Page 119 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chapter 6 ■ Theories of change: strategic management models
command and control. Rather like Rubinstein and Furstenberg (1999) they see too
much planning as a real weakness. For Clark the answer is ‘simultaneous, cheap
explorations of multiple options’ and trying not to try too hard – evolve options
ground-up rather than impose them via grand strategy. For Rubinstein and
Furstenberg, more effort devoted to problem-finding leads to less effort problem-
solving later on, and more changes earlier mean fewer changes later on in a devel-
opment cycle. Again these ideas appear to overlap, each with the other. But perhaps
the key difference to note is the Gilbert and Strebel focus on simultaneous change
in the various competence areas relevant to a business.
All of this leads one to think of time-based competition and concurrent engi-
neering. This of course was the very stuff of a wide-ranging critique of Western
manufacturing businesses during the final 20 years or so of the last millennium;
see, for example, Clark and Fujimoto (1991) and note the themes they conclude
as important for all sectors of the economy:

1 The need to achieve superior performance in product development in terms of
time, productivity and quality:
■ lead times a driver;
■ productivity a key differentiator;
■ total product quality and integrity – i.e. in terms of the whole system on
which it sits and over its whole life.
2 Integration in the development process in terms of:
■ communication;
■ organization;
■ multi-disciplinary working.
3 Integrating the customer and the product:
■ credible product management;
■ customer access and orientation;
■ leadership by concept.
4 Manufacturing for design, i.e. world-class delivering performance.
What is this, but the out-pacing referred to above with the word integration inter-
nally and externally the key?

But can you take this too far? Can you seek to move too fast, too radically? Are
there circumstances in which you need to spend more time in planning, design-
ing and analysing before you act? Handfield (1995) raises this question in what
he refers to as ‘the dark side of concurrent engineering’. We might widen that to
question whether some organization changes require incremental rather than
breakthrough change. For Handfield the key issue relates to the technology. If it
is new technology, he argues that an incremental approach is superior. Indeed,
he also suggests that his evidence points to breakthrough methodologies more
often being attempted where the product development involves an incremental
change with an existing technology, i.e. where the technology is well defined.
But he goes on to imply that increasingly it is possible to use simulation, piloting
and prototyping methods which allow for breakthrough approaches even where the
technology is novel. We see this, for example, in the BBC case study (see Chapter 14).
Whatever else may be said of it, ‘Producer Choice’ was a new paradigm for the BBC.

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