“Begin at the beginning in organizational change”
In business, the only constant is change. Systems change, partnerships change, markets change, the business world is in a constant state of flux. Unfortunately, enterprise software applications are by their nature rigid, complex and often inaccessible to untrained users or external audiences. As such, users adapt by managing business processes with homegrown databases, spreadsheets and email. Visibility, cycle time and decision making suffer.
What is Organizational Change?
Typically, the concept of organizational change is in regard to organization-wide change, as opposed to smaller changes such as adding a new person, modifying a program, etc. Examples of organization-wide change might include a change in mission, restructuring operations (e.g., restructuring to self-managed teams, layoffs, etc.), new technologies, mergers, major collaborations, "rightsizing", new programs such as Total Quality Management, re-engineering, etc. Some experts refer to organizational transformation. Often this term designates a fundamental and radical reorientation in the way the organization operates.
What provokes Organizational Change?
Change should not be done for the sake of change -- it's a strategy to accomplish some overall goal. (See Organizational Performance Management.) Usually organizational change is provoked by some major outside driving force, e.g., substantial cuts in funding, address major new markets/clients, need for dramatic increases in productivity/services, etc. Typically, organizations must undertake organization-wide change to evolve to a different level in their life cycle, e.g., going from a highly reactive, entrepreneurial organization to more stable and planned development. Transition to a new chief executive can provoke organization-wide change when his or her new and unique personality pervades the entire organization.
Range of Organizational Change
1. AUTOMATION: Using technology to perform current tasks more efficiently & effectively
2. RATIONALIZATION OF PROCEDURES: Streamline Standard Operating Procedures; eliminate bottlenecks
3. BUSINESS REENGINEERING: Radical redesign of processes to improve cost, quality, service; maximize benefits of technology
4. PARADIGM SHIFT
PARADIGM: A complete mental model of how a complex system functions
A Paradigm Shift Involves:
– Rethinking the Nature of the Business,
– Overhaul of the Organization;
– A Complete Reconception of How The System Should Function
Business Re-engineering
"Business Process Reengineering, although a close relative, seeks radical rather than merely continuous improvement. It escalates the efforts of JIT and TQM to make process orientation a strategic tool and a core competence of the organization. BPR concentrates on core business processes, and uses the specific techniques within the JIT and TQM ”toolboxes” as enablers, while broadening the process vision."
Paradigm Shift
A major change in the way of thinking about something or doing something. For example, development of the Internet has resulted in a paradigm shift in the way people gather information.
The Most Radical Type of Change is… Paradigm Shift;
The term "paradigm shift" has found uses in other contexts, representing the notion of a major change in a certain thought-pattern — a radical change in personal beliefs, complex systems or organizations, replacing the former way of thinking or organizing with a radically different way of thinking or organizing:
• Margaret Mead, noted anthropologist, shows a flashlight to the indigenous New Guinea people.
• People blind since birth are suddenly enabled to see.
• Development of new techniques in genetics impact long-standing assumptions in anthropology.
• An apparently miraculous healing is witnessed by someone who has never believed in miracles.
• Brainwashing — conversion experiences, patterned or forced shifts in ideology and social behavior.
Examples of paradigm shifts in complex systems and organizations:
• The English monarchy with the signing of the Magna Carta.
• The "explosion of life" during the Pre-Cambrian era.
• Society with the invention of any of several innovations (fire, the wheel, gunpowder, the microchip, etc.).
• Warfare and corporate structure with the development of the Prussian military model.
I don’t really know how to explain this further by my own interpretation of some articles that I have read. That is why I choose to paste some write ups that I found when browsing the internet. I know it could help to understand the real paradigm situation that I’m trying to discuss here.
Journal Article Excerpt
Coping with consumer fraud: the need for a paradigm shift.
by Monroe Friedman
For years law enforcement and consumer education practitioners have developed speaker programs, user guides, and other informational initiatives to help consumers avoid economic exploitation by criminal elements. (For recent examples, see Mott 1993; Schulte 1994; Shadel and John T. 1994; Whitlock 1994.) While these practitioner-launched undertakings are undoubtedly valuable to many consumers, it is the contention of this paper that they would be even more valuable if the advice they offered drew upon a larger and more diverse informational base.
