Why 'mundane' tools are vital for strategic change

UC management expert: why 'mundane' tools are vital for strategic change

Newly published research by a University of Canterbury management expert and her French counterparts shows organisational change does not need to involve expensive consultants, strategic planning tools or endless meetings.

The findings of a study of effective strategic change, published recently in the prestigious British Journal of Management by a team of scholars that includes UC Associate Professor of Management Colleen Mills, is challenging the way organisations approach change management.

Mills and her French colleagues show three types of mundane material tools, including simple forms and visual displays and minor structural changes to workspaces can ensure a strategic change is successful. This means the power to successfully manage change lies in the hands of middle managers and their operational teams and their collective ability to design their own work tools.

“While those of us who work in large organisations have always known successful change requires the ‘buy in’ of those at the frontline, until now research has not been able to demonstrate that it is the mundane tools these workers create to use each day that are the key to success. If these align with both senior managers’ objectives and local managers’ leadership principles then a strategic change can play out very efficiently in practice,” Mills says.

The paper on the research findings Materializing Strategy in Mundane Tools: the Key to Coupling Global Strategy and Local Strategy Practice?, by Mills and her colleagues Nicolas Arnaud, Celine Legrand and Eric Maton from Audencia School of Management in Nantes, is capturing the imagination of practitioners and scholars around the world, including those at the London School of Economics, which has showcased the research in the latest London School of Economics Business Review in an the article Middle managers play an essential role in executing change.

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