Understanding What Administrators See as Barriers to the Adoption of Technology for Learning and Intervention Measures to Overcome the Barriers by David S. Bail [This article has been divided into a number of separate web pages for browser-loading ease. You may view (and select) the contents by section title from the Contents, or click on the "Next" button at the bottom of each page.] Understanding the Components Michael Fullan, dean of the faculty of education at the University of Toronto, in Change Forces: Probing the Depths of Educational Reform (1994), writes "Why Reform Efforts are Failing", as follows: "There are two basic reasons why educational reform is failing. One is that the problems are complex and intractable. Workable, powerful solutions are hard to conceive and even harder to put into practice. The other reason is that the strategies that are used often do not focus on things that will really make a difference. They fail to address fundamental instructional reform and associated development of new collaborative cultures among educators (p. 46). "Without such a shift of mind the insurmountable basic problem is the juxtaposition of a continuous change theme with a continuous conservative system. On the other hand, we have the constant and ever expanding presence of educational innovation and reform. It is no exaggeration to say that dealing with change is endemic to post-modern society. On the other hand, however, we have an educational system which is fundamentally conservative. The way that teachers are trained, the way that schools are organized, the way that the educational hierarchy operates, and the way that education is treated by political decision-makers, results in a system that is more likely to remain status quo than to change. When change is attempted under such circumstances it results in defensiveness, superficiality or at best short-lived pockets of success....You cannot have an educational environment in which change is continuously expected, alongside a conservative system and expect anything but constant aggravation (p. 3)." As noted previously, prior success can sometimes be a barrier to necessary current change. Another view of that paradox comes from a review of small town life (Norris, 1993), which organizations can come to resemble; the commonly accepted standards may be comfortable, but if not challenged periodically by outside thinking, "the danger is that professional standards will slip so far that people not only accept the mediocre but praise it, and refuse to see any outside standards as valid (p. 55-56)." 1. Moral Purpose, Societal Improvement, Vision and Leadership Fullan (1994) asserts that it is important for education to develop a change capacity because education must produce critical thinkers and problem solvers for continuous improvement in "the self-renewing society," where "education has a moral purpose...to make a difference in the lives of students regardless of background, and to help produce citizens who can live and work productively in increasingly dynamically complex societies....[which] puts teachers precisely in the business of continuous innovation and change." He continues, "The new problem of change...is what it would take to make the educational system a learning organization--expert at dealing with change as a normal part of its work, not just in relation to the latest policy, but as a way of life (p. 4). The leader's new work for the future is building learning organizations (p. 70)." He suggests that individuals "start with personal vision-building because it connects so well with moral purpose contending with the forces of change. Shared vision is important in the long run, but for it to be effective you have to have something to share. It is not a good idea to borrow someone else's vision....Personal purpose should be pushed and pushed until it makes a connection to social betterment in society...if we realize that societal improvement is really what education is about....Paradoxically, personal purpose is the route to organizational change (p. 14)." He continues that, "Under conditions of dynamic complexity one needs a good deal of reflective experience before one can form a plausible vision. Vision emerges from, more than it precedes, action....Shared vision, which is essential for success, must evolve through the dynamic interaction of organizational members and leaders. This takes time and will not succeed unless the vision-building process is somewhat open-ended (p. 28)....Visions die prematurely when they are mere paper products churned out by leadership teams, when they are static or even wrong, and attempt to impose a false consensus suppressing rather than enabling personal visions to flourish (p. 30)." Relying on the work of Stacey (1992), Fullan concludes: "Reliance on visions perpetuates cultures of dependence and conformity that obstruct the questioning and complex learning necessary for innovative leadership (p. 139)...Success has to be the discovery of patterns that emerge through actions we take in response to the changing agendas of issues we identify (p. 124)...The dynamic systems perspective thus leads managers to think in terms, not of the prior intention represented by objectives and visions, but of continuously developing agendas of issues, aspirations, challenges, and individual intentions. The key to emerging strategy is the effectiveness with which managers in an organization build and deal with such agendas of issues (p. 146)." 2. Institutionalizing Innovation, Transformational Leadership, and Inclusiveness Curry (1992, November) writes in "Instituting Enduring Innovations: Achieving Continuity of Change in Higher Education," regarding the perspective of personal visions and the complexity of the change process: "It is not unusual for members of an organization to find themselves puzzling over the designs of their innovations and the best approach to gathering support and commitment from among their colleagues for putting those innovations in place. Knowing what it takes to put an innovation in place and what it takes to garner the support that will ensure the innovation's permanence is, in most instances, a benefit of hindsight. Hindsight is a broader view than the somewhat narrow and immediate views of an organization's members in the midst of creation or innovation. Each party comes to the process of creation or innovation with a vision of his or her own and influences change accordingly. As a result, a process that often sounds simple is much more complex and