The myth of change management: A reflection on personal change and its lessons for leadership development

Abstract

In this article I reflect upon my own personal learning when faced with significant individual change, leaving a corporate role to start my own business and returning to serious study after twenty-five years of neglect. I look at the relationship between individual and organizational change, trying to reconcile the mechanistic models of change ingrained by years of practice with new insights gleaned from my own personal transition. Implications for change agents include taking a more adaptive and multi-dimensional approach to change, rather than vainly trying to manage it. For people developers it may question the way we develop leaders and managers to cope with change. And all of us may decide we can be better at learning how to embrace perpetual change and perpetual learning as part of the same unpredictable process.