Introducing change

IT HAS been said that the only reality that has not changed is the phenomenon of change. This fact of existence has often been a subject in conversations as well as in written materials. Lectures and references in leadership and management courses always have topics about change. One may also hear parents advising their off-springs to change. Both employees and employers would also wish there would be some change in the business environment; electorates --- in the way their chosen candidates perform their duties as public officials; in schools, in the way their students are taught, --- and a host of other change that is wished for, planned for, in varying degrees of hope and at times, in near desperation.

My first encounter with the seminal book on change was fifteen years ago when Peter Senge’s (with Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts and George Roth) book The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations came out a year and two weeks earlier (March 16, 1999) than when our classes in Witzenhausen began. Witzenhausen is a campus of Kassel University, south of Germany where the Institute for Social Sciences (ISOS) had been set up.