Understand the 12 distinct types of organizational change and how they align with your organization's mission and vision. Learn how identifying the appropriate type of change informs planning, stakeholder engagement, and communication strategies.
Key Insights
- Organizational change can take many forms, including transformational, incremental, developmental, remedial, and structural changes such as mergers or rebranding.
- Identifying the specific type of change helps clarify how it aligns with the organization’s overarching mission and vision.
- Successful change management requires a well-developed plan that involves stakeholders and ensures consistent, organization-wide communication.
This lesson is a preview from our Federal Change Management Certificate Program . Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Let's talk about the different kinds of organizational change that exist. We have 12 of them, and we'll talk about strategies for developing your change plan, involving your stakeholders, and making sure that you have an organization-wide plan for communicating the change.
So we begin with the 12 kinds of organizational change, and you will see that there are so many of them with really minute differences between them, and some significant differences between them. Transformational change, as opposed to incremental change. Developmental change would be that process improvement opportunity we talked about before.
Remedial, very similar to that, problem-solving, and process improvement, as well as processes and systems, people and cultures, mergers, demergers, downsizing, relocation, and rebranding. So the question that you might have is, why do we have 12 different kinds of organization, and what is it that I really need to know about all of these labels? So the take-home for you is that we've talked a lot about vision and mission, and this connects to your vision and your mission. The reason you care about identifying the kind of organizational change you're proposing or you're going through is that this gives you clues about what your vision is and what your mission is.
You remember that the mission has to connect to the mission of the organization. So change mission equals organization mission. So if you build on that, then you're also thinking, okay, if we want to make sure we are agile as an organization, that we can adapt to changing times and stick to the mission, what kind of change will it take us in order to do that? Does it have to be transformational, as in fundamental shifts in everything we do? Or is it incremental? Those are the clues you take from what you need to do, and that feeds into how you articulate that mission, that vision, which ultimately feeds into how you explain it to everybody that you're working with.
