The Science of Organizational Change

Hailed as "the best book on change in 15 years" and a book that belongs alongside classics such as The Halo Effect, Switch, and the Fifth Discipline - The Science of Organizational Change is a must-read for senior executives and change experts alike. Gibbons offers the first blueprint for change that fully reflects the newest advances in mindfulness, behavioral economics, sociology, and complexity theory.

Google’s change expert said, “I loved Kotter when it came out, but this book is my new go-to on change.”

Microsoft’s internal culture team called the book revolutionary – “it completely changed how we think about culture change at Microsoft.”

In this updated 2019 edition of The Science of Organizational Change, Paul Gibbons takes us on a journey from change mythology, through pseudoscience and change, to New Age change ideas, from "reports in drawers", and from pop psychology up to the present.

In 2014, the change world was introduced to new concepts such as “change agility,” and the terms “humanizing change,” “integral change,” and “evidence-based” change.

Readers will discover the first book to bring behavioral science to the change management world and the first book to introduce risk psychology to change and the first to debunk the ubiquitous concept of resistance to change.

Though Gibbons is a management consultant with thirty-plus years of experience, he takes no prisoners while bashing some of the most costly and absurd mistakes that the profession makes with case studies from Google, IBM, Shell, British Airways, British Petroleum, HSBC, and Morgan Stanley.

You'll learn which cognitive biases caused the 2008 Financial Crisis, Enron, and the Deepwater Horizon.

The new concepts such as change-agility answer the question - "how can organizations be more responsive, so they are the disruptors, rather than the disruptees?" Turbulent environments demand constant change, but the mindset, skills, and behaviors taught to business leaders are unhelpful and sometimes flatly misleading.

The book was the first to identify dozens of change management myths, bad models, and unhelpful metaphors, replacing some with twenty-first-century research. Gibbons links the origins of theories about change to the history of ideas and suggests that the human sciences will provide real breakthroughs in our understanding of people in the twenty-first century.

Change fundamentally involves changing people's minds, yet the most recent research shows that the provision of facts may strengthen resistance.

On the topic of change leadership, Gibbons goes deeper and broader than any previous discussion. In this multi-disciplinary treatment, you will learn:

• How a deeper understanding of flaws in human decision-making can help you make far better choices when the stakes are largest.
• How new advances in neuroscience have altered best practices in influencing colleagues, negotiating with partners, engaging followers' hearts, minds, and behaviors, and managing resistance.
• How to bring greater meaning and mindfulness to your organization - and reap their benefits.
• How new ideas from analytics, forecasting, and risk are humbling those who thought they knew the future - and how the human side of analytics and the psychology of risk are paradoxically more important in this technologically enabled world.
• How to improve your boardroom, promoting more effective conversations about strategy, ethics, and decision-making.
• What chaos and complexity theories mean in the context of your own business.
• How to create resilient and agile business cultures, and anti-fragile, dynamic business structures.
• How to link science with your "boots-on-the-ground" experience, through interviews with top CEOs who are applying its principles.