Thanks for posting, Natalie. Apologies - your contribution was buried in our spam filter (it can be over-zealous). I have just 'released' your post.

I too would like to see a discussion on this.
Some food for thought via Paul Gibbons:
Is Change Management Science? Is Leadership? Should They Be? paulgibbons.net/.../

Hi Nataly,

I guess the problem is that "change management" is a rather elusive, meaningless term. After all, a merger can be considered as change, but so does the implementation of a new IT system. So whether a change effort is supported by evidence depends on what problem you're trying to solve.

Having this said, when you look at the scientific evidence on change management we must unfortunately conclude that managers & consultants should be skeptical regarding its trustworthiness: a recent systematic review shows "a predominance of one-shot studies with low validity", and replication studies are rare. Here's the link to the pdf on Researchgate:

www.researchgate.net/.../Effects-of-Change-Interventions-What-Kind-of-Evidence-Do-We-Really-Have.pdf

Eric

change management is a mix of individual psychology, organisational psychology (group dynamics), processess and social.
its a real mix of science and art.
for every time you get it right, there will be 10 times it is not as "slick"

What worked "last time" can be guarenteed not to work next time!
It is for this reason that large projects in orgs have change managers.

as for evidxence, there is some largly anecdotal evidence from the project management world, that projects with dedicated change managers are more reliable and are more successful than those that do not.