Details for Reducing Instability In A Transforming Organization

It is obvious from many studies that an alignment and understanding around vision, strategy and goals must occur within a corporation across all organizations before the corporation can operate at its highest efficiency. This becomes even more important in a “flat” organization with distributed leaders. Having this type organization allows transformation to a lean enterprise because decisions can be made at a much lower level and therefore accomplished faster. However, the leaders must know and understand the corporate vision, strategy and organizational goals, which create the context and framework for many of the decisions that will need to be made. Absent this understanding, decisions can appear disjointed, uneven and without purpose towards meeting larger corporate goals and once made, the decision may not in fact support the corporate strategy. The results of this may manifest itself in internal instability caused by leadership vision changes. Leadership vision changes as a major source of internal instability has been documented in several case studies conducted by the Labor Aerospace Research Agenda (LARA) at MIT starting in the late 1990’s. While this instability could be present under normal business circumstances, it most likely is exacerbated during a corporation’s transformation to a lean enterprise. This instability could be real (leadership vision changes frequently) or perceived (vision hasn’t changed but could be incorrectly interpreted by lower level leaders and thus the perception of change) but in either case if not properly managed could lead to a less efficient transformation and final organizational structure. Thus, a structured approach around a common framework to create a shared vision from top to bottom throughout the corporation could prevent this instability from occurring.