Conclusion and reflections
When these lines are written, the development and deployment of the first wave of the new solution has already been completed. This is typically the point in time when research on the post-implementation phase and on the actual organizational changes caused by the new technology could commence. From a research point of view, it is almost as if nothing important happened before the system was switched on. The three years leading up to the go-live have shown that this is a fundamental misunderstanding. The irony is that anybody who has worked in an organization with a significant organizational change pending will know that talks during lunch or at the coffee machine start well before any actual changes occur. Whether a pending change stems from new technology, financial cutbacks, or ritualistic, recurring organizational reshuffling is less important. Once the genie is out of the bottle, the pending change becomes part of organizational reality, even if it is still in the future. This paper has presented a theoretical/conceptual framework for the analysis of this pre-implementation phase. The main finding of the paper is that organizational members’ reaction to an extended anticipatory phase is an engaging in the recurring patterns of sensemaking, positioning and scripting in an effort to cope with the inherent uncertainty of the navigation of an uncharted organizational landscape. The recurring pattern is described as the anticipation cycle. The anticipation cycle offers a view of the mechanisms inside the previously black-boxed pre-implementation phase of a pending organizational change.