requires high levels of skill and collaboration to be successful." In their article "Getting Reform Right: What Works and What Doesn't," (1992, June), Fullan and Miles analyze seven reasons why change fails and propound seven '"propositions" for successful change. Reasons for failure include: faulty maps of change [preconceived notions]; the complexity of the problems faced; settling for symbols over the substance of actual change; impatience at the pace of change leading to superficial solutions; misunderstanding and discounting resistance; attrition of pockets of former success; and, misuse of knowledge about the change process. Their "propositions for success" include: change is learning--loaded with uncertainty; change is a journey, not a blueprint; problems are our friends; change is resource-hungry; change requires the power to manage it; change is systemic; and, all large-scale is implemented locally (Phi Delta Kappan, pp. 745-752). "Failure to institutionalize an innovation underlies the disappearance of many reforms," they write, and "changes in structure must go hand in hand with changes in culture and in the individual and collective capacity to work through new structures (p. 748)." Curry (1992, November) speaks of the tasks and difficulties of institutionalizing innovations: "Innovations cannot become lasting without a rather significant role from leaders. The direction and support of leaders are required for change to take place. And the term 'leader' is not limited to the chief executive officer....'leader' might refer to a number of individuals participating in the change process....Other factors influence change, including communication and decision making [that] facilitate discovery of an innovation's essential features. Change is a negotiated process, requiring that standards of reasonableness be met. To help meet those standards, the dissident voice must be heard; that is to say it must be part of communication networks and decision-making processes associated with the development and implementation of innovation. The dissident voice offers a test of the premises upon which innovations are based, challenging standards implicit in beliefs about the kind of change necessary to improve an organization. "The dissident voice, also the target of political activity during change, helps to create a balance between vision and the realities inside and outside the organization. The dissident voice is paradoxically the jewel of change, an important factor in the iterative and transactional processes that are the distinguishing features of the innovative organization. In an innovative organization, this voice is not stilled; rather, it is heard, serving to improve the innovative design. And this treatment of the dissident voice is characteristic of learning organizations. "Organizational change is a process that has been described extensively over the years, often as a model outlining the stages of change. One less complex typology includes three stages: (1) mobilization, whereby the system is prepared for change; (2) implementation, whereby change is introduced into the system; and (3) institutionalization, whereby the system is stabilized in its changed state (Curry, 1991). Studies of the way change occurs in organizations focus on each stage and attempt to find causes for outcomes that are often much less than the members of those communities had hoped for. In the studies, it is often difficult to determine where one phase stops and another begins, because mobilization, implementation, and institutionalization are interwoven throughout the life of an innovation." In "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail," John P. Kotter (1995, March -April), who is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at Harvard's Business School, writes that there are eight steps to transforming an organization: Establishing a Sense of Urgency examining market and competitive realities identifying and discussing crises, potential crises, or major opportunities Forming a Powerful Guiding Coalition assembling a group with enough power to lead the change effort encouraging the group to work together as a team Creating a Vision creating a vision to help direct the change effort developing strategies for achieving that vision Communicating the Vision using every vehicle possible to communicate the new vision and strategies teaching new behaviors by the example of the guiding coalition Empowering Others to Act on the Vision getting rid of obstacles to change changing systems or structures that seriously undermine the vision encouraging risk taking and nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions Planning for and Creating Short-term Wins planning for visible performance improvements creating those improvements recognizing and rewarding employees involved in the improvements Consolidating Improvements and Producing Still More Change using increased credibility to change systems, structures, and policies that don't fit the vision hiring, promoting, and developing employees who can implement the vision reinvigorating the process with new projects, themes, and change agents Institutionalizing New Approaches articulating the connections between the new behaviors and corporate success developing the means to ensure leadership development and succession (p. 61). Other useful quotes from Kotter are: "A paralyzed senior management often comes from having too many managers and not enough leaders (p. 60)." "Perhaps worst of all are bosses who refuse to change and who make demands that are inconsistent with the overall effort (p. 64)." "Two factors are particularly important in institutionalizing change in corporate culture. The first is a conscious attempt to show people how the new approaches, behaviors, and attitudes have helped improve performance....The second factor is taking time to ensure that the next generation of top management really does personify the new approach. If the requirements for promotion don't change, renewal rarely lasts. One bad succession decision at the top of an organization can undermine a decade of hard work. Poor succession decisions are possible when boards of directors are not an integral part of the renewal effort (p. 67)." "A useful rule of thumb: if you can't communicate the vision to someone in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signifies both understanding and interest, you are not yet done with this phase of the transformation process (p. 63)." "Efforts that don't have a powerful enough guiding coalition