Navigating Transformation: Review and Research Agenda

Over the past twenty-five years, the Journal of Change Management has played a central role in rethinking how organisational change and transformation are understood. Early contributions moved beyond rational and planned change models by emphasising participation, learning and development. Later work increasingly framed change as continuous, relational and embedded in complex and dynamic systems. More recent studies extend this trajectory by focusing on emergence, collaboration and paradox, as well as on the broader societal, technological and ecological conditions shaping contemporary transformation.This article synthesises these developments through a longitudinal analysis of publications in the journal and identifies five periods in the evolving understanding of navigating transformation. It demonstrates how change theorising has shifted from organisation-centred and interventionist approaches toward more dialogical, context-sensitive and collaborative orientations. The article introduces the VOLCANIC perspective, which characterises contemporary environments as volatile, ongoing, liquid, complex, ambiguous, nested, interactive and chaotic, highlighting the limitations of linear and episodic change models. Building on this synthesis, navigating transformation is conceptualised as a distinct theoretical orientation and a future research agenda is proposed that outlines five interconnected pathways for advancing theory and practice.MAD statementThis article makes a difference by clarifying navigating transformation as a distinct theoretical orientation rather than a variant of organisational change. Through a longitudinal review of twenty-five years of publications in the Journal of Change Management, it offers scholars a coherent synthesis of how thinking about change has evolved toward relational, emergent and collaborative perspectives. For practitioners, the article provides a language to recognise when managing change is insufficient and navigating transformation becomes necessary in volatile and ambiguous contexts. By situating transformation within broader societal and ecological dynamics, the article also highlights why navigating transformation matters for addressing complex challenges that extend beyond organisational boundaries.