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Adaptive Capacity in Project Teams (Edson & Metcalf)
Organizational resilience has become critical in today’s environment. According to Engelhardt and Simmons (2002): “The need for organizational flexibility to accommodate a changing world is well understood. Today’s high-velocity and competitive markets apply added pressure to adapt rapidly and perform at high levels. Technology is opening up new ways to compete while making old ways obsolete. These trends are recognized in strategic management theories that focus on constant change and speed” (p. 113). Some project teams were adept at overcoming adversity, while others were not. The project teams that adapted to environmental constraints were able to modify their behaviors to meet goals without losing their function, while others were not.…
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The dilemmas of a service economy
One of the biggest challenges we face at the moment is the shift towards a service economy. Depending on the statistics that you read, about 70% of American jobs, and 80% of US GDP, are based on services. It’s not much different for many other “developed” (3rd World, OECD…) countries. That information, though, only generates a lot more questions. For instance: What constitutes services? The answer varies a great deal. In the broadest economic terms, activities get lumped into two very general categories: goods and services. Everything that is not a physical product can be considered a service. Those get categorized and counted quite differently, though, by different organizations and…
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Dialogue and Ecological Engineering
The ways in which we envision or understand systems determine much about the ways in which we attempt to affect them. The industrial era created a concept of organizations which mirrored the machines on which it was built. An efficient organization was to run like “ a well-oiled machine.” A clear division of labor improved efficiency and productivity. Frederick Taylor’s program of Scientific Management further optimized each task through isolation and measurement. In work with human organizations and institutions, it appeared that this debate might have been resolved with the shift from a mechanistic to an organismic metaphor view. In reality it only seems to have created additional confusion. Very…