Facilitating and Undermining Organizational Change: A Case Study

This article offers a case study of a research-action project in which the author functioned as researcher and change agent. The success and failure of this project was related to his finding and losing the balance of joining and remaining separate from a social system's dynamics. The author describes the research project and reflects on its covert dynamics. In doing so, he illustrates the relationship between helping system members get unstuck from their automatic, dysfunctional patterns of relationships and getting himself unstuck from those patterns. He describes as well the forces within him and in the system itself that pulled for him to lose his balance, such that he either tumbled into it as a member or fell away from it altogether. He frames the earnings in terms of change agents creating or undermining the holding environment in which system members struggle to change dysfunctional relationship patterns.