What is Second-Order Change

When managers are confronted with the necessity to bring about second-order change in their organization, their change efforts are often not very successful. This chapter attempts to redefine organizational change using complexity theory and the work of Karl Weick and Ralph Stacey as a basis. Organizational change can be defined as emergent change in complex adaptive systems and is based on self-organizational principles. One important attractor that guides the process of emergence is equivocality. This article expounds the concept of ambiguity as a main attractor for emergent change and how managers can make use of this attractor to make change successful.