When The Dodo Became Extinct: Why Rethinking Change Should Not Take A Pandemic

Abstract

The degree of transformative change occurring in organizations due to the COVID-19 pandemic is extensive, with large-scale downsizing, rightsizing, workplace changes, structural transformation, and a general unease taking place. The sheer scale of these changes has not been seen for a generation. Technically, this situation represents an opportunity for organizational change researchers to dive deep and make sense of what has occurred to organizations globally, particularly because we already have the tools to understand change and transformation, what it looks like, how to manage it, and ways of reorienting to it. The assumption is that we have the instruments and knowledge to make sense, interpret, and deal with the challenges of Coronavirus wrought change. Yet it is precisely the unprecedented magnitude of this change taking place and the call for a response with quick fixes restoring the "normal" that also increases the risk for change scholarship of conforming new change to old models. As a provocation, this editorial note calls out what it is that change research does, of template matching and modularity. Change research coexists with a degree of comfort that has become an existential problem for the field and its researchers. With this note, we promote a call to arms-raising challenging questions for challenging times. It is time to rethink how we "do change." We don't provide answers. And that's precisely the point, because tackling what we don't know should be the outcome of collective intellectual effort. It's What We Know. When a Straitjacket Is Convention "But she must have a prize herself, you know," said the Mouse. "Of course," the Dodo replied very gravely.

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