can make apparent progress for a while. But sooner or later, the opposition gathers itself together and stops the change....Transformation is impossible unless hundreds or thousands of people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices. Employees will not make sacrifices, even if they are unhappy with the status quo, unless they believe that useful change is possible. Without credible communication, and a lot of it, the hearts and minds of the troops are never captured (p. 63)." The recent management bestseller Reengineering the Corporation (Hammer and Champy, 1993) is the source of this thought on inclusion and transformative leadership: "Getting people to accept the idea that their work lives--their jobs--will undergo radical change is not a war won in a single battle. It is an educational and communications campaign that runs from reengineering's start to its finish. It is a selling job that begins with the realization that reengineering is required and doesn't wind down until well after the redesigned processes have been put into place (p. 148)." The importance of teamwork and comprehensive school improvement is stressed by Douglas Mitchell and Sharon Tucker (1992, February), that "instructional leadership is out and transformational leadership is in." Murphy (1994, April) finds changes for site administrators in "Transformational Change and the Evolving Role of the Principal," such as leading from the center, enabling and supporting teacher success, and extending the school community (through public relations, working with the school board, and increased interfacing with parents). A significant quote regarding concern about the difference between the affective domain and effectiveness, or between adult work place issues and student issues, is that "What is becoming increasingly apparent is that the process dimensions of leading from the center need to be united with insights about learning and teaching if this evolving role for principals is to lead to important benefits for students (p. 15)." 3. Learning Organizations, Adaptive and Generative Change Defining organizational learning as "the capacity or processes within an organization to maintain or improve performance based on experience," Edwin C. Nevis, director of special studies at the Organizational Learning Center, MIT Sloan School of Management, along with assistant professor Anthony J. DiBella of the Carroll School of Management, Boston College, and Janet M. Gould, associate director at the MIT Organizational Learning Center, in their article "Understanding Organizations as Learning Systems" (1995, Winter), present a framework to examine a company's "learning orientations," defined as "a set of critical dimensions to organizational learning, and 'facilitating factors,' the processes that effect how easy or hard it is for learning to occur." Stating that all organizations are learning organizations, that "all have formal and informal processes and structures for the acquisition, sharing, and utilization of knowledge and skills," Nevis, DiBella and Gould's model of organizations as learning systems is presented as consisting of two primary parts. The first part, "learning orientations, are the values and practices that reflect where learning takes place and the nature of what is learned. These orientations form a pattern that defines a given organization's 'learning style.' In this sense, they are descriptive factors that help us to understand without making value judgments. Second, facilitating factors are the structures and processes that affect how easy or hard it is for learning to occur and the amount of effective learning that takes place." The learning orientations are seven bipolar variables. "The pattern of the learning orientations largely makes up an organizational learning system. The pattern may not tell us how well learning is promoted, but tells a lot about what is learned and where it occurs." Paraphrasing, the learning orientations are: Knowledge source: Internal-External preference for internal development or external acquisition Product-Process Focus: What?-How? emphasis on what is produced versus how it is made/delivered Documentation Mode: Personal-Public individual's knowledge valued or only publicly held knowledge Dissemination Mode: Formal-Informal procedure for sharing is prescribed and required to be organization-wide versus role modeling and casual daily interactions Learning Focus: Incremental-Transformative change is adaptive or corrective versus transformative Value-Chain Focus: Design-Deliver emphasis on learning investments in research and development versus product delivery and customer service Skill Development Focus: Individual-Group individual development versus team or group skills (p. 77). Holding that learning conforms to culture, and that "the nature of learning and the way in which it occurs are determined by the organization's culture or subcultures," the authors present ten facilitating factors, the absence or presence of which, and the degree of which, make learning easy or hard:   Scanning Imperative information about conditions and practices outside the unit; awareness of the environment; curiosity about the external environment in contrast to the internal environment Performance Gap. shared perception of a gap between actual and desired state of performance; performance shortfalls seen as opportunities for learning Concern for Measurement considerable effort spent on defining and measuring key factors when venturing into new areas; striving for specific, quantifiable measures; discussion of metrics as a learning activity Experimental Mind-Set support for trying new things; curiosity about how things work; ability to 'play' with things; 'failures' are accepted, not punished; changes in work processes, policies, and structures are a continuous series of learning opportunities Climate of Openness accessibility of information; open communications within the organization; problems/errors/lessons are shared, not hidden; debate and conflict are acceptable ways to solve problems Continuous Education ongoing commitment to education at all levels of the organization; clear support for all members' growth and development Operational Variety variety of methods, procedures, and systems; appreciation of diversity; pluralistic rather than singular definition of valued competencies Multiple Advocates new ideas and methods advanced by employees at all levels; more than one champion Involved Leadership leaders articulate vision, are engaged in its