Page 130 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

Collaborating With a Community College in Post-Katrina New Orleans 99

needed to be well thought out and executed in meaningful ways. The strat-
egy development effort looked specifically at faculty competencies, stu-
dent readiness, and organizational structure that could satisfy long-term
growth and support at the college.
During the 6 months right after the storm, there was a 500% increase
in online courses at the college. This was prior to any formal organiza-
tional strategy, structure, or process to support the institutionalization
of distance learning. This dramatic growth preceded a well-thought-
out model for both assessing and developing faculty competencies as it
pertains to content development and educational delivery for the vir-
tual classroom. Certain faculty rose to the occasion and, in many cases,
with little training, took the initiative and offered distance learning
courses.
In January 2005, a formal committee, the DLIT (Distance Learning
and Instructional Technology) group, was created to address the strategy,
structure, and process considerations. Individuals who became involved
in this effort approached it from one of two perspectives. One group of
individuals expressed reservations about making change as a reaction to
the storm, holding onto a belief that after a certain period of time things
would return to normal, and any change would make that return more
difficult. The past traditions will provide a beacon, a way to sustain hope.
Mintzberg (1994) suggests that formal planning is in the service of main-
taining the status quo of an organization.

Review and Correlation With the Literature

Planning is fundamentally a conservative process; it acts to conserve the
basic orientation of the organization, specifically, its existing categories.
Thus, planning may promote change in the organization, but of a particular
kind—change within the context of the organization’s overall orientation,
change at best in strategic positions within the overall strategic perspec-
tive. Expressed differently, planning works best when the broad outlines
of a strategy are already in place, not when significant strategic change is
required from the process itself. Change tends to be incremental, generic,
and short term. This likely happens because incremental change occurs at
the margin in limited scope and is consistent with the orientation of the
organization, as is planning itself. In contrast, quantum change, which
means comprehensive reorientation (Miller, 1984), disrupts all the estab-
lished categories of the organization upon which planning depends. As a