O2C Solutions Blog Blog: Transforming Organisations using Kotter and Tuckman

Transforming Organisations using Kotter and TuckmanApril 16, 2015OrganisationsAn organisation is a social unit of people that is structured and managed to meet a need or to pursue collective goals. All organisations have a management structure that determines relationships between the different activities and the members, and subdivides and assigns roles, responsibilities, and authority to carry out different tasks. Organisations are open systems--they affect and are affected by their environment. Organisations are underpinned by culture. CultureCulture in organisational terms relates to what is shared between people from that organisation such as beliefs, values, methods of operating, behaviours, language, traditions, meaning and sense-making. Just as cement binds bricks to form a house, culture operates the same way for people within an organisation. Organisational history and the nature of the work form part of this cultural context for an organisation. For example, the nature of police work and political work differ just as the history of aviation differs to the history of the ambulance industry.Useful references in this regard are:Schein, EH 1996, 'Three Cultures of Management: Key to Organisational Learning', Sloan Management Review, Fall, pp. 9-20.Schein, EH 2010, Organisational culture and leadership 4th Edition, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Chaos and DisorderAn organisation is the containment of chaos through order (structure, rules, roles, processes). Change is like chaos or disorder and, from the second law of thermodynamics, a system within an environment - like an organisation - may decrease disorder provided the environment increases by at least the same amount: a bit like displacement - the disorder has to go somewhere. Alternatively, the disorder may re-order and reform the individual parts of the organisation without external impact.Clearly, just allowing disorder to occur in an organisation without a process is akin to letting a bull loose in a china shop - who knows what will happen! So, understanding the context of the change, the organisational culture and associating an appropriate process for transformation are essential elements to organisational progress or producing order from chaos.So, we need a process...