Organizational change efforts have received considerable attention from both social scientists and practitioners interested in understanding the change process in organizations. Specific organizational development interventions have been developed to improve quality, increase job satisfaction, and reduce costs in response to increased competitiveness in a global economy. Common among most interventions is the goal of improving quality by involving employees in the process.

This paper relies on developments in the “new sciences”, which includes chaos, complexity theory, self‐organizing systems, and evolutionary systems, as a way of both approaching change in organizations and understanding organizations as evolutionary systems. These “new” perspectives denote a move away from the Newtonian model which is characterized by reductionism to understanding underlying relationships which create change in the operations of systems. The applicability of these “new sciences” is explored through a case study of change which occurred during the implementation of a quality program in a care‐giving institution. The first portion of the paper presents the explanatory elements of evolutionary systems and their applicability to understanding change in an organization. The second portion of the paper explores the conditions under which such a change can take place. Overall, this paper uses concepts from the new sciences to examine how organizational change in a care‐giving institution emerged.