential ingredients of this metaphor. The assumption is that if the social needs of individuals and groups in the organization are met, and the organ ization is well designed to meet the needs of the environment, there is more likelihood of healthy adaptive functioning of the whole system (Weiner, Amick, and Lee, 2008, 379-436). Thus it is apparent that there is no one best way to design or manage an organisation. Like in a organism, in such an organisation, the success of its functioning would depend on the transmission of information between different subsystems, and as has been mentioned earlier, the unhindered communication and exchange with the environment would determine its efficiency. Thus, as an organism, the homeostasis is the key. By homeostasis, it means the organisation would tend to maximise the fit between individual, team, and organisational needs. Therefore, it emerges that if one decides to manage the change in such an organisation, rather than using internal focus, changes are made only in response to changes in the external environment. The interaction between an organism and its