In this paper an informational base commonly associated with consumer initiatives for avoiding victimization is described along with its limitations. Also described and illustrated with a detailed case study is a plan for enlarging the informational base to provide more useful behavioral guidelines for helping consumers avoid victimization.
CURRENT INFORMATIONAL BASE AND ITS LIMITATIONS
The informational initiatives noted above, like most consumer guides for avoiding victimization by criminals, are often authored by practitioners with considerable professional experience dealing with criminal cases of consumer fraud. This experience typically takes the form of criminal investigations or prosecutions at federal, state, or local levels. The natural unit of description and analysis is often the individual police or agency report which describes in detail the particulars of an alleged act of fraud and its impact on the victim (e.g., financial losses incurred).
While such reports offer several advantages to the practitioner who hopes to help consumers avoid victimization (e.g., the reports provide a wealth of swindle particulars useful in informational and educational programs), the cases they consider are unlikely to be representative of seams at large. Many crimes go unreported. This is especially true of confidence swindles (Alston 1986). The victims who fail to report these crimes are often found to be naive individuals who do not know they have been swindled, and if they do, they do not know to whom to turn once a swindle has occurred (Blum 1972). For these various reasons, among others, available case studies may offer an unrepresentative picture of the population of actual confidence swindles.
A second weakness of case studies concerns their lack of information about critical incidents or stimuli that lead to consumer victimization (Fattah and Sacco 1989). It may be helpful to get an impression, albeit unrepresentative, of when and where swindles occur, but this general information is unlikely to be sufficient to help consumers ward off a swindle's sophisticated approach. It is not enough to provide a set of general background characteristics to be on guard against as this leads to many "false positives" being identified by consumers in that many individuals or circumstances that fit the swindle category also fit the non-swindle category.
What is especially needed to resolve such dilemmas is what behavioral theorists refer to as discriminative stimuli and responses, stimuli and responses whose presence is associated with a swindle situation and whose absence is associated with a non-swindle situation (Donahoe and Palmer 1994). In lay terms we should think of discriminative stimuli as danger signals and discriminative responses as escape mechanisms.
Unfortunately, analyses of case studies of swindles reveal few danger signals and escape mechanisms. This finding should come as no surprise because case studies typically found in police files have been placed there as a result of the failure of swindle victims to recognize and act upon discriminative stimuli.
HELPING OLDER AMERICANS COPE WITH CONFIDENCE SWINDLES: A PILOT STUDY
To secure needed information on danger signals and escape mechanisms, it was decided that a new strategic approach was needed, one that focused on the coping behaviors of consumers who have been successful in dealing with the attempts of confidence swindlers to defraud them. As older Americans are often victimized by confidence swindles (Friedman 1992), it was also decided to focus on this population subgroup. The first step in implementing the new strategic approach consisted of placing public service announcements (PSAs) in various news media and newsletters regularly received by older Americans in an effort to identify such success stories. A primary source was the AARP Bulletin, the newsletter of the American Association of Retired Persons, which is distributed each month to the more than 30 million AARP members, all of whom are at least 50 years of age. These older Americans were asked by the PSAs to submit a short letter relating a personal story of a suspected confidence swindle directed at them that they managed to avoid; they were also asked to identify relevant ...
Here is another piece that tackle Paradigm Shift
The entire nation on some level knew what they were doing; they just never noticed what it was doing to them, or in the case of the sub-prime mortgage lenders and investors -- never cared. The United States is now riding on what appears to be an unstoppable conveyor belt towards losing its top ranking within the global hierarchy. With such a massive tipping point, often comes a new way of thinking.
