In response to pressures to deliver short-term results, leaders and organizations often neglect building their capability to be productive. This book provides a description of how to overcome that purely reactive focus so that the organization can survive and prosper over the longer term.
This capability, or organizational capacity for change as I call it, contains eight different dimensions—four of the dimensions focus on critical human capital and four focus on social infrastructure. Many authors have written insightful books and articles about aspects of organizational capacity for change, but few have attempted to synthesize these writings into a coherent whole. Furthermore, this concept has been rigorously developed and researched in the organizational sciences, having undergone peer review of several scientific articles about it.
The remainder of this book elaborates on what the leader’s role is in creating organizational capacity for change, focuses on each of its eight dimensions in more depth, and provides practical ideas for diagnosing and enhancing your organizational capacity for change. In each subsequent chapter, I provide a detailed review of each dimension and discuss its relationship to organizational capacity for change. At the end of each chapter, seven actionable suggestions are made to help practitioners enhance this particular dimension of their organization.