implementation; frequently interact with members; become actively involved in educational programs Systems Perspective interdependence of organizational units; problems and solutions seen in terms of systemic relationships among processes; connection between the unit's needs and goals and the company's (p. 77). As these perspectives are reviewed in the perspective of our problem, several immediately come to the forefront. "Does the organization understand or comprehend the environment in which it functions? In recent years, researchers have emphasized the importance of environmental scanning and agreed that many organizations were in trouble because of limited or poor scanning efforts (p. 79)." Speaking of successful learning organizations, on the performance gap "how do managers, familiar with looking at the differences between targeted outcomes and actual performance, analyze variances? When feedback shows a gap, particularly if it involves failure, their analysis often leads to experimenting and developing new insights and skills. One reason that well-established, long-successful organizations are often not good learning systems is that they experience lengthy periods in which feedback is almost entirely positive; the lack of disconfirming evidence is a barrier to learning (p. 80)." And on team building for the change effort, "along with involved leadership, is there more than one 'champion' who sets the stage for learning? This is particularly necessary in learning that is related to changing a basic value or long cherished method....We found that a major factor in the...effort's success was the early identification, empowerment, and encouragement of a significant number of advocates (p. 81)," and "is leadership at every organizational level engaged in hands-on implementation of the vision? This includes...being an active, early participant in any learning effort. Only through direct involvement that reflects coordination, vision, and integration can leaders obtain important data and provide powerful role models (p. 82)." Professor Peter M. Senge, director of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT's Sloan School of Management, suggests in The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990/1994) another example of how culture can put a halt to desired change, and most importantly for our problem, the proper visible role of management: "Limits to growth structures often frustrate organizational changes that seem to be gaining ground at first, the run out of steam. For example, many initial attempts to establish "quality circles" fail ultimately in U.S. firms, despite making some initial progress. Quality circle activity begins to lead to more open communication and collaborative problem solving, which builds enthusiasm for more quality circle activity. But the more successful the quality circles become, the more threatening they become to the traditional distribution of political power in the firm. Union leaders begin to fear that the new openness will break down traditional adversarial relations between workers and management, thereby undermining union leaders' ability to influence workers. They begin to undermine the quality circle activity by playing on workers' apprehensions about being manipulated and "snowed" by managers: Be careful; if you keep coming up with cost saving improvements on the production line, your job will be the next to go (p. 99). Managers, on the other hand, are often unprepared to share control with workers whom they have mistrusted in the past. They end up participating in quality circle activities but only going through the motions. They graciously acknowledge workers' suggestions but fail to implement them (p. 99-100). According to Huber (1991) as paraphrased by Balasubramanian (1994), learning and information are modified by organizational culture because "individuals and groups have prior belief structures which shape their interpretation of information and thus the formation of meaning. These belief structures are stored as a rule-base or a profile which is automatically applied to any incoming information in order to form a meaningful knowledge that can be stored. The interaction between stored mental models and interpretation is critical to understanding how organizations learn. Greater learning occurs when more and varied interpretations are developed." when greater diversity is acknowledged. Balasubramanian's contribution to the knowledge about learning and technology is that "learning systems can facilitate this learning process by supporting the processes of knowledge acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, and organizational memory (p. 11)." Balasubramanian also quotes Argyris and Schon (1978): "Argyris and Schon (1978) describe three types of organizational learning: Single-loop learning (SLL): Organizational learning occurs when errors are detected and corrected and firms carry on with their present policies and goals. According to Dodgson (1993), SLL can be equated to activities that add to the knowledge-base or firm-specific competencies or routines without altering the fundamental nature of the organization's activities. SLL has also been referred to as lower-level learning by Fiol and Lyles (1985), adaptive learning or coping by Senge (1990), and non-strategic learning by Mason (1993). Double-loop learning (DLL): DLL occurs when, in addition to detection and correction of errors, the organization is involved in the questioning and modification of existing norms, procedures, policies, and objectives. DLL involves changing the organization's knowledge-base or firm-specific competencies or routines (Dodgson, 1993). DLL is also called higher-level learning by Fiol and Lyles (1985), generative learning (or learning to expand an organization's capabilities) by Senge (1990), and strategic learning by Mason (1993). Strategic learning is defined as 'the process by which an organization makes sense of its environment in ways that broaden the range of objectives it can pursue or the range of resources and actions available to it for processing these objectives.' (Mason, 1993: 843) Deutero-learning (DL): Deutero-learning occurs when organizations learn how to carry out single-loop and double-loop learning. The first two forms of learning will not occur if the organizations are not aware that learning must occur (pp. 3-4)." It would appear that the application of technology to education might be approached by some school districts for the purpose of learning to use the technology itself as adaptive or single-loop learning, perhaps even purposefully as a tactic to adopt the technology as a "new look" to supplement the existing delivery system through Integrated Learning Systems, drill and practice, and computer labs. On the other hand, districts seeking to apply technology to learning to broaden their capabilities might be engaged in double- loop or generative learning. For those districts seeking to integrate technology into learning as a means of implementing systemic reform or as a means of transforming from teaching to learning, often as a result of acknowledging a performance gap, such a use of technology would require both adaptive ("how to use") and generative ("using technology to learn") learning to occur at the same time as well as transforming the organization to a new mode of learning, thus deutero-learning. 