ESSAY

Clearing the Fog around Organizational Change and Change Management

Change management is often confused with organizational change, weakening its credibility and diluting its focus. Organizational change spans multiple disciplines, while change management specifically helps people adapt to and adopt a change. Expanding its scope risks making it a vague catch-all. Instead, practitioners should focus on guiding the human side of change while collaborating with allied fields. By defining its boundaries and strengthening partnerships, change management can sharpen its identity, increase its impact, and contribute meaningfully to change within organizations.

There’s a persistent fog in the world of change-in-organizations, and it’s a fog that creates real problems for change management practitioners. The terms “change management” and “organizational change” are thrown around as if they’re the same thing. Spoiler alert: They’re not! And this confusion doesn’t just create a bit of mental fuzziness; it undermines the credibility of the discipline, weakens collaborations with other disciplines, creates problems for recruitment and education, and holds back the growth of the field.

The Difference between Organizational Change and Change Management

It’s important to get clear about something: Organizational change is a big tent or umbrella. It includes many disciplines that all contribute to an organization’s ability to change or develop. There is strategic planning (and its partner strategic foresight) in one corner proposing what changes should or could happen, enterprise and business architecture in another corner mapping out how to execute on the strategy and addressing business capability implications, project management managing the execution of defined project or programme initiatives, knowledge management advising on organizational learning and knowledge-retention implications, service design shaping the experiences of one or more stakeholders, and organizational leadership making decisions and overseeing the strategic agenda. Change management? Well, we’re the ones focused on helping people through the process of a scoped change (whether structured or emergent in nature), guiding them to adapt, adopt, and embrace it.

Russell Ackoff’s view of organizations can help us make sense of this. Ackoff saw organizations as having two major systems: operations (the here-and-now of getting things done) and development (the forward-looking, change-driving system). [1] Organizational change overlays on the development system—and change management, as a discipline and knowledge base, lives within it. Change management practice happens in and with the operations system of an organization, but its home base is the development system.

It would make some kind of sense to use the term “organizational development” (OD) as the label for the umbrella covering all disciplines involved in changing an organization. However, that term can be fuzzy in itself, and I have found many change management practitioners to have a strong reaction to being seen as sub-ordinate to OD. A big topic for another essay!

Before we move on, there is another use of the term “organizational change” to clarify. I refer to the use about context – that is ‘a change that happens in an organizational context’. A notion that can becomes clearer when you consider other change contexts, like personal change, industry change, societal change. Arguably change management practice can be applied in all of these change contexts, though it will not come with the role title, Change Manager. For example, a psychologist works in a “personal change” context. There are more uses of the term “organizational change” worth exploring and clarifying – but that’s also a topic worthy of its own essay.

The “Management” Objection

Now, some people get stuck on the very term “change management” (which could be one reason why the term “organizational change” gets used instead). The argument goes something like this: “You can’t manage change; it’s too unpredictable and complex.” Sure, any change process will have complexity. It’s emergent – people in change are a dynamically, evolving reality that is unpredictable. The objection to the term “management” is based on a particularly narrow view of what it means. If we take “management” to mean complete control, then yes, we’re all in trouble. [2]

For example, when we say, “it’s good to manage your emotions,” we understand that we aren’t talking about controlling them like robots. We’re talking about influencing, responding, and guiding them in a useful direction. Management, in its modern sense, is about steering things as best we can, given the messiness of life—or in our case, the messiness of people-in-change. A fuller “management” explanation and exploration I’ll also leave for another essay!

The Dilution Problem – Not Everything is Change Management

Here’s where things start to get sticky. There’s been a growing tendency to expand the scope of the discipline of change management—to roll in all kinds of other disciplines, from strategic planning to design thinking under the change management banner. And while that might sound like a way to boost the field’s profile, it’s actually doing the opposite. By diluting the field, we’re losing what makes it distinctive and valuable.

Change management should focus on change-the-verb—the act of changing, guiding people through the process, helping them transition, and making sure the change sticks. We don’t need to take on the work of figuring out what changes should be made—that’s the job of strategic planning. Nor should we take on the prime responsibility of building the organizational systems to manifest the change—that’s for project management and business architecture and other disciplines to lead.

Warning: This ontological positioning is not to suggest that I am reducing change management to technical work! That would be like saying that architecture is just about drawing blueprints, marketing is about making websites, or leadership is just about giving orders! Change management is about the human side of making change happen—understanding and addressing the emotional, psychological, and social dynamics that arise when people and organizations adapt. It’s about guiding a manageable, sustainable journey, ensuring that the external change isn’t just introduced but embedded in ways that align with people’s real needs and motivations. (And there’s another tangent we could go on here about external and internal change, change vs transition – but that’s for another essay!)

