Page 184 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Convergence and the learning organization
is very difficult to get an organization to do more than seek incremental improve-
ments which fail. Clear differentiation is what is needed. For Hurst the cycle is a
learning cycle. What he does not analyse is how the learning is captured such
that the organization could be said to have learned, but what he does clearly do
is show business development and corporate change as a social process within
which learning is embedded.

Convergence and the learning organization

Putting these ideas together a number of points appear to emerge. The most
important is that if an organization is to achieve long-term benefit from the
learning which is undoubtedly achieved through change then appropriate
processes are needed. In fact we need convergent systems designed to capture and
create knowledge. We need to secure a convergence of the IT infrastructure’s
capacity to capture knowledge, the management structure and systems design
focused on the encouragement of learning, and corporate development processes
aimed at achieving learning and applying it in new circumstances. All of this
needs to be ‘energized’ by appropriate leadership, vision, rewards and ‘mental
maps’.
Thus we need a process which facilitates ‘productive reasoning’. At root that is
hard cognitive work to do with identifying and challenging assumptions, col-
lecting and analysing data, challenging the status quo, opening up tacit knowl-
edge and converting it to explicit knowledge, bringing in new knowledge and
thinking through the unintended consequences of systems, decisions, the status
quo, new ideas and so on. New techniques in the field of cognitive modelling can
help in training these cognitive capabilities but at root the issue is about over-
coming the organizational defences against ‘productive reasoning’ (see Chapter
13 for more detail).

CASE
STUDY Oticon

Oticon is a Danish manufacturer of hearing aids. Having established a dominant posi-
tion in its sector through the 1950s and 1960s, its performance declined in the 1980s.
It was caught out by the advent of in-the-ear aids which it was slow to develop, but its
decline was masked by the steady strengthening of the Danish krone in the 1980s.
This meant that when finally the need for change was accepted, action needed to be
more immediate and wide ranging. Under a new chief executive a turnaround was put
in place, focused initially on survival but eventually on innovation and change (from
1990 onwards).
In summary, the organization has sought to ‘think the unthinkable’. In manufactur-
ing it had a flexible manufacturing approach based on cellular approaches. In head
office a ‘spaghetti organization’ has been created. In essence the organization is an
‘internal market’. People are expected to carry out their normal jobs and be involved in
projects. Everyone is expected to be involved in projects. There is no paper!
➔

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