Page 85 - The Resilient Organization

72 Part Two: Step 1. Managing the Consequences of Past Performance

JavaStation: “Until the JavaStation, I had thought engineering was as reli-
able as rain, but now I was skeptical.” This unexpected “engineering” fail-
ure then caused the sales organization promoting the JavaStation to lose
credibility with its clients: “A lot of field reps were burned by all the flux
with the JavaStation. The joke in our group was ‘Yeah, I know we said we
would have the product, but we lied.’” When the salespeople were expected
to try to sell the Sun Ray, they felt they could no longer trust engineering:
why would the Sun Ray, which they associated with the JavaStation, work
any better? The technological differences were ignored as emotions of bro-
ken trust and feelings of their own reduced credibility among clients came
to the surface. Indeed, this traumatic experience may likely have interfered
with the crafting of a solid marketing and sales strategy, one of the Sun Ray
group’s noted weaknesses in its attempts to develop a reference client base
for its novel computing solution.

Demotivation Is Contagious (and Affects Even Those
without the Traumatic Experience)

At a critical moment in the Sun Ray product launch, the JavaStation merg-
er with the Sun Ray group brought two teams together that until then had
been fierce competitors. Some antipathy was sure to result that was not
beneficial for the integration of the two teams. But more importantly, it
brought together a team that had recently undergone the traumatic
JavaStation experience with a team that had not.
As one member of the Sun Ray team recalled, people moving from the
JavaStation team brought along “a culture of failure” to the Sun Ray team
that had finessed an intimate working style resembling an ambitious start-up.
Every Monday morning, for example, the Sun Ray team had been holding a
meeting during which plans for the week were collegially discussed and prob-
lems addressed in real time. This style of working was no longer possible after
the team suddenly became 10 times its prior size. Thus the merger was not
only disruptive in (lack of entrepreneurial) spirit, but it also forced a change
in the working routines of the group that now had to decide how to take
advantage of the many more (and perhaps less focused) people on its team.
As evidenced in our interviews, these changes caused feelings of trauma
in the Sun Ray team. Thus, trauma can travel (see Barsade, 2002;