4. Biologic and Social Science Principles Useful for Transformational Change "Rapidly improving technologies. Increasingly demanding customers. New and aggressive competition. These forces are driving businesses--and other organizations--either to learn from and adapt to today's turbulent markets, quickly and accurately, or to begin to die," writes futurist consultant Ken Baskin in his article "DNA for Corporations: Organizations Learn to Adapt or Die" (The Futurist, 1995, January-February). "This law of survival--adapt or die--is also a law of life. The hawk that cannot adjust instantly to the movements of its prey flies home hungry. For this reason, managers would do well to ask what they can learn about running their organizations from the way living things learn and adapt." Living things depend on a central nervous system to collecting and interpreting information about current events in the internal and external environment, and DNA provides information on how to react, enabling the organism to make decisions on the appropriate level. Baskin illustrates how organizations have similar information systems, but asserts that "it's not enough just to know what's going on. The ability to react appropriately is equally vital. Living things do that with DNA molecules. DNA distributes the procedural information of the whole to every part. You have the same DNA in your lungs as in your legs. All parts of your body 'know' on some level the procedures of all the other parts. When you run and your legs need more energy, your lungs know to breathe faster. Many successful corporations have developed an equivalent, corporate DNA" including information on the corporation's identity, vision, values, and accepted behaviors and where each person's job fits into the organization, and how each can work together with all. "Everything that people in these companies do arises from clear, understood identities. Employees also have access to the way the organization works when they need to know it....[These industry leaders] discovered that organizations, like living things, must adapt or die. To encourage adaptation, they developed corporate DNA, structures that offer managers in any organization powerful tools for navigating the turbulence of even the most dynamic marketplaces (p. 68)." Such concepts of DNA being instructive to individuals so that they might know appropriate reactions in given situations is not deterministic. The individual still has free will to do something different. Rather the DNA, or organizational vision, values, and objectives in a business setting, are guides to the individual for more successful endeavor, which if acted on, lead to a more harmonious advance. Such positive thinking on overcoming adversity is also shared by biologists and organic chemists, who are reported to be less enthusiastic about the Second Law of Thermodynamics than are physicists, according to Dr. Chet B. Snow (1989, 1993), who writes that while entropy must eventually triumph over all, life is held out to be at least temporarily triumphant: "Living organisms evolve from simplicity toward complex, active organization. Mere seeds or fertilized eggs are virtually formless. As they grow they acquire more and more form, complexity and order. They accomplish this by adapting to and cooperating with their environment. "The theoretical analysis of Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine, for which he won a Nobel prize in 1977, takes this commonsense observation a step further. He developed a set of mathematical equations which prove that even systems of so- called inert matter interact with their local natural environment like a living organism. They can thereby act as a catalyst to create new levels of more complex organization in direct contradiction of the Second Law. "Dr. Prigogine called such catalysts `dissipative structures' for they consume available energy more quickly than nearby, stagnant systems. They seem, on the surface, to be speeding their entire established order toward destruction. However, actually their disturbance of the status quo forces meaningful change on their surroundings. The dissipative structure's entire environment may be forced to reorganize itself creatively in a more complex way to meet the catalyst's challenge. "Further, Dr. Prigogine demonstrated that such positive change is not the result of slow, continuous growth. Instead, just as quantum-level reality suddenly leaps into being upon observation, so higher-level physical systems suddenly appear just when chaos threatens to overcome the old order. The original system is forced to reorganize to a more efficient stage in order to survive. Paradoxically, the whole order's capacity for positive evolution is directly proportional to its complexity because only complex, rather fragile systems are threatened by unruly `dissipative structures' (pp. 244-245)." Another example of individuals exerting free will while observing certain internal rules of conduct is presented by assistant professor Mitchell Resnick of the MIT Media Lab (also home to Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital ) in his article "Changing the Centralized Mind" (1994, July): "A flock of birds sweeps across the sky. Like a well-choreographed dance troupe, the birds veer to the left in unison. Then suddenly, they dart to the right and swoop toward the ground. Each movement seems perfectly coordinated. The flock as a whole is graceful--maybe more graceful--than any of the birds within it. How do birds keep their movements so orderly, so synchronized? Most people assume that birds play a game of follow-the-leader: the bird at the front of the flock leads, and the others follow. Indeed, people assume