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This paper arises from an increasing concern that the field of strategic change is not delivering meaningful and relevant process wisdom that allows researchers to enrich their academic discourse and practitioners to effectively realize strategic change. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on how adopting a mindful perspective on organizational change can contribute to stronger and more meaningful process understanding on the emergence of change in organizations. More specifically, our intended contribution is to advocate a deeper and richer process understanding of strategic change by advancing mindful organizing as a meta organizational capability that allows organizations to embrace equivocality during sensemaking of change, and to apprehend the processual status of change. Mindful organizing grounds organizational change in more realistic assumptions reflecting a strong process ontology, and advances a practitioner-oriented and pragmatic reading of an ontology of becoming. Mindful organizing rejects fundamental assumptions of the mainstream organizational change discourse - a discourse that not necessarily reflects organizational lifes equivocality, interdependencies and intricacies. Mindful organizing contributes to stronger process theorizing on strategic change implementation as it nurtures perceptual rather than conceptual perception, whereby a direct vision of reality allows grasping dynamic complexities and emergent nature of strategic change. We argue that mindful organizing, by focusing attention on the deep structures of change processes, allows for generating broader interpretive repertoires and more complicated understanding. Eventually, mindful organizing facilitates equivocality work during sensemaking processes of change implementation, and contributes as such to an appreciation of the emergent and processual nature of organizational change and organizational becoming.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a richer process understanding of strategic change implementation, by illustrating sensemaking dynamics during change implementation and by reflecting on how a mindful organizing perspective on strategic change adds to this deeper understanding. To do so, we adopt a change recipient sensemaking perspective with the objective to identify salient hurdles of sensemaking dynamics. Through an explorative case study conducted at a professional service organization, we identified five hurdels of change recipient sensemaking: coherence between ostensive and performative aspects of organizational routines, equivocality of expectations, dominance of organizational discourse, shifts in organizational identification and cross-understanding between departmental thought worlds. Case findings reveal that implementation processes of strategic change become intricate and difficult if change recipient sensemaking is not effectively acted upon. For organizations to better manage the complexities of strategic change implementation processes we subsequently propose to adopt a mindful organizing perspective to strategic change. We argue that a mindful organizing perspective, by focusing attention on the deep structures of change processes, allows for generating broader interpretive repertoires, more complicated understanding and eventually facilitates equivocality work during the sensemaking processes of change implementation.

As the world of business becomes increasingly volatile, organizations need to become increasingly proficient at changing. With new developments in technology, socio-cultural beliefs and geopolitics having seemingly accelerated over the past few years, it has become critical for organizations not to excel at any given moment, but to instead work towards staying nimble at all times. Now, more than ever, the old proverb holds true: that the only constant, in fact, is change itself. However, while this understanding seems to have rallied a large number of scholars and managers to explore the topic of organizational change in earnest, the acknowledgement and interaction between often diverging point of views has been marked limited at best. Eventually, this has come to result in people talking past each other, when dialogue between them could be beneficial; eventually, this has caused our body of knowledge on change to become dispersed and fragmented, with insights no longer stimulating our dealings with change in practice. This PhD dissertation highlights how perspectives on organizational change, however different, may work to complement and enrich our understanding of transformation in an organizational setting. Drawing on reconceptualization as well as studies conducted in the industries of IT consulting, diamond trading, container handling and cooperative banking, this dissertation advances five dedicated essays on organizational change, ultimately constructing a scaffolding of different views on the topic as it is. In doing so, this dissertation delivers three major contributions. First, it lays bare how those dealing with organizational change may advance our body of knowledge by occupying different theoretical positions. By unveiling how different core assumptions may inspire distinct understandings of change, this dissertation allows further work on change to become more interwoven while staying diverse. Second, this thesis showcases how change ultimately requires a complex array of competences from organizational leaders, hereby shedding light on the varied actions that leaders can practically advance in order to outperform their competition. Finally, this dissertation highlights the different onto-epistemological streams of thought that have over time been established with regard to organizational change, thus supporting those teaching change to instruct their students in the eclectic and varied way that the topic ultimately deserves.