Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Communicating Change

Just a quickie. Sometimes you are left wondering why some companies bother to bring in expertise or even bother with their own OD departments, managers and leaders.

We have been working with a large organization who are about to go through a serious change process. A lot of research and preparatory work is being done at the moment, especially in the area of developing resilience, dealing with ambiguity and opportunity finding prior to any change. An internal taskforce is (was until this morning that is) working on new structures, strategic alignments and organisational/talent development.

This morning everyone in the organisation received an email from one of the board members with a powerpoint attachment. The email was titled 'Organizational Change - new structure'. The powerpoint with the same title comprised of 5 slides with a series of organisational charts. The email said that this was the new organisational structure. There are no explanatory notes to accompany the slides.

The entire organisation has as you can well imagine, now stopped working and are engaged in a process of trying to work out if the new structure includes them or not as no names are supplied just a load of newly named departments and reporting structures.

Many of the managers have managed to work out during the day that the new structure only accounts for about 1/4 of them.

How to stop an entire organisation in it's tracks in 2 minutes flat. Amazing.

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