Can change be managed?

For over a century, organisations have been treated as machines. Although complicated, they can be broken down, optimised, and controlled.

Taylor’s Scientific Management (early 1900s) reduced work to discrete, measurable tasks, prioritising efficiency. Ford’s assembly line (1913) standardised production, reinforcing the idea that organisations function best through rigid structures and control.

This thinking continues today, and still underpins most traditional change management models.

In a complicated system, you can break work into steps, apply linear models, follow ‘best practices’, and achieve predictable outcomes. Here, change can be managed.

But today’s organisations aren’t complicated.

They’re complex.

They aren’t machines. They’re made up of people – constantly adapting, responding, and influencing each other in unpredictable ways. They exist in volatile, uncertain, and chaotic environments.

In complex systems, change is emergent, not linear. Inputs don’t determine predictable outcomes.

So in complex systems, you can’t manage change.

You can only facilitate it by:

• Creating conditions where change can emerge

• Running safe-to-fail experiments

• Amplifying what works and dampening what doesn’t

• Focusing on sense-making and adaptation, not control

We’ve spent decades believing change can be managed. But what if real progress comes when we stop trying to control it – and start enabling it?

What do you think? Have you seen change managed successfully in a complex system?

A great read on this topic: It's Not Complicated: The Art and Science of Complexity in Business.