Managing complex change: Challenges at the National Health Service Greater Glasgow and Clyde

Abstract

When managing change, effective communication is fundamental to success. Indeed, many failures of change initiatives are attributed, in whole or in part, to communication failures (Kotter and Cohen 2002). We have spent the last two years studying an organisation that faced a particularly difficult change challenge. The study reveals some interesting insights. The National Health Service (NHS) Greater Glasgow and Clyde faced a difficult task in that the organisation had a large and change-fatigued group of employees, needed to effect the change very quickly and faced real public scrutiny over the both the change process and performance outcomes. This article explores some of the lessons learnt from this longitudinal and in-depth study of complex, rapid and radical organisational change. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.