Using Intentional Change Theory, a series of programs were designed by Case Western Reserve University for the top executives at Fifth Third Bank to develop leaders. Typical approaches to leadership development do not produce sustained, desired change -- the impact atrophies over three weeks to three months. This occurs because most leadership development programs do not address the requisite behaviors required to facilitate better relationships at multiple levels in the system surrounding the organization. Based on 30 longitudinal studies with M.B.A.s and executives, the first program focused on emotional and social intelligence competencies needed to build resonant relationships. Interacting in resonant relationships activates the parasympathetic nervous system and stimulates neuroendocrine, behavioral, and relational renewal. As a result, people are more cognitively, perceptually and emotionally open to possibilities, learning and change. In the second program, executives learned to engage others in developmental conversations aimed at inspiring behavior change and through action learning projects. This helped to convert individual and dyadic learning into team, organization and community change through positive emotional contagion. Three stories will illustrate the impact. Mary Tuuk moved from corporate staff as chief risk officer to president of an affiliate, a community leader, and personal renewal. Bob Shaffer found mind-body-heart-spirit balance, energized the audit unit of the Bank, enhanced loving relationships with his family, and lost 95 pounds in the process. Paul Moore took over all of operations and is stimulating a new level of service, engagement, and a stronger role for the bank in the community.

When the world witnessed the murder of George Floyd in 2020, my classmate sent a message to our small group text: “I feel so conflicted on how to be involved. I want to push forward and protest, but it feels foolish to squander the opportunity to practice medicine, where I can have a greater impact for Black communities.” This sentiment summarizes a hindrance to many medical students—we are held to nebulous standards of professionalism that prevent us from speaking our minds because we know that a violation can have devastating career consequences. I posit that the frustration felt by many of us is a harnessable form of energy.

From tightening lead regulations in the 1970s to helping prevent nuclear war during the Cold War, physician activism courses throughout the history of medicine. As current events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter movement, and Anti-Asian Hate protests continue to highlight inequities affecting the health of our patients, my fellow medical trainees and I feel increasingly compelled to take action. For instance, after a classmate and I noticed few photographs of skin of color in our dermatology curriculum, we worried that this could unintentionally exacerbate health inequities for patients of color. Consequently, with the support of our director of culturally responsive health care education—and after months of work—we made the following additions to the dermatology curriculum: a skin of color textbook, a lecture on skin of color conditions, and skin of color photographs in lesson plans and exams.

Medical school for many students is a further step to greater changemaking. A new trainee will be exposed to a parade of potential role models, such as leaders in education, accomplished researchers, and those dedicated to clinical and community service. Students are often encouraged to select from the standard leadership areas above. Yet, just as there are many medical specialties, there are many changemaking modalities, and new trainees will benefit from early and broad exposure rather than foreclosing on those first identified or commonly found. Although less frequently mentioned in mainstream medical education, physicians across the country create change through entrepreneurship, holding political office, partnership with industry, and grassroots nonprofits, to name a few. For trainees who find themselves called to make change on issues they feel passionate about, finding the right combination of changemaking modalities can be crucial to both the impact of their efforts and personal satisfaction in their work.

To accelerate the energy transition and achieve the needed large-scale transformation to address climate change, different barriers including lock-ins and path dependencies, incumbent power structures and changing individual and collective norms, values, and behaviors around energy need to be addressed. In the face of these challenges, citizens are beginning to play a bigger role in the transformation of the energy system. For example, they are becoming prosumers (energy consumers who also produce energy) and are increasingly engaging in collective energy actions, including taking part in energy communities. In the latter instance, collective investment and consumption decisions are made together, and norms, understanding and behavior towards energy are shaped collectively. To better understand the roles that individuals and groups can play in confronting the challenges of the energy transition, we make use of and adapt Ostrom’s socio-ecological systems (SES) framework to analyze past examples of collective actions and to delve deeper into the causes and catalysts of collective actions. We show how this framework can be used to analyze collective actions across time and contexts, focusing on connecting individual and group behavior with changing societal norms and the corresponding barriers to change. By applying the adapted SES framework as a lens to analyze historical examples of collective actions that have resulted in a widespread transformation in social norms and structures, we identify similarities and differences between these case studies and the current energy transition. Confronting incumbents and the challenge of changing social norms and behaviors are among the similarities, but the specific tactics used to limit incumbents’ powers and the actions taken to influence the norms and behaviors differ. Lastly, we determine the key actors that influenced social and behavioral change, as one of the main outcomes of the analysis.

This article reviews longstanding debates about the relationship between power over and power to - often posed as the tension between domination and emancipation. It then turns to several frameworks which integrate these approaches to inform strategies for social action. In particular, it focuses on recent empirical studies which apply one such framework, the 'powercube', to glean insights into how social actors navigate across multiple forms, spaces and levels of power. In so doing, we gain clues into how relatively powerless groups develop the capacities for agency and action which challenge domination and in turn give new possibilities for emancipation.

Society persists despite the mortality of its individual members, through processes of demographic metabolism and particularly the annual infusion of birth cohorts. These may pose a threat to stability but they also provide the opportunity for societal transformation. Each birth cohort acquires coherence and continuity from the distinctive development of its constituents and from its own persistent macroanalyic feaures. Successive cohorts are differentiated by the changing content of formal education, by peer-group socialization, and by idiosyncratic historical experience. Young adults are prominent in war, revolution, immigration, urbanization and technological change. Since cohorts are used to achieve structural transformation and since they manifest its consequences in characteristic ways, it is proposed that research be designed to capitalize on the congruence of social change and cohort identification.