centralized control for almost all patterns they see in the world. But that's not necessarily so. In the case of bird flocks, most don't have leaders at all. Rather each bird follows a simple set of rules, for example, matching its velocity to that of the other birds around it, and keeping a safe distance from the birds on either side (p. 33)." And how do ants communicate progress toward accomplishing objectives? "In ant colonies, trail patterns are determined by the interactions among worker ants, such as when they follow a scent that their fellow ants emit upon finding a source of food," Resnick reports. The trails were not established by direction of a leadership, or in coordination with a predetermined plan, but rather arose out of communication of success in accomplishing a value that was important to each ant and shared by all ants--in this case finding food (p. 35). (Parenthetically, Resnick, Nevis, Gould, Papert, and Senge, all quoted in this paper, are all on the faculty at MIT). Russell (1995), educated in theoretical physics, experimental psychology and computer science, states that: "Synergy does not imply any coercion or restraint, nor is it brought about by any deliberate effort. Each individual element of the system works toward its own goals, and the goals themselves may be quite varied. Yet the elements function in ways that are spontaneously mutually supportive. Consequently, there is little, if any, intrinsic conflict.... Because the elements in a synergistic system support each other, they also support the functioning of the system as a whole, and the performance of the whole is improved (pp. 162-163). The essence of high synergy is that the goals of the individual components are in harmony with the goals of the system as a whole. As a result there is minimal conflict between components, as well as between these components and the overall system (p. 277)." Shared vision and values in human organizations may operate through social psychological models such as cognitive dissonance, expectancy theory, equity theory, and superordinate goals. Cognitive dissonance is a means by which an individual tries to bring his perception and the perception of others or a group into consonance, so as to reduce internal discomfort. Festinger (1957), excerpted in Kast and Rosenzweig (1979), writes: "A tendency toward uniformity results from an individual's internal cognitive patterns. The individual recognizes differences in his or her perception of a situation from the perceptions of others or from the group as a whole. The mental state resulting from this situation has been termed cognitive dissonance. The theory says that two cognitions are dissonant if, considering those two alone, the adverse of one element would follow from the other. The theory further holds that dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to reduce dissonance and achieve consonance. "With regard to group pressures on individual decision makers, cognitive dissonance could result if group action were contrary to individual values, beliefs, and perceptions. The individual may play a role in an organization and hence have a need to decide issues in a way that will be organizationally rational. At the same time, his or her own private value system may not be able to accept the alternatives implemented (person-role conflict). Because this is an uncomfortable mental state, the individual typically will engage in cognitive behavior that will reduce dissonance and result in a more comfortable state of mind. An individual copes with dissonance and/or strives for cognitive consonance in many ways. He can blame himself; i.e., come to believe his own judgment is faulty and that the group is correct. He can blame the group; i.e., the group judgment is faulty and his is correct. He can try to reconcile discrepant judgments and look for reasons that "explain away" the differences. He can accept the fact of individual differences, particularly when issues involved are subjective and/or personal. He can avoid evidence of discrepancy and maintain independence through "isolation" from the group. He can decide that he has been deceived (in an experiment or some actual situation) and that no "real" discrepancy exists. "Overt pressure to conform does not create as much dissonance as self-determined discrepancies because the individual can "rationalize" conforming behavior in terms of being forced into it. More dissonance and more change result from felt pressures that are internalized and not easily attributable to an outside agency. A subtle form of dissonance results when a person behaves differently from what he believes is right. The cognitive dissonance resulting from this situation may be resolved via one of the modes described above or by merely concluding that the issue is 'not worth it' (pp. 409-410)." As each ant searched for food because it was important to him, and as the ants also worked together because they shared common goals, so too do humans seek to find an expectation that their effort to attain a goal on behalf of an organization will result in a reward that each values. Victor H. Vroom (1964), as excerpted in Szilagyi and Wallace (1990): "Even though significant problems exist with expectancy theory, there are certain implications for managerial practice. First a manager can clarify and increase a subordinate's effort-to-performance expectancy through the use of coaching, guidance, and participation in various skills training programs. Second, rewards must be closely and clearly related to those behaviors of individuals that are important to the organization. This requirement has definite implications for reward systems in organizations, especially the need to make rewards contingent on an individual's performance. Finally, individuals differ in the value (valence) they place on the rewards they can receive from their work. Managers, therefore, should place some emphasis on matching the desires of the employee with the organizational reward. Expectancy theory can provide the manager with a framework for explaining the direction of behavior of employees and for highlighting organizational influences that may affect their motivated behavior (pp. 129-130)." The value of the reward to the individual and the expectation that the reward can be attained modulate a person's effort to attain that goal, along with the perceived equity of whether or not each person has a fair chance of being rewarded for his effort. Adams (1963, November) as excerpted in Szilagyi and Wallace (1990): "Equity