Introduction
>>The "Titanic syndrome"
How organizations change over time
Succumbing to the "Titanic syndrome"
The roots of the evolutionary organization
Principles of the evolutionary organization
The evolutionary organization-- an operational perspective
The evolutionary organization-- a management perspective
The evolutionary organization-- a new science perspective
A practical experience in building an evolutionary organization
Summary

(continued from Introduction)

The Titanic Syndrome

Most managers are constantly preoccupied with change, reacting to threats and opportunities, and initiating activities based on their beliefs and aspirations. They are guided by the wealth of work which has been published dealing with organizational change, including claims to understand and predict it specifically [1]. They design their organizations to "tame" change, and they train their employees to "manage" it. Indeed, the literature is replete with authors who see this mastery of change as critical to the survival of the modern company. Unfortunately, if current news sources are to be believed, organizations have not made a very good job of it. So if our capability to address organizational change successfully is at least adequate, why are things so bad? We believe the answer lies with the Titanic syndrome; once the entrepreneurial business cruise is over, managers simply do not believe their particular Titanic is sinkable.

Like the officers of the Titanic, managers do not see any need to slow their ship down when warned of looming business icebergs. When the inevitable happens, they seek to create the illusion of progress through "change management". This is almost invariably an exercise in foundational (level 1) learning [14], "learning to do things right". Even as the business is sinking, the emphasis is on the best way to re-arrange the deckchairs. The dilemma is that the managers responsible for the disaster are the same managers who are notoriously disinterested in objectively examining their own mindsets, and the part they played in the creation of the problem [15].

We agree with the authors such as Senge [7] that change-related problems cannot be addressed by managers whose mental models obscure and/or contribute to the problems. All of an organization’s competitive strategies, such as total quality control, re-engineering and customer value, come to nothing if its managers’ business paradigm is not appropriate. When managers fall victim to the Titanic syndrome, believing their ship to be "unsinkable", it will make perfect sense to agonize over where the deckchairs should be stacked. As Kuhn [16] said, "Learning within an existing paradigm is puzzle-solving."

If "education is the stem that winds the watch" [17] then someone has forgotten to reset the time. In spite of the vast sums spent on management learning, management thinking in the 1990s is mired in industrial age thinking almost as much as it was in the 1980s [6] and 1970s [3]. Because of this, managers easily succumb to the Titanic syndrome. Predictability is still the basis on which most organizations are run. In the next two sections we show that this attitude is an unintended natural consequence of how organizations grow and change over time.

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The Saint-Onge Toolkit www.saint-ongetoolkit.com was released on November 1, 2001. It is an online learning platform containing rich media Powerpoint Presentations, a monthly seminar and Discussion Group that focuses on the core ideas of Hubert Saint-Onge's Knowledge Assets Strategy. $200US for a three-month subscription. It can be customized for a CKO's corporate knowledge strategy implementation.