So why is there the push to broaden the field? Some formal change management competency models indicate that change managers need to be skilled in a wide variety of areas. I say we should resist expansion of the discipline. The more the discipline spreads into other disciplines, the more it risks reducing the credibility of being a specialisation. I believe, we need to contract the discipline (not the practitioner – see next paragraph) to a core set of skills: Understanding the people side of changing, tangling with complexity and sense-making, fostering engagement, and ensuring successful adoption or adaption.

The Inter-disciplinary Dilemma

There’s another piece of the puzzle to address here. Many professionals working in organizational change space are inter-disciplinary—they have skill and tools, for example, from strategic planning, project management and change management. And that’s fine, but let’s be clear: Just because someone holds the title “Change Manager” or “Change Lead” doesn’t mean everything they do is change management.

We need to recognise that these are different skill sets (and perspectives), and while someone might wear many hats, they don’t need to muddy the waters by conflating all those disciplines under the label of ‘change management’. A person can be an inter-disciplinary practitioner without diluting what change management practice actually is. It would be fair to say they are an “organizational change practitioner” then, not a “change management practitioner”.

The Woman who Didn’t Belong

This confusion isn’t just theoretical. It’s something I see happening in real life. At a recent event, I was approached by a woman who seemed almost embarrassed as she tentatively told me that she wasn’t sure if she belonged in the room. She wasn’t sure if she was a “real” change manager.

As we talked, it became clear that she was right. She wasn’t in change management—she was working in business architecture and strategic planning, focused on shaping the ‘what’ of organizational change, not the ‘how’. She had been wrestling with this feeling of not fitting in for some time, and when I explained to her the difference between change-the-noun and change-the-verb, she sighed in relief. She said, “This has just changed my world,” and thanked me for clarifying what had been gnawing at her for so long.

The problem is, when people are unsure where they fit in the “change space”, they often default to thinking they must be in change management. Why? Because we haven’t done a good enough job of defining and positioning our field – particularly in contrast to a term that seems synonymous. We need a clearer conceptual map, and we need to explain it well—not just for ourselves, but for those in the organizational change ecosystem who work with and alongside us, and those who seek to engage our services.

The Collaboration Opportunity with Change-the-Noun Practitioners

Here’s where we can make a powerful impact. A key principle of human-centred change management is to help people feel they have ownership, influence, and agency in the change process. This means that we need to work collaboratively with those who are dealing with change-the-noun—the strategists, the architects, the planners, the designers.

When we consult people, ask for their feedback, and invite them to co-design or test changes, we’re giving them a stake in the outcome as well as the process. It transforms their experience from one of being “done to” to being “done with.” The difference is huge. Instead of triggering resistance and friction, we’re far more likely to see engagement, enthusiasm and smoother adoption.

That said, there are times when change-the-noun isn’t negotiable—compliance requirements are a good example. However, even in those cases, there’s still room to give people a voice in how the change happens. Maybe people can influence how the training is delivered or what specific support they’ll value during the transition. Change management is about finding those opportunities to make changing feel less forced and more like a shared meaningful experience.

It is also good for us to know something about these fields so we can better collaborate across disciplinary lines – just like a diplomat knows the language and customs of a foreign country in which they serve. However, we can’t and shouldn’t claim to represent a space in which we have little expert knowledge, qualifications and no remit. (I reckon there’s a whole other essay on this topic too!)

The Challenge with Words

Even writing this essay, I’m reminded of how slippery words can be. Take the phrase “to implement the change.” Depending on your perspective, that can mean building a system, executing a project, or guiding people through adoption. Does “implementation” mean change-the-noun (the thing being built), or change-the-verb (how we help people embrace it)?

This ambiguity in language and the underlying concepts, is at the heart of many of the ‘knowing’ problems we face in the change management field. Without better ways to talk about what we do, and be in meaningful discourse with allied practitioners, we’ll keep encountering misinterpretations and credibility issues.

An Invitation to a New Way Forward

So, where does that leave us? I believe we start by clarifying a conceptual map (aka ontology) of change management. Starting with the focus that it’s to manage the process of change, to help people transition through changing, and to make sure the changes made stick. Let’s not dilute our speciality work by trying to do everything. At the same time, let’s not build silos. We can—and should—collaborate with other allied disciplines while also embracing our speciality.

This is a valuable conversation for the change management field if it is to grow and mature. What would you do next?

[1] Ackoff, R. L. (1999). Re-Creating the Corporation: A Design of Organizations for the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

[2] Looking at the origins of the word ‘manage’: The root of “manage” can be traced back to the Latin word “manus”, meaning “hand”, where managing originally involved handling things directly with one’s hands – doing hands-on work. By 16th century, the term had taken on a wider range of meanings in English, including directing, controlling, conducting and supervising various activities. https://www.etymonline.com/word/manage