Managing organisational change

20-22 April 2023 | Executive seminar

Demographic change, digitalisation, changing and rising citizen expectations towards government, an increasingly constrained fiscal environment and crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic put government organisations globally under severe strain and change the frameworks in which public managers are operating.

In contexts like these, public managers will have to be equipped with the capabilities to participate in or lead organisational change and assess approaches and tools appropriate for addressing these challenges. This course will provide students with an understanding of the current operating context of governments, as well as different approaches to and pitfalls of organisational change. It focuses on public managers that lead organisational change in their own organisation and specifically reflects on the practical dilemmas of creating and facilitating change in an organisation the manager is responsible for.

This course aims to prepare managers of (or in) public sector or service organisations for the leadership of organisational change processes by focusing on the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes needed to manage this strategically. It critically examines the assumptions, concepts and tools of various approaches to change management and applies these to real-life situations. All topics are further explored in real-life case studies in various contexts – some of them provided by external speakers and by the conveners, others by participants themselves as they reflect on their own experiences in the change processes they work in.

This seminar is offered as part of the Executive MPA programme and in the open enrolment programme and can be taken as part of the ETGN certificate programme.