Narrativer i förändringsarbete – Från projekt till Athenas plan

Abstract

Planned changes occur constantly in organizations. Most of these change management projects fail to reach decided goals and have limited impact within the organization. An important prerequisite for anchoring changes is to get people motivated, engaged and to create understanding of the change process. Today we use a number of rational and instrumental methods for change management, which in many cases do not succeed to create the desired commitment to change. Both from a theoretical and a practical perspective, there is therefore a need to investigate whether a more metaphorical and formative approach in the form of a narrative perspective can increase the possibility of success of change projects and anchoring them. In this thesis a narrative approach to change management is investigated. The research question is ”How can we use narratives to engage, motivate and anchor change among employees in organizations?” The thesis describes three action research studies in which narratives have been investigated. The first study deals with a management team in a brass orchestra. The second study deals with a large business and IT project in a multinational automotive company. The third study is about a city office that is about to develop and establish a 24-7 agency on the web. Two different approaches have been tried in the studies. The first is to use narratives as a way to create creativity in their change process. The second is to drive and transform the change management project in the form of a story. The studies show that the narrative approach has had a positive impact on the meaning making process in the groups that was engaged in the change process. There has also been a transformation in the groups, i.e. they have been able to transfer the traditional communication change plan to a narrative context and thus developed a new approach for its change. A result from the three studies is also a practical-oriented change method based on a formative narrative perspective.