It can be argued that the successful management of change is crucial to any organisation in order to survive and succeed in the present highly competitive and continuously evolving business environment. However, theories and approaches to change management currently available to academics and practitioners are often contradictory, mostly lacking empirical evidence and supported by unchallenged hypotheses concerning the nature of contemporary organisational change management. The purpose of this article is, therefore, to provide a critical review of some of the main theories and approaches to organisational change management as an important first step towards constructing a new framework for managing change. The article concludes with recommendations for further research.

Many companies have tried to transform themselves in order to meet a more competitive market environment, but most of the transformation efforts have been less than a total success. A study of the companies that have been successful indicates that the transformation process entails a number of phases and that the elimination of any of these phases may harm the entire process. In addition, mistakes made during the transformation can reverse the process. These, and eight other transformation steps, are discussed.

In this conceptual paper we examine how organizations can develop capacity for change, which we define as the allocation and development of change and operational capabilities that sustains long term performance. Making change happen without destroying well-functioning aspects in an organization and harming subsequent changes requires both capabilities to change in the short and long term and capabilities to maintain daily operations. The change literature includes a number of process prescriptions on how change can be mobilized such as, framing, participation, pacing, and sequencing, routinizing change, and recruiting. We examine how these process prescriptions contribute in developing an organization's (1) capabilities to change, (2) capabilities to maintain daily operations and (3) capabilities to implement subsequent change processes. While participation, pacing and sequencing are likely to have adverse effects on daily operations, routinizing change and recruiting personnel are likely to have positive effects on subsequent change processes.

As a commentary to Juhani Iivari’s insightful essay, I briefly analyze design science research as an embodiment of three closely related cycles of activities. The Relevance Cycle inputs requirements from the contextual environment into the research and introduces the research artifacts into environmental field testing. The Rigor Cycle provides grounding theories and methods along with domain experience and expertise from the foundations knowledge base into the research and adds the new knowledge generated by the research to the growing knowledge base. The central Design Cycle supports a tighter loop of research activity for the construction and evaluation of design artifacts and processes. The recognition of these three cycles in a research project clearly positions and differentiates design science from other research paradigms. The commentary concludes with a claim to the pragmatic nature of design science.

Two paradigms characterize much of the research in the Information Systems discipline: behavioral science and design science. The behavioral-science paradigm seeks to develop and verify theories that explain or predict human or organizational behavior. The design-science paradigm seeks to extend the boundaries of human and organizational capabilities by creating new and innovative artifacts. Both paradigms are foundational to the IS discipline, positioned as it is at the confluence of people, organizations, and technology. Our objective is to describe the performance of design-science research in Information Systems via a concise conceptual framework and clear guidelines for understanding, executing, and evaluating the research. In the design-science paradigm, knowledge and understanding of a problem domain and its solution are achieved in the building and application of the designed artifact. Three recent exemplars in the research literature are used to demonstrate the application of these guidelines. We conclude with an analysis of the challenges of performing high-quality design-science research in the context of the broader IS community.

The democratic governance of emerging science and innovation is a major challenge.•We describe a framework for responsible innovation that addresses social and ethical concerns.•The framework has four dimensions: anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness.•We describe the application of this framework to one geoengineering research project.•We conclude that such a framework can underpin a practical and systematic approach to governance. The governance of emerging science and innovation is a major challenge for contemporary democracies. In this paper we present a framework for understanding and supporting efforts aimed at ‘responsible innovation’. The framework was developed in part through work with one of the first major research projects in the controversial area of geoengineering, funded by the UK Research Councils. We describe this case study, and how this became a location to articulate and explore four integrated dimensions of responsible innovation: anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness. Although the framework for responsible innovation was designed for use by the UK Research Councils and the scientific communities they support, we argue that it has more general application and relevance.

The aim of this article is to explore the nature of resistance to change (RTC) and the notion that employees are the prime source of such resistance. It takes a historical perspective on the subject, beginning with an examination of Coch and French's [1948. Overcoming resistance to change. Human Relations, 1, 512-532] influential work on resistance, especially their assertion that resistance does not arise from the individual, but from the context in which the change takes place. The article explains that their work was part of a long-running series of studies of change by Kurt Lewin. This leads on to a review of the development of the resistance literature since their article was published. This is followed by an examination of four theories of resistance, which shows that they are consistent with and help develop Coch and French's work. The article concludes by arguing that taking a 'long view' enables us to see why their work provided not only the foundations for our understanding of RTC, but also how it can be built on to produce a rounded and robust view of RTC.

Purpose - Change, and in particular intentional or desired change, has not been understood nor systematically studied. By applying concepts from complexity theory to intentional change theory, the purpose of this paper is to provide a new level of insight into why and how sustainable desired change can occur at all levels of human social interaction, from individual to teams to organizations to communities, countries and the globe. Design methodology approach - Using research from over 30 years of longitudinal studies of individual and organizational change, the concepts are explored and implications proposed. Findings - Sustainable, intentional change is on the whole discontinuous. It occurs through a series of five discoveries or emergence conditions. It is driven by the interplay of the positive and negative emotional attractor. It follows the described process at all fractals of human organization. Research limitations implications - Extensive empirical research has been done at the individual level, but only case studies at the organization and country levels. Practical implications - Every person seeking to explore, understand, or facilitate sustainable, desired change can be helped by the model and understanding how it functions. Originality value - The theory of intentional change is relatively new to the literature, as is the use of complexity theory.

How Amani Institute is building a skills-based and inclusive curriculum for changemaking in the developing world. Part of the Innovating Higher Education series.