Not simply a book about organizational transformation, Immunity to Change is a challenging analysis of how our well-developed methods of processing information and experience become barriers that hinder our attempts to achieve adaptive change. The first section of the book describes the theory and can be pretty tough going. The second applies the theory to case studies of organization change. The last is a primer on how to detect and overcome change immunity in your own organization.
At the risk of being overly reductive, I will try to summarize the theory.
People deal with fear and anxiety as a normal part of life. They don't feel this fear most of the time because they have created effective internal anxiety management systems. Those frameworks for evaluating experience are beneficial and necessary but can also form a hidden barrier to the desire to achieve adaptive change. The development of a more complex mental framework (the "self-transforming mind") help the individual recognize the filtering effect and limitations of his/her own frame of reference. This recognition will allow the individual to begin to negate the effects of an internally imposed change immunity.
Looked at this way, any change which is adaptive rather than technical will, as a matter of course, put at risk "a way of knowing the world that also serves as a way of managing a persistent, fundemental anxiety." The authors argue that we can only succeed with adaptive changes by recognizing the seriousness of the internal challenge we face. The desired change can put at risk "what has been a very well-functioning way of taking care of ourselves."
This all begins to explain why diets fail, smokers continue their habit in the face of a life threatening diagnosis or a manager does not increase flexibility even if his/her job depends on so doing.
If the authors are wrong, reading this book may add unnecessary complexity to our efforts to affect the change process. If they are correct, however, they are providing the beginnings of a critical understanding of the barriers to fundemental change as well as a methodology both to detect and resolve the problem.
Many business books present somewhat simplistic reformulations of problems with which managers have long wrestled. This book, on the other hand, offers a complex psychological and epistemological methodology to detect the seemingly insurmountable barrier to individual and organizational change. I found the arguments insightful and compelling but think it unlikely I could apply the approach suggested in section 3 without the assistance of a professional coach. Given that caveat, if the outputs can be as significant as the authors suggest, it would be worth the cost and the effort.