One of challenges about change in organisations is to understand what the past really tells us about what matters about today and in the future. There are many aspects to looking at the history of a problem situation within an organisation but it is clear that one of the common weaknesses is to over-focus on the rational, often purely financial aspects, of a problem.Experience shows the social dynamics, power relationships, myths and shared self-images within a corporate are at least as important to organisational change as a pure economic analysis. Perhaps there are some lessons for those of us working mainly in the corporate world can learn from campaigns for social change?The initial source of ideas was work published by Friends of the Earth and the History and Policy network. They brought together historians of past campaigns and modern day campaigners to discuss the possible lessons for today's campaigns. The material developed is freely available at https://www.foe.co.uk/blog/campaigning-change-can-we-learn-from-history and provides much food for thought on both the complexities of building support for radical change and the difficulties of using historical analysis as the source of recommendations for the future.A second source of ideas has been the recent work done by Duncan Green of Oxfam: documented at http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/category/how-change-happens/. The book covers many topics such as the importance of exploiting crises, the role of an overt analysis of the shifts in power which the proposed changes drive and many other topics relevant to work within large corporate structures.Beyond the book and blog the material is also covered in a number of lectures available on the web which are well worth a watch as an overview e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdoClHjjALQ.Both sources have an emphasis on how power dynamics and actors interplay to generate social and political change - which suggests we may need to reinforce the diagnostic tools used to analyse problem situations within an organisation to include the political "soft" aspects which are often overlooked and yet are critical to successful changes.It is not just in social change that analysis of power relationships have been seen as a critical part of the reality that change agents must address. The lessons from Checkland's work on Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) were clear as he aimed to combine social and technical system analysis ideas to solving complex problems within organisations. In SSM there is a "Rich Picture" as a summary of the system being changed but it must be complemented by the vitally important analyses of power relationships and the social norms, values and roles within an organisation to enable a problem situation to be properly addressed. The history and evolution of the social and political structures is seen as an important part of situation analysis within SSM. A word of caution: SSM is often poorly represented on the web and in the management literature and I would recommend the "Learning for Action" book by Checkland and Poulter as a good summary.History is often a dangerous source of lessons - managed and manipulated by the powerful for their own purposes. But it does seem there are many useful themes and ideas readily available we can adopt to make organisational change more effective.