The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

—Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead was a philosopher and mathematician, but with that kind of insight on the subject of change, he could have been a CEO. Today’s business leaders have to worry about addressing customer needs in a fast-paced environment impacted by social, economic, political, and cultural shifts. In today’s business environment, the ever-looming presence of change is pretty much the only thing that stays the same.

The problem is, no one likes change.

Change, like the passing of time, is unavoidable

Organizations and their managers have to learn how to anticipate and implement change effectively. Managers need to find ways to overcome their employees’ natural aversion to change, because managing change effectively can mean the difference between staying in business and becoming irrelevant to their customers. The first step in managing change effectively is to understand what change is and where it comes from.

Organizational change is the transformation or adjustment to the way an organization functions. Organizations adjust to small changes all the time, possibly looking to improve productivity, responding to a new regulation, hiring a new employee, or something similar. But on top of these little adjustments we make at work all the time, there are larger pressures that loom over us, like competition, technology, or customer demands. Those larger pressures sometimes require larger responses.

What forces create these changes?

External forces are those changes that are part of an organization’s general and business environment. There are several kinds of external forces an organization might face:

• Demographic. A changing work demographic might require an organizational change in culture. For instance, Avon built and grew their business around door-to-door cosmetic sales, with the stay-at-home wife and mother as their primary front line employee. When more women entered the workforce in 9-to-5 jobs, Avon had to shift gears and find new ways to get their products in front of their customers.
• Social. Changing social trends can pressure organizations into making changes. Consumers are becoming more environmentally conscious, a trend which has pushed fast food restaurants to replace Styrofoam containers with paper. Manufacturers of cleaning products changed product formulas to omit phosphorus and other environmentally threatening chemicals. Tobacco companies have buckled under the changing image of smokers, the dangers of their products, and some have started looking into eCigarettes and other smoking alternatives to stay in business.
• Political. Government restrictions often force change onto organizations. This can be something as simple as a change in minimum wage for employees, or as complex as rules and restrictions governing fair competition in business. For instance, when the Affordable Health Care act was put into place, businesses had to change their operations and put steps into place to confirm that all employees had healthcare coverage to comply with the new law.
• Technology. Still have your VHS player? The founder of Blockbuster wishes you did. Technological changes can make or break a business. Whether new technology is introduced industry-wide, as when the laser was introduced to modern medicine, making surgeries easier and safer; or when it’s introduced to end users, as when consumers stopped renting videos to enjoy the cheaper, more convenient streaming services like Netflix, organizations must change to accommodate new technologies or suffer the consequences.
• Economic. During the 2008 recession, consumers lost their jobs and cut back on their spending. These economic downturns had a major impact on businesses. Banks failed. General Motors and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy. Survival meant adapting to change. Companies like Lego, who experienced stagnant U.S. sales during this time, took the opportunity to build their markets in Europe and Asia. Netflix realized the potential of providing in-home entertainment to families that had cut back their entertainment budgets and grew their subscriptions by 3 million subscribers in 2009 alone. Meanwhile, in the midst of spiking fuel prices, gas guzzling Hummers were no longer en vogue and were discontinued.

Companies can also experience internal forces of change, which can often be related to external forces, but are significant enough to be considered separately. Internal forces of change arise from inside the organization and relate to the internal functioning of the organization. They might include low performance, low satisfaction, conflict, or the introduction of a new mission, new leadership.

Low performance within an organization must obviously be addressed with change that facilitates higher performance. When low performance yields low quality or inefficiencies, customers complain and organizations need to change.

More often than not, these forces of change are outside of an organization’s control, but without exception, they all must be managed if an organization is going to be successful.