As we wrote in the Preface of the first edition, like the content of this book, the writing of it has been a change journey. The genesis of this journey was the teaching of organizational change at undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive levels over many years, and an increasing disquiet we each had about change texts. For example, organization development (OD) texts were readily available but somehow failed to capture for us the variety of approaches to managing change. Alternatively, the more popular recipe-driven, “here's how to do it” change books, while rich in examples, failed to capture the messiness of change that has been our experience—and that of many of those whom we have taught.

We started conversations with each other about these issues and out of them emerged our challenge to create a text that would fill what we saw as a gap in the material available to those teaching organizational change. We wished to write a text that stated upfront that organizational change is often messy and something that is not easily subject to control by those placed in charge of managing it. It seemed to us that conceiving of managing change as a shaping rather than as a controlling process was often a better way of approaching it. We also wanted a text that exposed readers to a variety of change approaches rather than presenting them with a single approach to all change situations. The text needed to be one that contained a wide variety of relevant teaching materials and exercises and was simple to use, but deep in its understandings of the underlying issues involved in managing change. It needed to connect with people's experience of change and help to highlight for them how to make sense of these experiences and identify options for future action.

The result of our conversations is a book that provides a multiple-perspectives approach to managing organizational change. A backdrop to the chapters that follow is the ever-present theme that the images we hold of how organizational change should be managed affect the approaches we take to managing change. Adopting different perspectives and images helps to open up new ways of approaching the management of change. We hope that this approach will help to guide and inspire others in their own paths toward managing organizational change.

Since the first edition when we wrote these words we have continued our conversations, not just among ourselves as authors but with the many people who have approached us since the book came out and who have been using it in their teaching, consulting, and other organizational change pursuits. In so many of those conversations it was heartening to hear how the multiple-perspectives framework underlying this book struck the right chord with them, opening up new, innovative, and different ways of seeing, thinking, conceptualizing, and practicing organizational change. We hope that this new updated edition will continue to fuel our various change journeys—and we look forward to more conversations along the way!