Adapting exercises 2.1, 5.1 and 9.2 to fit with Students’ experience (or lack of experience) of organizational change
Chapter 2: The process of change management.
An alternative to exercise 2.1 for students who do have work experience.
This chapter opens with an activity (exercise 2.1) designed to explore the issues and choices involved in developing an approach to managing organisational change. This is ideal for students who have limited experience of organizational change. An alternative exercise for students who do have some experience of organizational change is as follows:
Invite students to reflect on their own direct experience of organisational change and identify issues that have either facilitated or blocked change.
Preparation. Students are asked to prepare a one-page description of a change that somebody tried to introduce in their organisation. Points for consideration might include:
- Timing: were the problems or opportunities that triggered the change recognised in good time. If not how did this affect the way the change was managed?
- The ‘what’ of change: which aspects of the organisation were the focus of change - were the correct targets for change identified and addressed.
- The ‘how’ of change: how was the change implemented and what were the strengths and weaknesses of the implementation strategy.
Working in small groups students share their stories and identify issues that, in their experience, have either blocked or enabled change.
Plenary session. One person from each groups reports back their group’s list of enabling and blocking factors. The lecturer maps these onto the process model of change presented in chapter 2 to facilitate a discussion of change management as a process and to highlight issues that require attention.
Chapter 5: Open systems models and alignment
An alternative to exercise 5.1 for students who only have limited work experience.
This chapter opens with an activity (exercise 5.1) which is based on a procedure for collaborative model building devised by Tichy and Hornstein (1980). It involves five steps. The first requires students to prepare a short assessment of the current state of their organisation (or one they are very familiar with). The next four steps involve reflecting on how they arrived at this assessment in order to tease out the main features of their implicit model of organisational functioning. This is ideal for those students who do have work experience but an alternative format may be more appropriate for students with little or no work experience.
The alternative involves a modified first step which requires students to think about how they would assess the strengths and weaknesses of a retail company rather than an organisation they have worked for.
Revised step 1: The scenario
Imagine that you are a consultant retained by a large retailing organisation. Your role is to provide the new
The company has a network of large edge-of-town superstores selling food and related products. It is the third largest retailer in the country and has a long (40-year) history of successful trading. However, over the last three years its shares have underperformed.
Your task
Produce a list of the bits of information that you would seek out or attend to in order to diagnose the ‘health’ of the organisation.
Different people attend to different aspects of organisational functioning when making their assessments. Some focus most attention on formal performance indicators such as return on capital or share price, whereas others pay much more attention to the factors that they believe contribute to these outcomes. List as many of the different bits of information that you would use to diagnose the strengths and weakness of the organisation as you can. Typically, when people do this they are able to identify at least 20 different indicators and/or informal observations that they use, but you might attend to more or less than this.
Chapter 9: The role of leadership in change management
An alternative to exercise 9.1 for students who only have limited work experience.
Exercise 9.1 invites students to identify two change managers (or ‘constellations’ of change managers) who have been key figures in attempting to introduce and manage change in an organization they are familiar with. They are asked to use Kotter’s checklist (pp 169-70) to assess their approaches to managing change and consider whether there is any evidence to suggest that successful change managers are those who attend to Kotter's eight points.
The alternative exercise for students with limited work experience involves them using Kotter’s checklist to speculate about how the CEO of KeyChemicals (see case 30.1, pages 456-7) might go about leading the change.
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