Developing organisational change capability

This paper reports the outcome of research into eleven organisations in the UK automotive supply sector, all of which have an acknowledged reputation for their ability to sustain successful change. It describes a ‘Listen – Interpret –Translate – Transfer’ (LITT) process used by a researcher to build an explicit model of change, based on the often only implicit experience of these organisations. In addition the LITT process is used finally to establish each organisation’s ownership of the explicit model. The paper argues that the process–model symbiosis used in the research and described here can be used by internal managers or outside consultants to accelerate the development of organisational change capability in any organisation. Organisational change capability is regarded in this study as generic to all the other dynamic capabilities embedded in an organisation, and as essential if a dynamically stable organisation is successfully to operate any of the other dynamic capabilities around which it is structured.