Whatever they may be, organisations for reasons usually linked to the improvement of their efficiency, the globalization of their markets, the change of location of their activity centres, the upholding of their competitiveness and the growth of their profits, are led to pattern themselves upon a permanent movement of adaptation and transformation.

Within this context of permanent change, when the question is no longer whether "everybody follows?" but rather "do we do what we should where we should do it? "Permanent Change Management Europe (P.C.M.E.) promotes "the art of changing" as an alternative to "the science of change."

Until recently, it was indeed considered that everyone had to participate in the same way, with the same attitude, in the organisation’s cultural renewal and transformation.

This view brought on deviations as regards behaviour, abusive control on the method used to carry things out rather than on the expected outcome: procedures would prevail over results and this led to organised change.

Today, priority is given to "the spirit" with which things should be done and to what has to be done rather than to the mode of procedure. Nowadays, organisations have to face situations that require more and more flexibility, fast adaptation to an environment, to a context in constant mutation, where the development of ideas, initiatives, actions wins over the systematic of the process.

Yet, what is change?

Organisations, institutions move from an Old World, where all participants are playing by the rules and are focusing on the mode of action, to a world where actors are pondering on the meaning of action.

This mutation calls into question the whole of mediums of action accepted so far.
The former world is relying on three features specific to a society of mechanistic type.

The Labour Scientific Organisation used these features to develop its rules. These rules are:

The end of 20th Century and the move to the 21st Century is marked by three fundamental changes:

Change also becomes the fertiliser of innovation, constant creation, and its nourishing substance. Adaptive and innovative organisation will develop owing to the command of the changes brought about by economical and technological progress.

The 21st Century welcomes the age of relations characterised by communication predominance, space-time relativity, networks supremacy; one’s taking into account the non-rational, the constant uncertainty due to permanent change, the rise of ethics, the globalization of phenomena and, the awareness of complexity.

Referring to Paul Watzlawick, who co-founded the Palo Alto group and wrote a methodology of change; there is two types of change: change 1 and change 2.

In The systemic growth of organisations, Pierre-Marc Meunier cites the zoologist Jean Dorst. The latter also distinguishes two levels of change: the microevolution, a species progressively moving to another which is related (change 1); but also the macroevolution, a type of organisation moving to another: the move from fish to batrachians, from batrachians to reptiles, from reptiles to birds, then to mammals (change 2).

More intuitively, change may just be the awareness of a complementary dimension, a more globalizing perception of what we are as an individual, as a group, as a member of a permanently changing organisation, which interacts with other organisations.

It may also be replacing the overused word crisis, by the word change or by the words transformation, progressive and permanent mutation of Society, of ourselves, of the organisations in which we live and through which we go.

Change may simply be moving from knowledge to the exploitation of that knowledge, the know-how, to the blossoming of the individual, the know-who, and this in a permanent and recurring way.