The Investigation of Implementation’s Speed of Change Programs in the Light of Organizational Conversations

Conversations are the main channels for the formation of organizational changes that can speed up or slow down the speed of change implementation and thus determine the success or failure of organizational change programs. From this viewpoint, an organizational change program has a suitable implementation speed when it has a smooth passage through the four levels of initiative, understanding, performance, and closure conversations. However, the occurrence of mental and linguistic barriers in the process of formation of the change conversations leads to the failure of the desired timely implementation of these programs. Based on this, the aim of the current research is to explore the effective factors in timely and successful or late and unsuccessful implementation of change programs in the context of organizational conversations in Soban Educational Holding. This research is a qualitative study that uses a combination of qualitative techniques of semi-structured interviews, participatory observation, and document analysis to collect data, and uses thematic analysis to analyze the data. The participants are all the organizational members involved in the two change programs of Soban Educational Holding. The findings show that performance and then understanding conversations account for the largest volume of change conversations and, slowing down the speed of change implementation. Additionally, the findings show that most of the mental and linguistic barriers to the formation of effective change conversations occur at the level of understanding conversations, but performance conversations occupy a larger volume of change conversations and thus, play a more important role in advancing the changes.