Economic Tipping Point Leads to Consumer Paradigm Shift
According to Edmund L. Andrews and Jackie Calmes in the December 17, 2008 New York Times article, “Fed Cuts Rates to A Record Low,” the Federal Reserve cut federal-fund rates to zero in a desperate effort to revive frozen credit markets and to stimulate bank lending and consumer spending.
Some economists feel however, that despite the fact that money is now “on sale,” making it easier to pay credit card debt and afford equity loans; lowering interest rates might not be the golden ticket to boost consumer confidence. Americans are too worried about losing their jobs to assume more debt, while banks are unwilling to lend to people they view as a high credit risk. People are too scared to borrow what they might not be able to pay back and banks are reining in loose lending standards, two changes in fiscal behavior that in hindsight, seem long overdue.
This involuntary shift to how consumers and institutions view and manage money flow could move this once-or-twice in a century economic crisis into the next critical phase of social change: a complete paradigm shift. The nation might be ready to adopt an entirely new belief system about how to ensure the health of an economy. Consumers, lenders, bankers, investment firms and leaders will likely have to permanently alter how they now operate liquidity levels and money systems.
http://tim.oreilly.com/articles/paradigmshift_0504.html - This site offers an article which has the title of “Open Source Paradigm Shift” by Tim O'Reilly dated June 2004. He said that “This article is based on a talk that I first gave at Warburg-Pincus' annual technology conference in May of 2003. Since then, I have delivered versions of the talk more than twenty times, at locations ranging from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the UK Unix User's Group, Microsoft Research in the UK, IBM Hursley, British Telecom, Red Hat's internal "all-hands" meeting, and BEA's eWorld conference. I finally wrote it down as an article for an upcoming book on open source," Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software," edited by J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. R. Lakhani and to be published by MIT Press in 2005”. See for more details…
Leaders in Organizations are in a position to change the evolution of humanity. For example, in changing our perception from wrong-mindedness to right-mindedness---moving from a fear-based to love-based perception---the scarcity principle of there's not enough and I'm afraid I won't get mine no longer governs. This movement can facilitate a change from the having mode to the being mode...not wanting more and consuming only what I need, thus sustainability by acting responsible. This transformation in perception no longer requires the endless search for outside material contentment which gives us an illusion of success for the intrinsic elements of happiness, security, satisfaction, purpose, and fulfillment are found within.
John P. Kotter's 8 steps to successful change:
John Kotter's highly regarded books 'Leading Change' (1995) and the follow-up 'The Heart Of Change' (2002) describe a helpful model for understanding and managing change. Each stage acknowledges a key principle identified by Kotter relating to people's response and approach to change, in which people see, feel and then change (see a more detailed interpretation of the personal change process in John Fisher's model of the process of personal change): Kotter's eight step change model can be summarised as:
1. Increase urgency - inspire people to move, make objectives real and relevant.
2. Build the guiding team - get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels.
3. Get the vision right - get the team to establish a simple vision and strategy, focus on emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency.
4. Communicate for buy-in - Involve as many people as possible, communicate the essentials, simply, and to appeal and respond to people's needs. De-clutter communications - make technology work for you rather than against.
5. Empower action - Remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders - reward and recognise progress and achievements.
6. Create short-term wins - Set aims that are easy to achieve - in bite-size chunks. Manageable numbers of initiatives. Finish current stages before starting new ones.
7. Don't let up - Foster and encourage determination and persistence - ongoing change - encourage ongoing progress reporting - highlight achieved and future milestones.
8. Make change stick - Reinforce the value of successful change via recruitment, promotion, new change leaders. Weave change into culture.
Sources/References:
http://managementhelp.org/mgmnt/orgchnge.htm#anchor493930
http://www.nexprise.com/solutions/business_process_automation.html
http://www.businessballs.com/changemanagement.htm
http://www.yourdictionary.com/business/paradigm-shift
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5001350002
http://neohumanism.org/p/pa/paradigm_shift.html
http://americanaffairs.suite101.com/article.cfm/economic_tipping_point_leads_to_paradigm_shift
In business, the only constant is change. Systems change, partnerships change, markets change, the business world is in a constant state of flux. Unfortunately, enterprise software applications are by their nature rigid, complex and often inaccessible to untrained users or external audiences. As such, users adapt by managing business processes with homegrown databases, spreadsheets and email. Visibility, cycle time and decision making suffer.
