Designing A Strategy On A Single Big Opportunity

Organisations today find themselves operating in an environment that is changing rapidly. The process of analysing the implications of these changes and modifying the way that the organisation reacts to them is known as business strategy.

All organizations will encounter strategic challenges over their duration of years in business. These challenges will come at all different levels across the company. Knowing that these challenges have happened in the past and will happen in the future, it is important to see how an organization will react to overcome the challenges.

Businesses are facing a dichotomy between wanting to chalk out an all-time structure and strategy for their organization, and recognizing that their world is in a constant state of flux [3]. For most of the 20th century they were largely focused on the static elements of this dichotomy. However, in the last decade changes have become more frequent and more dramatic, so much so that a whole branch of management is now devoted to the subject of change itself.

Every organization should have a strategic plan to achieve its goals in a limited time period, the strategic plan has many variable models. The strategic planning process that we studied needs a collaboration between the organization’s staff, board members, and strategic plan committee. This strategic planning process has ten guide steps.

Applying the Four Frames and Eight Stages to Create a Plan to Manage Organizational Change

Week 3, the lecture on Managing Change describes organizational changes that occur when a company makes a shift from its current state to some preferred future state. Managing organizational change is the process of planning and implementing change in organizations in such a way as to decrease employee resistance and cost to the organization while concurrently expanding the effectiveness of the change effort. Today's business environment requires companies to undergo changes almost constantly if they are to remain competitive. Students of organizational change identify areas of change in order to analyze them. A manager trying to implement a change, no matter how small, should expect to encounter some resistance from within the organization.

Change has become necessary for every organisation there is. World is moving rapidly towards better technologies, efficient systems, new techniques, compact profits, different friendlier environments and organisations are always in the race to reach new heights by thriving effectively in this competitive environment (Kotter, 1996).

There are four main organisational change strategies used to implement change which are Rational-Empirical Strategy, Normative-Re-educative Strategy, Power-Coercive Strategy and Environmental-Adaptive. The environmental-adaptive strategy occurs in seven stages:

“If you do not know where you are going, you will likely end up somewhere else” – Yogi Berra. Every organization, no matter what industry that they are in encounters an environment that is rapidly changing and evolving. Organizations must deal with and address rapidly changing technological capabilities, competition from rivals, and the changing tastes and needs of consumers. In order to effectively respond and adapt to the competitive business environment organizations need to have a clearly defined understanding of where the firm currently is as well as an understanding of where they want to be in the future. An organization’s business strategy provides the backdrop and context for the decisions an organization makes in response to the challenges and opportunities encountered within the business environment. Without a defined strategy an organization is forced to make decisions blindly and will most likely end up in a position where it is very difficult for them to continue to maintain their competitive advantage. Therefore, successful organizations must dedicate the time and resources needed to develop, define and clearly communicate their strategy throughout the organization.

Organizational change is a widely encompassing process which necessitates application of competencies to effectively manage. There are internal and external factors that impinge on the performance of organizations which provide the impetus for efforts to change. Organizational change is defined by Chen, et al. (n.d.) as “a process in which an organization optimizes performance as it works toward becoming its ideal state” (p. 2). In its simplest form, the meaning of organizational change was described as “a process in which a large company or organization changes its working methods or aims, for example in order to develop and deal with new situations or markets” (Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 1). From the definitions, it could be deduced

Today’s companies find themselves operating in an environment that is changing faster than ever before. Therefore, organizations have to analyze these changes and modify themselves to

Therefore, the authors consider the design step as the most important. Design is the third step in the model called, and here you should motivate, enable, brief and authorise people to pursue the change and you should identify constraints for implementation. The fifth, and last, step will take you back to the beginning of the process to complete the loop, this is the reinforcement step. Here it is important to understand that this can continue several years after implementation of the strategy. Environmental factors will decide if further strategy development is needed. The control loop will hereby be closed and the process would have to be repeated, starting with the further development of the vision (Pfeifer, Schmitt & Voigt, 2005). We argue that this step makes the model applicable to the earlier mentioned turbulent business environment.

Create urgency: Make everyone aware of the need for change by showing statistics or status in market place. According to Kotter you have to work really hard on Step 1, and spend significant time and energy building urgency, before moving onto the next steps (Mindtools.com, 2017). This will motivate employees to participate in change process.

Further internal competition was realized by the employees whose roles would be directly impacted by the changes needed. Employee resistance was a result of a failure to implement the strategy. The implementation phase was too abrupt and overly ambitious, resulting in the employee’s inability to effectively engage in the new processes and strategic intent (Bartlett, 1991, p.6). The organization had focused too much of their time on the strategic intent of the organization rather than on how the changes would impact employees (Pryor, 2007, p.6). As employees are “the active ingredient in the implementation equation” there should have been a considerable amount of energy focused on how the changes would affect employees (Pryor, 2007, p. 6). Strategic intent is something which is not easily obtained in the near-term but realizable in the long-term. Accordingly, the fast pace of change would not result in effective implementation of the strategy. Further, internal employee challenges may be a result of the organization failing to “sell” the destiny and direction components of their strategic intent. Perhaps these components were easily understood by leadership but not effectively communicated down the line to other personnel. A key component of strategy implementation is based on communication of purpose. “The elements that

Over the past decades, organizational changes have become recurrent. It then became decisive for managers to perfectly understand this phenomenon in order to lead organizations to efficiency.