The example organisation is a large State owned enterprise that has recently undergone a series of leadership crises, resulting in the appointment of a new CEO. The CEO is aware that the original mandate of the SOE is not being met in that service levels are not in line with customer requirements. The CEO has appointed a final year MBA student to research the change needed to bring the organisation in line with present day requirements. The research mandate was: What degree of change needs to be managed to achieve the required turnaround? Alternatively it could be posed as: What degree of strategic change is significant to achieve change in the organisation?

An opening model would be one that opened up the research problem holistically. As one of the leading questions revolves around the strategic positioning and response to external demands (service levels) the strategic drift model (Fig 1, Johnson, 2004) would be an appropriate opener to identify where the organisation stands historically in meeting the demands of external change.

This external change could be manifest in the dynamics of stakeholder management, client and service needs as well as performance levels.

Even a superficial application of the model raises the question as to where the organisation is currently positioned i.e. phase 1, 2 or 3? The theoretical considerations underlying the model are that in phase 1 only an incremental change is needed in order to continually adapt to external (or client) needs. However, the organisation may have been making minor incremental changes (e.g. playing lip service to BBBEE requirements) and subsequently has lapsed further and further from the required targets.

One can imagine that the previous CEO’s perceived differing needs for transformation and may have responded only within the existing paradigm thus maintaining the comfort zone. This is turn could have pushed the organisation into the flux stage (i.e. where there is no clear direction on the issues with a subsequent increase of disquiet within the organisation). The end result (current status?) is that the organisation would be at, or near the point of no return i.e. transformation (radical change) or demise (point 3/4).