The management of change and the Viplan Methodology in practice

Abstract

Conventional approaches to change management tend to be prescriptive with the assumption that the specific course of action will lead to the intended outcome, with surprise when this does not materialise as expected. This possibly can be attributed to a failure to understand the context of change and thereby the failure to deal with conditions less than conducive to supporting the desired change. This paper presents Raul Espejo's Viplan Methodology as an appropriate framework to examine the context of change in an explicit and structured manner and thereby support the creation of conditions more conducive to change, thus increasing the likelihood of the desired outcomes. It draws upon the author's experience as a practitioner engaged in effecting operational change within UK small and medium-sized enterprises.

Keywords:

• problem structuring methods
• organisational change
• cybernetics
• systems
• methodology

Acknowledgements

Very special thanks must go to Professor Raul Espejo for sharing his thoughts about the Viplan Methodology and for his critical comments about earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank Gary Scott, an operations manager, who provided a practitioner insight on this paper.

Notes

1 For a more detailed account refer to Ashby (1963) or Beer (1979).

2 The SSM is presented as a ‘cyclical learning system’, which is depicted as four activities in Checkland and Scholes (1990, Figure 1.3, p. 7).

3 The format of ‘activity’ is used to denote the idealised activity presented in the model of the Cybernetic Methodology in contrast to the actual practices.

4 The word organisation is used to denote any configuration of stakeholders, which may or may not be coterminous with formally recognised organisational entities (eg divisions, functions).

5 Structure is defined as the set of regular relations between stakeholders.

6 Formal relations and informal relations as well as cultural-political.

7 This is typified by the models of processes, whether actual or possible. While these might take the form of flow diagrams, they lose the richness of the detail. One approach to capture detail is to follow the documentation/screens and map the processes by creating collages using the documentation/screen-dumps. These serve as models (boundary objects) that allow discussion among the various stakeholders, with a view to reaching some form of agreement as to the desired change.

8 Not to be confused with the VIPLAN Methodology.