Find a company which reflects Morning Star and St
Luke’s image of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) and reflect in your blog what
the implications are for you and your present organization (or any organization
you are familiar with). Identify what you believe are appropriate actions to
move your organization forward.
To understand this task, we
must take a look at both companies and determine what differences there might
be in them and then apply that to a third party organization. I’ll then look
into my own organization and try to make reasonable comparisons and try to
determine the best course of action for us moving forward.
First let’s look at St.
Luke’s Complex Adaptive System (CAS).
St. Luke’s Website states “We are a top 10 independent creative agency,
owned and run by our management team. What sets us apart is our ability to
help clients set powerful new agendas in their market. Any good creative agency
can provide you with a good campaign. We will help you set a new agenda” (St.
Luke’s, 2015). What this tells me is that they are very complex, fluid, and
adapting to the needs of the marketplace. In our reading this week, we learned
that cross functioning organizations are becoming more and more popular and
effective. What happens is, reaction times grow and more information is being
shared at a higher rate throughout the organization because there are multiple
lines open for communication. It appears that St. Luke’s utilizes that aspect
of business and applies it to their daily work.
Next we have to look at
Morning Star and their Complex Adaptive System. Morning Star is in the food industry and they
produce tomato products. Their website spells out their CAS this way “an
organization of self-managing professionals who initiate communication and
coordination of their activities with fellow colleagues, customers, suppliers
and fellow industry participants, absent directives from others” (Morning Star,
2015). The main difference here is that they allow employees to work together
while being responsible for their actions to an organizational leader or
someone above them at all times. What actually happens is, employees are
responsible to themselves and they are responsible for creating different
opportunities and motivations for themselves. That is unique because in other
systems, organizations set the precedent for that type of stuff. They are
actually allowing the employee to enable one another and themselves.
I found a company called Connecticut Spring and Stamping
this week. Their website describes them this way, “Family values have been at our core since 1939, and we share a sense of
pride in CSS with each new generation. Our commitment to training for the CSS
family enables us to deliver topflight products far more efficiently because
our employees are able to seamlessly interact and collaborate across all our
departments” (Connecticut, 2015). Because departments interact uniquely,
they are allowing the flow of information and the interaction of employees to
manifest. According to the book reading, “there will be a need for a more fluid
structure and so the next stage of evolution occurs” (Obolensky, 2014). Here
teams are constant but they fit the need of the organization. They go onto say
that “As a family managed company, we treat our
team like family and hold a vested interest in the professional and personal
success of our employees. Each and every team member brings a depth of
unparalleled knowledge and experience that we share every day across all our
locations with the help of our 27 Self Directed Work Teams (SDWT) and trained
team facilitators” (Connecticut, 2015). It seems as though they are
heading in the correct direction and they’ve been successful for all these
years because of their willingness to adapt and overcome.
For my current company, I think we have a unique mixture
incorporating both organizations talked about above. At the lowest level, the
controller level, each employee is responsible for creativity and they are
hired for their ability to do the job. They are also responsible to themselves
and in some cases, the tower team they are working with. Because of the job,
things are instantaneous, the “market” is always changing and controllers have
to be able to adapt to those changes spontaneously. In our additional reading
this week, one source states “Like all forms of complexity, strategy is poised
on the border between perfect order and total chaos, between absolute
efficiency and blind experimentation, between autocracy and complete ad
hocracy” (Hamel, 1998). If I had to describe air traffic control in itself, it
is living chaotically and using experimentation based on past experiences to
initiate complex control patterns. On one hand, we are operating in a complex
environment everyday while on another, we are responsible to our self and to
the company. It is a goofy thing to balance. Organizationally, I feel as though
we still operate in a Silo functioning environment. Everything is directed by
either our company or the FAA in a directive manner. What comes from the top
goes and there is little feedback reception from the actual controller level.
Because of that, retention levels are low and our organization has to
constantly worry about replacing people at each facility. When the FAA hires,
we loose people and we gain people when FAA employees retire. The problem is,
those retired FAA controllers will eventually leave again and the circle
continues. Until we open communication
lines from the bottom up and become more fluid, these issues will not change.
Issues at the lower levels are hardly ever responded to unless they are
operationally significant to air traffic control.
References
Connecticut Spring and Stamping. About Us. (2015). Retrieved
August 30, 2015, from http://www.ctspring.com/who-we-are/about-us
Hamel, G. (1998, Winter98). Strategy Innovation and the
Quest for Value. Sloan Management Review. pp.
7-14.
Morning Star; Self-Management. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29,
2015, from http://morningstarco.com/index.cgi?Page=Self-Management
Obolensky, N. (2014). Complex
adaptive leadership. (2nd edition.). London ,
UK
St. Luke’s: Who we are | St. Lukes. (2015). Retrieved August
29, 2015, from http://stlukes.co.uk/who-we-are/
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