Dear colleagues,
A couple of days ago I sent a message to the list and asked for suggestions of experiential activities that I could use to compliment a lecture on change process and Kotter's model. I would like to thank Ranjeet Nambudiri, Elizabeth Christopher, Raymond Sparrowe, Niranjan Janardhanan, Kevin Henderson, Rob Briner, and Michael Johnson for their responses. I have included a summary of their responses below.
Thank you all,
Serena
Books:
1. "An experiential approach to OD" by Brown and Harvey. It has a lot of interesting and useful activities on the subject.
2. "Organization Development: Accelerating Learning and Transformation" by Ramnarayan & Rao. It has several short cases as examples for the concepts put together by multiple authors.
Activities/Simulations:
1. Global Tech Simulation developed by Experience Point<http://www.experiencepoint.com/ExperienceChange>
2. The Change Game from Lewis and Grosser (2012) in JOM (I have been using this activity for several years and it's always been a success)
3. An activity that Elizabeth Christopher has adapted from the Road Game, Elizabeth has kindly shared a detailed description that I have attached to this Email.
4. Change Management Simulation: Power and Influence (https://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cbmp/product/4345-HTM-ENG). Students try to achieve a critical mass of support for their change initiative in a multi-scenario web-based simulation.
5. Human Synergistics' Organizational Change Challenge (http://www.humansynergistics.com/docs/default-source/product-overviews/organizational-change-challenge-sample-pg.pdf?sfvrsn=6). This is similar to various "survival" simulations, in that students rank order change activities, and then come up with a team solution. It looks like this company now has some more change products as well that I haven't tried (Cultural Change Situation and Turnaround,
http://www.humansynergistics.com/products-services/TeamBuildingSimulations/BusinessSeries).
6. BikeStuff Simulation (Keith Rollag and Salvatore Parise, Journal of Management Education, 2005, 29, pp. 769-787). Student teams simultaneously process mail orders while developing and implementing an IT solution to make order processing more efficient.
At the end, I would like to thank Rob Briner for sending the following note and article on the subject: It's probably not what you're looking for exactly, but when I teach change I try to get students to reflect on the huge number of organizational change models there are based on stages (like Kotter's) and the extent to which they are likely to be empirically supported and the extent to which they are useful well-validated prescriptive models that can be used to guide change interventions in organizations.
This is useful review that in fact suggests that in general the evidence for change interventions is so weak that it's pretty difficult to be confident that any of these prescriptions are useful:
Barends, E., Janssen, B., ten Have, W., & ten Have, S. (2013). Effects of change interventions: What kind of evidence do we really have?. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 0021886312473152.
http://www.tenhavecm.com/wp-content/files_mf/barendsetal.2013effectsofchangeinterventionswhatkindofevidencedowereallyhave.pdf
Thanks again for all your suggestions,
Sincerely,
Serena
Serena Golchereh Sohrab, Ph.D., MBA
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour
Faculty of Business and Information Technology
University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Phone: (905) 721-8668 Ext. 5536
Email:
Serena.Sohrab@uoit.ca