What is Organizational Change?
Typically, the concept of organizational change is in regard to organization-wide change, as opposed to smaller changes such as adding a new person, modifying a program, etc. Examples of organization-wide change might include a change in mission, restructuring operations (e.g., restructuring to self-managed teams, layoffs, etc.), new technologies, mergers, major collaborations, "rightsizing", new programs such as Total Quality Management, re-engineering, etc. Some experts refer to organizational transformation. Often this term designates a fundamental and radical reorientation in the way the organization operates.
What provokes Organizational Change?
Change should not be done for the sake of change -- it's a strategy to accomplish some overall goal. (See Organizational Performance Management.) Usually organizational change is provoked by some major outside driving force, e.g., substantial cuts in funding, address major new markets/clients, need for dramatic increases in productivity/services, etc. Typically, organizations must undertake organization-wide change to evolve to a different level in their life cycle, e.g., going from a highly reactive, entrepreneurial organization to more stable and planned development. Transition to a new chief executive can provoke organization-wide change when his or her new and unique personality pervades the entire organization.
Range of Organizational Change
1. AUTOMATION: Using technology to perform current tasks more efficiently & effectively
2. RATIONALIZATION OF PROCEDURES: Streamline Standard Operating Procedures; eliminate bottlenecks
3. BUSINESS REENGINEERING: Radical redesign of processes to improve cost, quality, service; maximize benefits of technology
4. PARADIGM SHIFT
PARADIGM: A complete mental model of how a complex system functions
A Paradigm Shift Involves:
– Rethinking the Nature of the Business,
– Overhaul of the Organization;
– A Complete Reconception of How The System Should Function
Business Re-engineering
"Business Process Reengineering, although a close relative, seeks radical rather than merely continuous improvement. It escalates the efforts of JIT and TQM to make process orientation a strategic tool and a core competence of the organization. BPR concentrates on core business processes, and uses the specific techniques within the JIT and TQM ”toolboxes” as enablers, while broadening the process vision."
Paradigm Shift
A major change in the way of thinking about something or doing something. For example, development of the Internet has resulted in a paradigm shift in the way people gather information.
The Most Radical Type of Change is… Paradigm Shift;
The term "paradigm shift" has found uses in other contexts, representing the notion of a major change in a certain thought-pattern — a radical change in personal beliefs, complex systems or organizations, replacing the former way of thinking or organizing with a radically different way of thinking or organizing:
• Margaret Mead, noted anthropologist, shows a flashlight to the indigenous New Guinea people.
• People blind since birth are suddenly enabled to see.
• Development of new techniques in genetics impact long-standing assumptions in anthropology.
• An apparently miraculous healing is witnessed by someone who has never believed in miracles.
• Brainwashing — conversion experiences, patterned or forced shifts in ideology and social behavior.
Examples of paradigm shifts in complex systems and organizations:
• The English monarchy with the signing of the Magna Carta.
• The "explosion of life" during the Pre-Cambrian era.
• Society with the invention of any of several innovations (fire, the wheel, gunpowder, the microchip, etc.).
• Warfare and corporate structure with the development of the Prussian military model.
I don’t really know how to explain this further by my own interpretation of some articles that I have read. That is why I choose to paste some write ups that I found when browsing the internet. I know it could help to understand the real paradigm situation that I’m trying to discuss here.
Journal Article Excerpt
Coping with consumer fraud: the need for a paradigm shift.
by Monroe Friedman
For years law enforcement and consumer education practitioners have developed speaker programs, user guides, and other informational initiatives to help consumers avoid economic exploitation by criminal elements. (For recent examples, see Mott 1993; Schulte 1994; Shadel and John T. 1994; Whitlock 1994.) While these practitioner-launched undertakings are undoubtedly valuable to many consumers, it is the contention of this paper that they would be even more valuable if the advice they offered drew upon a larger and more diverse informational base.
