Boundary activities and readiness for ... - Projekti-Instituutti

Results
Table 17 Identified associations between the boundary activities and the intent of the change
program
Boundary activity types
Visible need
and pressure
for change and
sustained
momentum
Intent
Clear and
shared vision,
sense of
direction, and
commonly
accepted goals
Purposeful plan
for change
content, change
process, and
program
structure
Positioning and negotiating X X
Linking
Task coordinating
Information seeking X X
Resource seeking
Informing
Legitimating and committing
Influencing
Guarding
Enclosing
X
X
X
X
As Table 17 indicates, informing activities as well as legitimating and
committing activities were seen to contribute to the visible need and
pressure for change and sustained momentum. The data indicates how
boundary activities did not create the need and pressure for change, but
they were utilized to make a wider audience of people aware of the need and
to make them agree with the reasoning behind launching the change
program. Firstly, according to the analysis, various kinds of informing
activities were performed to communicate the need and pressure for
change. In all three cases, the need for change had been acknowledged by
the key managers even several years before the program launch, but after
the change programs were officially initiated, informing others about the
need for change became a significant activity. To give an example, the
program owner in Chain described these activities in the following way:
Q53 (Chain, program owner): “To get people to wake up and realize that there is
a need for change, and to point out that something is happening and we need to
change in order to survive also in the future, all this has required a lot of
discussion … Nowadays we don’t need to talk about this that much, we don’t
need to assure people that something is happening. But we have spent a lot of
resources on talking about those changes during the past two years.”
Similarly as informing activities, the data shows how legitimating and
committing activities aimed at making people acknowledge and accept the
need for change, and also at sustaining the commitment to the change
150