End-of-Chapter Exercises
Toolkit Exercise 3.1
Critical Thinking Questions
How Organizations Change – Henrik Marten. – Video of 7.07 minutes
Presentation by H. Marten on how learning is necessary for organizational change.
· Explain Marten’s key takeaways about how an organization can best learn.
· Discuss any change experience you’ve had and how they compare to Marten’s description of organizational learning.
Eddie Obeng: Smart Failure for a Fast-Changing World – Video of 12:33 minutes
Obeng talks about our ever changing world, how our learning has changed and the importance of smart failure.
· Describe how you perceive failure.
· Describe how others you’ve worked with in the past have dealt with failure in themselves as well as people around them.
· Discuss how you might begin changing an organization to treat failure more like Obeng describes in the video.
Toolkit Exercise 3.2
Analyzing Your Organization Using Nadler and Tushman’s Model
Use the congruence model to describe your organization or any organization you are familiar with.
Describe the key input factors that influence the organization:
The external environment (including political, economic, social, technological and ecological factors).
The organizations history (including its culture) and the resources it has access to.
What is the strategy of the organization? Is it in line with the organization’s environmental inputs and its history (including its culture) and resources?
Are the components of the transformation processes well aligned with the input factors and the strategy? These elements include:
The work
The formal organization
The people
The informal organization (part of which is the culture that manifests itself in different parts of the organization.
How do they interact with one another in ways that influence the outputs produced by the organization?
4. What outputs are being achieved? Are these the desired outputs?
When you evaluate your organization’s outputs at the individual, group, and organizational levels, what issues should the organization address?
Are there any aspects of how your organization works that you have difficulty understanding? If so, identify the resources you would need to access to help with this analysis.
