The Dance of Change:
The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations

By Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard Ross, George Roth, and Bryan Smith

(Doubleday, April 1, 1999; $35.00; 624 pp.).

Authors of the best-selling Fifth Discipline Fieldbook show how business people can move beyond the first steps fo the "Lerning Organization" to corporate growth and innovation that last.

"If a seedling has no room to grow, it will never become a tree," says management guru Peter Senge.

"Most leaders instigating change are like gardeners standing over their plants, imploring them: 'Grow! Try harder! You can do it!' If leaders don't understand the forces that keep significant change from taking root and growing, all their entreaties, strategies, and change programs will produce more frustration than real results."

Challenges occur at all levels within the organization, and leaders at every level - be they executive, line, or network - need to be aware of their consequences.

What thinking and behaviors reinforce innovation - or impede it?
What strategies can effective leaders pursue to anticipate and meet the limits of corporate growth?
How can they recognize the challenges of profound change ahead of time, and generate the greatest return from them?

These concerns are the heart of THE DANCE OF CHANGE, which is rooted in breakthroughs and reflections from a variety of major organizations.

TEN SPECIFIC CHALLENGES TO CHANGE
Peter Senge and his colleagues have identified 10 distinct forces that oppose significant organizational change:

• The first four changes develop as soon as a "pilot group" (which could be a local team or business unit or a senior management team) begins to conduct its work in unfamiliar ways. These include the challenges of: "Not Enough Time," "No Help," "Not Relevant," and "Walking the Talk."
• The next three forces come into play once early success has been achieved as problems of sustaining momentum arise both within the team and between the team and the larger organizational culture. These include: "Fear and Anxiety," "Assessment and Measurement," and "Believers and Nonbelievers."
• The final three challenges of systemwide design and rethinking arise as a pilot group's work gains broader credibility and confronts the established internal infrastructure and practices of the organization. These include:"Governance," "Diffusion," and "Strategies and Purpose."

REFLECTION ALONG WITH CHANGE
According to Senge, if today's business organizations want to meet such external challenges of globalization, changing workforces, the evolving competition and new technologies, it is not enough to change strategies, structures and systems. Organizations, after all, are products of the ways that people think and interact. "Sustaining any profound change process requires a fundamental shift in thinking and action. We need to think of sustaining change more biologically and less mechanistically. This requires patience as well as urgency. It requires a real sense of inquiry, a genuine curiosity about limiting forces. It requires thinking about how significant change invariably starts locally, and how it can grow over time. And it requires recognizing the diverse array of people who play key roles in sustaining change - people who are leaders."

Through in-depth stories of companies that sustained themselves through real-world turbulence, The DANCE of CHANGE shows how inner shifts in people's values, aspirations and behavior can combine with "outer" shifts in processes, strategies, practices and systems. THE DANCE OF CHANGE takes an inside look at how challenges were met at such corporations as British Petroleum, Chrysler, DuPont, Ford, General Electric, Harley-Davidson, Hewlett-Packard, Mitsubishi Electric, Royal Dutch/Shell, Shell Oil Company, Toyota, the U.S. Army, and Xerox. Through its systematic approach to complex material, the book provides an effective framework of insights and opinions to help CEOs, executives, line-level managers, internal networkers, and educators change the way they think about change.

"NOTES FROM THE FIELD" RESOURCE
Organized as a "notes from the field" resource, THE DANCE OF CHANGE contains proven strategies for leaders at all levels. Based on the experiences of people in the front lines who are attempting to put learning initiatives into practice, it includes case histories and field studies, round-table discussions, individual team exercises, checklists, and tested practical advice. It also includes an important resources feature: hundreds of cross- references within the text directing readers to important books, articles and web sites.THE DANCE OF CHANGE is the first guidebook/roadmap
/choreographic guide for these leaders

• Peter Senge is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the chairman of the Society for Organizational Learning, and the author of the bestseller The Fifth Discipline, named by the Harvard Business Review as one of the five "key business books" of the past two decades. He is a recognized pioneer, theorist, and writer in the field of management innovation.
• Charlotte Roberts is a speaker, writer, and consultant to executives, with expertise in creating learning cultures in business and community organizations.
• Richard Ross is a speaker, trainer, and organizational consultant who works with numerous Fortune 500 and international corporations.
• Bryan Smith is a vice president of Arthur D. Little, Inc. and a director of Innovations Associates; his work focuses on strategy implementation, corporate governance, and sustainable development.
• George Roth is an MIT researcher, lecturer, and Executive Director of the Ford/MIT collaboration.
• Editorial Director Art Kleiner is a faculty member at New York University and the author of The Age of Heretics, a finalist for the Edgar Booz Award for most innovative business book of 1996.