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Executive Summary
Dramatic changes in the world test the adaptiveness of organizations and the people in them. Managers who can prepare their organizations to meet ongoing challenges will see their organizations survive and thrive. One of the most essential tools enabling adaptiveness in people and organizations is communication. This article examines five categories of questions for managers to consider in order to create the kind of organizational communication needed to meet the challenges of change.
Ask managers to characterize the world they work in, and many different images of organizational life emerge. But one theme will connect most of the images: change. Even a cursory look around reveals that the organizational world is in the midst of sweeping changes that challenge the adaptiveness of virtually every organization - and consequently, the people who work in and with organizations. Just about all of us are in different "boats," running what respected management thinker Peter Vaill so aptly and vividly labels the "permanent white water" of the organizational world.
What are the structures and resulting currents that make up this tumult? The list of factors contributing to the swirl is limitless, but without question it includes dynamic and evolving forces relating to:
technology;
workforce characteristics, diversity, and expectations;
customer characteristics, diversity, and expectations;
globalization of labor and customer markets, economies, and information;
and much more.
And the upshot? Unprecedented and largely unforeseeable rapids, bends, falls, shallows, obstacles, and who knows what else - unrelenting tests of organizational and human adaptiveness that will create opportunity and threat, success and failure, strength and weakness, life and death in the organizational world.
Communicating about change
There isn't much an individual person or organization can do to divert significantly the nature of the white water stretching before us. But that doesn't mean we're powerless. We can prepare for and navigate through our journey There are many proactive things that people and organizations can do, not only to survive but also to learn, profit, and thrive in conditions of constant change.
Many of the most important such steps we can take in our organizations center around the interface between change and the people whose organizational lives will be different as a result of change. Following the white water metaphor, it's...