Anchoring Reticence: Why Practitioners Shun the Final Stage of Planned Organizational Change

This paper recounts the chance discovery and multi-step follow-up exploration of an unexpected and remarkably robust empirical regularity in a planned change training exercise. Participants (predominantly experienced management professionals) appear surprisingly unattracted – even avoidant – to the work and activities associated with the final ‘anchoring’ phase of planned change. If replicated in practice, this ‘anchoring reticence’ may lead to the non- or at least underinstitutionalization of planned change efforts, that is, to ‘unclosed loops’ of change. This may undermine or even nullify change efforts and thus provide a new explanation for the allegedly low success rate of planned change efforts. Using a post-game follow-up questionnaire and extensive discussions with participants, we systematically explore this finding in depth and probe several tentative explanations for the apparent ‘unpopularity’ of change anchoring activities. Next, we discuss our findings from both a theoretical and practical angle, bringing in the reflections of an expert panel. We find that anchoring activities tend to be avoided because they are considered boring, hard, ‘not my concern’ and superfluous. We trace the origin of these beliefs to managers’ professional and educational socialization, which tends to undervalue tactical management. Our findings provide new suggestions for explaining unsuccessful planned change initiatives. Zooming out, they point to the more generic phenomenon of orphaned and neglected practices in organizations and the mechanisms behind their languishing subsistence. For this organizational learning failure, we provide a tentative model.