IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 61

are enacted and all agents need to agree to the new
structure or rules. The final phase, freezing, connects to
what Lewin said about the equilibrium in a system: it has
to be ensured that the new state that has been reached
remains stable and a regression to the old, unfit state
is prevented.
The issue of compliance is also emphasized by Klein
and Sorra. They discuss the main conduit of enabling a
change effort to be successful: individuals' willingness
to change must be expected, supported, and rewarded
for all individuals [13]. A prerequisite for this is, however,
to communicate the need to change, the purpose of the
changes, and make constituents aware, and willing to
participate. This brings us back to incentive-compatible
mechanism design with all its limitations.
Finally, Kotter [14] provides a set of enablers for
change. They echo many aspects discussed above - in
particular Lewin's three phases - and include establishing a sense of urgency, forming a powerful guiding
coalition, creating and communicating a vision, as well
as empowering others to act on this vision. Kotter also
suggests planning and creating short-term wins that
affect individuals positively in some way to reduce
resistance and increase participation. If a potential benefit is too far in the future, the people involved in the
change might lose sight of the vision. Interestingly, the
enablers listed by Kotter do not contain any direct
incentivation. Instead, they rely on communication of a
vision and a coalition of collaborators that push for the
change and are able to convince others. The short-term
wins also allow creating a sense of self-interest that
motivates employees to support the change, but they
often come in the form of better work environment,
less bureaucracy, easier procedures, etc. Again, nontangible incentives seem to play an important role in
the management of a successful change.

Impact of Managed Change on Participatory
Self-Organizing Socio-Technical Systems
As soon as humans play a role and we move away from
purely technical to participatory socio-technical systems, the factors outlined above undoubtedly play a role
since changes in the system will not always be to the
individual's advantage, their purpose may not always be
clear, and incentive structures cannot always be homogeneous and free of non-tangible forms of motivation.
Game theory and mechanism design do provide an
excellent starting point for the design of self-organization and collaboration mechanisms. Its reduction to
pure rational bahavior and incentives allowed the creation of powerful cooperation algorithms for purely
technical agents. If the complexities of "real" social
bahavior need to be regarded in a socio-technical system, and culture, values, and social capital start playing
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The system should be equipped with
the freedom to respond itself.
a role, how does that influence the design of the overall
system? How will engineers be able to construct sociotechnical systems that are fit for purpose?
Part of the answer could be that engineers should
impose less restrictions on their systems and instead
give them the ability and the power to self-organize
structures and rules that fit the purpose and the current
circumstances on their own. Instead of providing a fixed
set of rules that fit the purpose and the world as the
designers see it, the system should be equipped with
the freedom to respond itself - not only through changes of interaction patterns or adaptation of some parameters as we see at the moment, but by overhauling the
rules by which the system operates. The challenge is to
ensure that fitness for purpose is maintained.
This is already attempted in the self-adaptive and
self-organizing systems community. In addition, what is
required is a collective awareness that contains information about structures and rules and associated
goals, and that offers sufficient introspection to detect
the need for change within an organization. This should
be embodied in some form on all levels of an organization, not unlike the "collective agency" called for elsewhere in this issue [24]. Norms can play a role here, but
organizations also contain a lot of implicit information
that is not explicitly codified such as corporate culture
or values or inter-agent relationships that have formed
outside the corporate hierarchy like the "web of trust"
mentioned earlier.
The other part of the answer is that we must return to
the roots of agent-based systems and again understand
agency as it was originally used: a technical system representing a human being with all its complexities and irrationalities. There is work in the agent community on
emotions [6], norms [10], ethics [1], and other relevant topics that can guide us in this direction. The key will be to
allow the agents to reason about these aspects when collaborating to adapt the interaction patterns and the rules
in their environment to achieve their purpose. The change
management theories and ideas that have come out of
organizational psychology might prove valuable in this
endeavor. A rough mapping of insights from change management to participatory self-organizing socio-technical
systems is provided in Table 1 as a starting point for
exploring these connections and how insights can be
transferred into the design and operation of this emerging
class of systems.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017