In this paper an informational base commonly associated with consumer initiatives for avoiding victimization is described along with its limitations. Also described and illustrated with a detailed case study is a plan for enlarging the informational base to provide more useful behavioral guidelines for helping consumers avoid victimization.
CURRENT INFORMATIONAL BASE AND ITS LIMITATIONS
The informational initiatives noted above, like most consumer guides for avoiding victimization by criminals, are often authored by practitioners with considerable professional experience dealing with criminal cases of consumer fraud. This experience typically takes the form of criminal investigations or prosecutions at federal, state, or local levels. The natural unit of description and analysis is often the individual police or agency report which describes in detail the particulars of an alleged act of fraud and its impact on the victim (e.g., financial losses incurred).
While such reports offer several advantages to the practitioner who hopes to help consumers avoid victimization (e.g., the reports provide a wealth of swindle particulars useful in informational and educational programs), the cases they consider are unlikely to be representative of seams at large. Many crimes go unreported. This is especially true of confidence swindles (Alston 1986). The victims who fail to report these crimes are often found to be naive individuals who do not know they have been swindled, and if they do, they do not know to whom to turn once a swindle has occurred (Blum 1972). For these various reasons, among others, available case studies may offer an unrepresentative picture of the population of actual confidence swindles.
A second weakness of case studies concerns their lack of information about critical incidents or stimuli that lead to consumer victimization (Fattah and Sacco 1989). It may be helpful to get an impression, albeit unrepresentative, of when and where swindles occur, but this general information is unlikely to be sufficient to help consumers ward off a swindle's sophisticated approach. It is not enough to provide a set of general background characteristics to be on guard against as this leads to many "false positives" being identified by consumers in that many individuals or circumstances that fit the swindle category also fit the non-swindle category.
What is especially needed to resolve such dilemmas is what behavioral theorists refer to as discriminative stimuli and responses, stimuli and responses whose presence is associated with a swindle situation and whose absence is associated with a non-swindle situation (Donahoe and Palmer 1994). In lay terms we should think of discriminative stimuli as danger signals and discriminative responses as escape mechanisms.
Unfortunately, analyses of case studies of swindles reveal few danger signals and escape mechanisms. This finding should come as no surprise because case studies typically found in police files have been placed there as a result of the failure of swindle victims to recognize and act upon discriminative stimuli.
HELPING OLDER AMERICANS COPE WITH CONFIDENCE SWINDLES: A PILOT STUDY
To secure needed information on danger signals and escape mechanisms, it was decided that a new strategic approach was needed, one that focused on the coping behaviors of consumers who have been successful in dealing with the attempts of confidence swindlers to defraud them. As older Americans are often victimized by confidence swindles (Friedman 1992), it was also decided to focus on this population subgroup. The first step in implementing the new strategic approach consisted of placing public service announcements (PSAs) in various news media and newsletters regularly received by older Americans in an effort to identify such success stories. A primary source was the AARP Bulletin, the newsletter of the American Association of Retired Persons, which is distributed each month to the more than 30 million AARP members, all of whom are at least 50 years of age. These older Americans were asked by the PSAs to submit a short letter relating a personal story of a suspected confidence swindle directed at them that they managed to avoid; they were also asked to identify relevant ...
Here is another piece that tackle Paradigm Shift
The entire nation on some level knew what they were doing; they just never noticed what it was doing to them, or in the case of the sub-prime mortgage lenders and investors -- never cared. The United States is now riding on what appears to be an unstoppable conveyor belt towards losing its top ranking within the global hierarchy. With such a massive tipping point, often comes a new way of thinking.
