Balancing Acts

A Human Systems Approach to Organizational Change

By: James Conklin

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Hardcover | 15 October 2021

At a Glance

Hardcover
372 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.3 x 14.9 x 3.3

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Balancing Acts offers consultants and managers a simple, powerful way to think about change, and ascribes a four-phase iterative process for implementing change. Reviewing change initiatives from different types of organizations, Balancing Acts confronts the problems and pitfalls head-on that often arise during workplace transitions. Conklin explains why organizational change can be so difficult, and shows that by balancing a set of competing psychological and systemic challenges, interveners will increase their chance of success.

Conklin shows that human groups function as complex systems, and that a change initiative is not a linear progression toward a predefined result. Instead, change is an iterative process that involves a search for feasible and useful solutions. The book's central argument is that while leading or supporting this search, consultants and leaders must balance four critical concerns: confrontation and compassion, participation and observation, assertion and inquiry, and planfulness and emergence.

Industry Reviews

Balancing Acts practices what it preaches. In a largely seamless manner, it integrates conceptual and practice approaches to change, helping interveners (from college-age on up) learn how to organize their thinking about change and apply it in practical ways. It shows the necessary ways that compassion and confrontation, participation and observation, assertion and inquiry, and both staying and changing the course all need to be jointly present in change processes and how to help this happen. This is an exciting and deeply insightful book that I highly recommend.

- Jean M. Bartunek, Robert A. and Evelyn J. Ferris Chair and Professor of Management and Organization, Boston College

Balancing Acts is the product of an experienced organizational change consultant with an academic mind who combines evidence-based and experience-based insights to produce a well-integrated model for organizational change consulting. Rooted in a Diagnostic OD framework, Conklin integrates that framework with Dialogic OD insights to advise organizational change consultants that they need to balance seemingly opposite things that nevertheless are both required for effective practice. Students and those in the field of organization development and change practice will find many useful ideas in this book.

- Gervase R. Bushe, Professor of Leadership and Organization Development, Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University, author of The Dynamics of Generative Change, and co-editor of Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change

James Conklin's Balancing Acts reflects his many years of thinking and action in seeking to bring about desirable changes in human systems. This very readable book adopts a conversational tone that is always authoritative without being didactic. In a field which requires artistry rather than pretensions at mastery, this is Conklin's own artwork.

- Mike Pedler, Professor Emeritus, Henley Business School, University of Reading and Founding Editor of Action Learning: Research & Practice

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