Find two or three different people who have worked in the same place for a while. It could be in any workplace: a shop, a company, or your college. If you can fi nd people who are at different levels in the organization or have been there for different lengths of time, it will add extra interest to this exercise. Ask each of them the following questions.

● Looking back over the last fi ve to ten years, what have been the main changes in your industry or sector?

● What do you think caused or triggered the changes in your own organization?

● How much is this a refl ection of global, industry sector, or geographic trends?

● To what extent are the changes rooted in the organization’s immediate task environment or history? Or might it be random, luck, or coincidence?

How much agreement did you fi nd between the people you asked? Did people identify ‘big picture’, macroscopic reasons for their organization changing or did they tend to identify changes in the immediate task environment as the trigger for organizational change? How diffi cult was it for them to identify a single cause or did they tend to identify multiple, interconnected causes?