Economic Tipping Point Leads to Consumer Paradigm Shift
According to Edmund L. Andrews and Jackie Calmes in the December 17, 2008 New York Times article, “Fed Cuts Rates to A Record Low,” the Federal Reserve cut federal-fund rates to zero in a desperate effort to revive frozen credit markets and to stimulate bank lending and consumer spending.
Some economists feel however, that despite the fact that money is now “on sale,” making it easier to pay credit card debt and afford equity loans; lowering interest rates might not be the golden ticket to boost consumer confidence. Americans are too worried about losing their jobs to assume more debt, while banks are unwilling to lend to people they view as a high credit risk. People are too scared to borrow what they might not be able to pay back and banks are reining in loose lending standards, two changes in fiscal behavior that in hindsight, seem long overdue.
This involuntary shift to how consumers and institutions view and manage money flow could move this once-or-twice in a century economic crisis into the next critical phase of social change: a complete paradigm shift. The nation might be ready to adopt an entirely new belief system about how to ensure the health of an economy. Consumers, lenders, bankers, investment firms and leaders will likely have to permanently alter how they now operate liquidity levels and money systems.
http://tim.oreilly.com/articles/paradigmshift_0504.html - This site offers an article which has the title of “Open Source Paradigm Shift” by Tim O'Reilly dated June 2004. He said that “This article is based on a talk that I first gave at Warburg-Pincus' annual technology conference in May of 2003. Since then, I have delivered versions of the talk more than twenty times, at locations ranging from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the UK Unix User's Group, Microsoft Research in the UK, IBM Hursley, British Telecom, Red Hat's internal "all-hands" meeting, and BEA's eWorld conference. I finally wrote it down as an article for an upcoming book on open source," Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software," edited by J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. R. Lakhani and to be published by MIT Press in 2005”. See for more details…
Leaders in Organizations are in a position to change the evolution of humanity. For example, in changing our perception from wrong-mindedness to right-mindedness---moving from a fear-based to love-based perception---the scarcity principle of there's not enough and I'm afraid I won't get mine no longer governs. This movement can facilitate a change from the having mode to the being mode...not wanting more and consuming only what I need, thus sustainability by acting responsible. This transformation in perception no longer requires the endless search for outside material contentment which gives us an illusion of success for the intrinsic elements of happiness, security, satisfaction, purpose, and fulfillment are found within.
John P. Kotter's 8 steps to successful change:
John Kotter's highly regarded books 'Leading Change' (1995) and the follow-up 'The Heart Of Change' (2002) describe a helpful model for understanding and managing change. Each stage acknowledges a key principle identified by Kotter relating to people's response and approach to change, in which people see, feel and then change (see a more detailed interpretation of the personal change process in John Fisher's model of the process of personal change): Kotter's eight step change model can be summarised as:
1. Increase urgency - inspire people to move, make objectives real and relevant.
2. Build the guiding team - get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels.
3. Get the vision right - get the team to establish a simple vision and strategy, focus on emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency.
4. Communicate for buy-in - Involve as many people as possible, communicate the essentials, simply, and to appeal and respond to people's needs. De-clutter communications - make technology work for you rather than against.
5. Empower action - Remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders - reward and recognise progress and achievements.
6. Create short-term wins - Set aims that are easy to achieve - in bite-size chunks. Manageable numbers of initiatives. Finish current stages before starting new ones.
7. Don't let up - Foster and encourage determination and persistence - ongoing change - encourage ongoing progress reporting - highlight achieved and future milestones.
8. Make change stick - Reinforce the value of successful change via recruitment, promotion, new change leaders. Weave change into culture.
Sources/References:
http://managementhelp.org/mgmnt/orgchnge.htm#anchor493930
http://www.nexprise.com/solutions/business_process_automation.html
http://www.businessballs.com/changemanagement.htm
http://www.yourdictionary.com/business/paradigm-shift
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5001350002
http://neohumanism.org/p/pa/paradigm_shift.html
http://americanaffairs.suite101.com/article.cfm/economic_tipping_point_leads_to_paradigm_shift
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