theory states that if individuals perceive a discrepancy between the amount of rewards they receive and their efforts, they are motivated to reduce it; furthermore, the greater the discrepancy, the more the individuals are motivated to reduce it. Discrepancy refers to the perceived difference that may exist between two or more individuals. The difference may be based on subjective perception or objective reality....Discrepancy, or inequity, [is] the condition that exists whenever a person perceives that the ratio of his or her job outcomes to job inputs is unequal to a reference person's The reference person may be someone in the individual's group, in another group, or outside the organization (p. 130)." To bring individual and group goals together and reduce conflict, superordinate goals (such as shared vision and values) must be found. Sherif and Sherif (1969) as excerpted in Szilagyi and Wallace (1990): "Superordinate goals are common, more important goals on which the conflicting parties are asked to focus their attention. Such goals are unattainable by one group alone and generally supersede all other goals of each group. A common superordinate goal could be the survival of the organization. Petty differences are considered unimportant when the survival of the overall organization is in question. A number of preconditions are required for this technique to succeed. First, mutual dependency of the groups is required. Second, the superordinate goal must be desired by each group and have a high degree of value attached to it. Finally, there must be some reward for accomplishing the goal. By identifying and working toward a common interest, managers can use superordinate goals to provide a realistic strategy for resolving intergroup conflict (pp. 370-371)." 5. Marketing, Economic Principles, and Corporate Lifecycle Stages Organizations exist to fulfill customer needs. As Peter Drucker wrote (1954), "there is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer (p. 37)." Echoing and expanding that thought, Hammer and Champy (1993) write in Reengineering the Corporation that: "Customers now tell suppliers what they want, when they want it, how they want it, and what they will pay. This new situation is unsettling to companies that have known life only in the mass market (p. 18). "Inflexibility, unresponsiveness, the absence of customer focus, an obsession with activity rather than result, bureaucratic paralysis, lack of innovation, high overhead--these are the legacies of one hundred years of American industrial leadership. These characteristics are not new; they have not suddenly appeared. They have been present all along. It is just that until recently, American companies didn't have to worry much about them. If costs were high, they could be passed on to customers. If customers were dissatisfied, they had nowhere else to turn. If new products were slow in coming, customers could wait. The important managerial job was to manage growth, and the rest didn't matter. Now that growth has flattened out, the rest matters a great deal (p. 30). "We believe that, in general, the difference between winning companies and losers is that winning companies know how to do their work better. If American companies want to become winners again, they will have to look at how they get their work done. It is as simple and as formidable as that (p. 26)." Adaptation of an organization is as desirable as adaptation of an individual. Evolution of an organization is as common as evolution of a species. Adaptation and evolution of an organization to respond to its changing environment may be viewed in a systems context, as Clark and Coletta (1981) have done in "Ecosystem Education: A Strategy for Social Change," one of a set of prize winning papers in the 1979 Mitchell prize competition: "Adaptation and evolution as Systems Concepts represent the creative response of a system to its changing environment. These concepts suggest that all systems change over time in an evolutionary manner. When applied to the national economic system, these concepts suggest that such change should be anticipated and recognized so that it can be utilized creatively. To understand that such change is a natural process is a first step toward controlling the direction and impact of change (p. 198)." Changes in the predominant occupations of society have been reported and foreseen in numerous books and articles. One report by Russell, a trained theoretical physicist, experimental psychologist and computer scientist, presents a framework and guidance for our current understanding and future direction. In The Global Brain Awakens: Our Next Evolutionary Leap, (1995) he writes of the characteristics of exponential growth in populations or their characteristics. In exponential growth the rate of growth is directly proportional to its current size and grows at a constant percentage rate, thereby having its own unique "doubling time", which is the time it takes that population or its characteristic to double. Natural growth is never purely exponential growth because at some time or times the population or characteristic reaches limits "imposed by the physical environment" (pp. 118-124): "At some point a growing population will start to feel the environment's inability to support ever-increasing numbers - usually when it is about halfway to the maximum. The growth rate will then begin to slow down, and the curve will start bending over in the opposite direction, producing an S-shaped curve (p. 121)." Agriculture, fishing, and food distribution was the occupation of ninety percent of the population prior to the eighteenth century, having a doubling time of forty-five years, about the same time as the population as a whole. However, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution "The increasing application of technology to farming led to a slowing in the growth rate of agricultural employment, and the curve began to bend over in the characteristic S-shape (pp. 127-128)." Employment in industrial occupations began increasing in the 1800's, doubling about every sixteen years, until by 1900 about thirty-eight percent of the population was employed in agriculture and the same amount in industry, with industry being dominant over the following seventy years. Beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, information processing jobs began to grow, sky-rocketing in the late forties, fifties, and sixties, until by 1975 there were as many people employed in processing information (such as in