Organization change failure, deep structures and temporality: Appreciating Wonderland

Abstract

Organization change failure has typically been viewed as occurring when expected outcomes of change have not been met. This view downplays key, but frequently hidden organizational dimensions such as deep structures and temporality. In this article, drawing inspiration from the story of Alice in Wonderland, we distinguish between surface-level intervention approaches to change, deeper process approaches and, deeper yet, structuration approaches, and suggest the different ways they approach change failure as well as the implications of these. On the basis of our exploration we propose a three-fold way forward: adopting a process-based, empirically grounded and reflective approach to understanding change and its often-failed outcomes; adopting methodologies that can capture deep structures and temporal dimensions; and incorporating expanded conceptions of time as a multi-level, nested construct. We illustrate our ideas of deep structures and temporality by drawing from a particularly important illustration of long-term successful change that includes multiple short-term failures, that of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the United States (NASA).