From Blind Chickens to Lions: A process perspective on a planned change approach with a communication strategy focus

Today’s era of digital transformation requires modern organizations to continuously invest in new information technology (IT). Managing an organizational change process always implies challenges and often this process fails to meet its objective. This thesis examines a planned organizational change process of an IT-tool implementation by taking on a process perspective to evaluate the employees’ awareness. In our approach, we particularly focus on how the employees understand and interpret the change process’ communication measures and how this influences the success of a change. The study is rooted in an interpretative research tradition and follows the abductive research approach. A qualitative in-depth case study within a consultancy was used to identify the employees’ understanding and interpretation of the change project. We contribute to the research fields of organizational change and the communication of change at large by investigating the change project. In this study, we develop the communication-value-matrix from our main findings and argue that the communication strategy and the perceived value of the change are two interdependent dimensions. This communication-value-matrix presents the awareness of employees as four ‘ideal types’ of sensemaking: lions, donkeys, blind chickens, and foxes. Our findings and theoretical contributions also intend to support practitioners in their change management.