Introduction
Please note that this is a preliminary course description. The final version will be published in June 2026.
Organizations today often struggle to create meaningful, sustainable changes. In today's world, organizations face both increasing complexity driven by technological and regulatory shifts, the rise of virtual work, and volatile business environments. This Master of Science course delves into these messy situations, where actors often find themselves in a "fog" of entangled problems, to sort out the central issues and challenges organizations must address. We emphasize the critical need for inquiry, discovery, sensemaking, experimentation and learning to navigate these environments. Complex environments are frequently characterized by wicked problems, for which no ready-made solutions exist, in that there is a knowledge gap regarding what works, and stakeholders with different worldviews, values and interests. This course recognizes that leading change is rarely accomplished by individual leaders, it is a collective effort.
The course aims to equip students to better manage organizational change by learning underlying theories and perspectives as well as gaining skills and develop their reflection on values and norms guiding change efforts. Practitioners often draw on popular recipes for managing change rather than research-based insights and approaches. Through the course, students shall be able to critically assess recipes, templates and models of change that are circulated by consultants and management theorists. The students will also be exposed to a series of cases that are controversial and ambiguous, thus well suited to develop judgment from. The course draws on literature from social psychology, organization theory, culture studies, action research as well as applied management studies of organization development, change management, and design thinking.