Speaker(s): J. Bradley
Morrison (MIT Sloan) -- Recruiting Talk
Title:
Organizational Change
Abstract
Sustaining organizational change efforts is difficult. Change processes tend
to run out of energy and momentum. As a window through which to view change, I
conducted extensive fieldwork at manufacturer adopting the practices of lean
manufacturing and the Toyota Production System (TPS), widely-recognized as a
superior production technology yet rarely if ever successfully imitated by other
firms. In the talk, I develop a grounded theory that explains how situated human
interactions account for the observed trajectory of organizational behavior, a
successful start and subsequent fizzle. I apply a feedback lens to closely
examine how people do the work of process improvement and identify a set of
mechanisms capable of generating the patterns of organizing that result. I find
that workers were actively involved in generating ideas, but the work of
implementing those ideas placed demands on key support personnel such as
manufacturing engineers. As the support personnel quickly become overwhelmed and
modified their work practices to address the mounting workload, the change
process evolved and so did the content of the changes it produced. I use a
mathematical model and simulation analysis to demonstrate that the feedback
structure accounts for a start and fizzle pattern over time. Simulation analysis
also identifies a tipping point beyond which the organization transitions to a
regime of lasting change. I conclude by interpreting the simulations as
characteristic of the transition problem in organizational change: imitating the
current practices of other successful firms is not sufficient to navigate the
dynamics of learning and adoption inherent in an organizational transition.