The process of planned change involves a change agent, a client system, and the collaborative efforts to apply appropriate knowledge to clients’ problems.
It is concerned with problems including identification of values and objectives, conflicts and collaborations, leadership and control, resistance and adaptation to change, utilization of resources, communication and management development.
It emphasizes implementation through counseling, education and training, participation, management development schemes and so on. To change an institution is to make it different in some ways so as to achieve its objectives better.
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An institution strives to achieve equilibrium with the changing external environment and social structure. Change requires new adjustments and adaptations among people. Successful principals do not wait for future. They make future by managing change.
Here some paradoxes are involved. Bringing about no changes and maintaining status quo has the advantages of predictability, stability, certainty and efficiency. On the other hand, rapid changes imply flexibility, anxiety, uncertainty, instability and unpredictability.
For some institutions, stability is so important that maintaining status quo is mandatory. On the other hand, some institutions desire change so as to be competitive to enhance its prestige and to maintain harmony with dynamic external environment.
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Educational institutions handle this stability V/s change dilemma depending on the nature and amount of innovation required. If change is evolutionary in nature, it does not greatly violate the traditions and expectations, does not arouse great emotions (enthusiasm or anger), does not lead to deep resistance and dramatic results. Thus, the stability of an institution is not greatly affected by it.
On the other hand, if change is radical or revolutionary in nature, it causes violations, rejections and strong resistance and conflicts.
However, planned change “does not start with the acceptance or rejection of status quo but begins with a normative intellectual model of what should be the model, that is, blueprint for action” (Blake and Mouton, 1970).
It is also necessary here to distinguish between proactive and reactive changes. Proactive change is change initiated by an institution because it is identified as desirable and is not forced on the institution. As opposed to this, reactive change is change implemented in an institution because it is made necessary by external forces.