Abstract for: Building Understanding of Organizational Change

This article presents some insights from ongoing implementation of BP’s Operating Management System (OMS) in Alaska. BP aspires to improve the way it operates and become a sector leader in personal safety, process safety, environmental management and operations excellence. In this paper, the OMS implementation is examined as a process of organizational change. One of the early stages of that process is to build understanding of the organizational change among those responsible for implementation. For that purpose a System Dynamics model and model based simulator were used. The article presents an overview of the model, which is based on established theories of transformation. Some simulation scenarios were examined to illustrate the results of various policies, and to test ideas thought to increase the probability of sustainable change. Implications for organizational learning are discussed.