Organizational Change

College is an interesting creature. Sometimes it beats you up and leaves you for dead and other times it is invigorating and can push you to become something more. This last semester I had moments of both sides of this animal. There were a few classes that I simply did not care about and it was clearly apparent and there were other classes that I absolutely loved. Part of the reason why I loved my classes were they helped me gain that real world experience I needed and they were heavy on strategy.

I loved my strategy classes, including one class were we worked with an organization to help them in a turnaround situation. It was fascinating and loved the tools and assignments we used in our class lectures. As a wrap-up for the end of the semester, our professor divided the class into three groups and told us to illustrate what we had learned on the whiteboards at the front of the room. She did her best to help us out a bit after we presented our initial thoughts by giving us a short list of some principles she wanted to make sure we included:

 

Some of us took the basic business diagram approach with a very professional-style and format:


Others decided to be slightly more creative and made more of a flow path illustration:

With my group I saw this as an opportunity to use some creative freedom and do my best to illustrate the turnaround process in a RSA whiteboard animation style:

It couldn't be quite as sophisticated as RSA animation because I only had 20 minutes to plan out our process and design the board but in the end, I think it came out half-way decent.

The idea is that there is a struggle between maintaining the status quo and allowing for change. In a turnaround situation, change has to win out but when it does, the markers or red flags show up in a few different places that we can look at. If we see the need to change, we have to assess the cost of fixing the company or whether it would be better to liquidate and let it die. If we are going to fix it, we need to look at the strengths and core competencies of the company. Do we want to focus on a financial fix with cutting costs or is this more behavioral and cultural? Once we have a general idea of our approach then we can follow Kotter's Model while we watch where our company is on the change curve. If successfully implemented, a company should be able to recover and get back to growth and prosperity down the road.