"…rigid hierarchies like the one you grew up in are lousy at dealing with change"
Martin Springfield in Charles Stross‘ Singularity Sky(Amazon.com).
Change is difficult. Uncertainty makes change even harder. Catherine Edwards and Graham Walton suggest that to manage change you need "an atmosphere of openness, good communications, clear vision, leadership and training engenders good change management and this involves the issue of management style. Consultation, communications, transparency and informality minimise fear and suspicion; staff resent the sense that changes are imposed on them and that they are powerless – they need to be involved. They need to understand the rationale behind decisions which are being made". Achieving this environment can be extremely difficult in a hierarchical organization.
I wonder how in an organization with a hierarchical decision making structure to successfully implement large scale change. Peter Senge offers that we need to think of change as growing something and rather than just "changing". This might be tougher, because this requires an organization to take a long view of itself, not the quarterly or annual planning cycles we live through. The inertia of an organization might be too much to move. This must be why pockets of innovation occur in companies, ala PARC being able to create the Star and Xerox being unable to captialize; and the need for smaller organizations for innovations (startups). This works for private entities, I wonder does it work for larger institutions, e.g., government or universities. While DeVry and the University of Phoenix are growing do we expect them to subplant traditional universities? Is change really an imperative if the university will continue to receive government funding even if it is unable to adapt or change?