printing, publishing, accounting, banking, journalism, TV, radio and telecommunications, as well as computing and all its ancillary occupations) as there were in processing materials and energy. Thereafter the growth curve of industrial jobs bent over in the S-shaped curve, while information processing continued to grow, growing exponentially, doubling every six years (pp. 128-129). Most recently, beginning about 1975, a new occupation of inner development and consciousness-raising has begun to be the occupation of increasing numbers of individuals. Russell maintains that the growth in these occupations could see their numbers equaling information processing by 2000, which could at that time be "bending over" haveing surpassed its peak of maximum growth (pp. 252-257). As these concepts may be applied to the national economy so as to anticipate normal changes in response to environmental changes, so too may they be applied to an individual organization, to anticipate where an organization may be evolving. The views of management science consultant Theodore Modis of the Digital Equipment Corporation in Geneva in "Life Cycles: Forecasting the Rise and Fall of Almost Anything" (1994, September-October) are presented here at length, as they would fail in paraphrase: "There are limits to natural growth, and the rate of growth slows down as the population of a product or a species nears its limit....Whether it is bacteria in a bowl of soup, rabbits in a fenced-off meadow, or computers in society, the limited resources available for a resident population are progressively exhausted. "Natural growth is not a uniform process. It consists of successive S-shaped steps, each of which represents a well-defined amount of growth....We can see two distinct time periods: a steeply rising period, when the growth rate is at a maximum, and a flat period, when the overall growth rate drops toward zero. The flat period occurs after an old process has almost finished but before a new one has fully started....These two periods - the steep and the flat - are fundamentally different and require individual attention. "The high-growth period for anything, whether an individual product or a whole company, is a time for conservatism. You don't tamper with something that works well. During this time, top-down forces make companies consolidate, integrate, and centralize their operations. Enterprises fine-tune themselves into a clockwork operation and tend to develop heavy bureaucracies. The jargon of management gurus gravitates around terms like leadership, vision-driven, control, continuous improvement, acquisitions, and investments. "As we enter the flat, low-growth period, fluctuations in the rate of growth (of a product's sales record, for example) become progressively more visible, creating an environment of turbulence and chaos. It has been shown that a chaoslike state may precede as well as follow the rapid-growth phase. These instabilities can be interpreted as a random search for new directions that will give rise to a new growth phase. "The low-growth period is a fertile time for taking risks and initiating profound changes; innovations and discoveries abound and enterprises segment, decentralize, and encourage entrepreneurship. The seasonal jargon of management gurus during this period revolves around such terms as re- engineering, empowerment, culture-driven, downsizing, and self-organizing units. "Cascading growth processes can be encountered in a variety of human affairs. Chains of S-curves with different ceilings and time constants proceed independently at all times. While the world economy goes through a long wave, ethnopolitical blocs, individual nations, industries, companies, and people are tracing their own distinct life cycles. "Successive growth stages depicted by cascading S-curves may outline an overall growth process itself amenable to an S-curve description....As you will note, life cycles are longer during the steep-rising, high-growth period and shorter during the flat, low-growth periods. The phenomenon of shrinking life cycles is an important concern of today's manufacturers. For a family of products, shrinking life cycles reflect how close to exhaustion a technology may be.... (pp. 20-22). "Monitoring the drift of the width of life cycles over time will tell us either how close we are to full saturation (life cycles getting shorter), or how far we are from a future rapid-growth phase (life cycles getting longer). Predictability of a system's behavior implies a certain amount of predestination, which is a taboo in Western society, particularly among forceful, strong-willed individuals who like to plan out the future.... "What good decision makers do more often than not is optimize. Optimization reduces free choice. From the moment you choose to strive to win a race, there is not much freedom left: You must follow the list of optimized course actions as closely as possible. You must try to stay on the course and make corrections as needed, just as natural systems do.... "Similarly, a leader's job, to a large extent, is to optimize; that is, reduce the amplitude and the frequency of the corrections to be applied. The burden of such responsibility is not unbearable. If 'decision makers' become more aware of well-established natural-growth process and of how much free choice they may not have after all, they would make fewer mistakes - and get fewer ulcers (p. 25)." Waiting for the low growth time to initiate changes and take risks is not the preferred strategy of Charles Handy, visiting professor at the London Business School, who writes in The Age of Paradox (1994), also presented at length because of its pertinence: "The sigmoid curve is the S-shaped curve that has intrigued people since time began. The sigmoid curve sums up the story of life itself. We start slowly, experimentally, and falteringly; we wax and then we wane. It is the story of the British Empire, and of the Soviet Empire, and of all empires always. It is the story of a product's life cycle and of many a corporation's rise and fall. It even describes the course of love and relationships. If that were all, it would be a depressing image. There would be nothing to discuss except to decide where precisely on the curve one is now, and what units of time should go on the scale at the bottom. Those units of time are also getting depressingly small. They used to be decades, perhaps even generations. Now they are years, sometimes months. The accelerating pace of change shrinks every sigmoid curve. "Luckily, there is life beyond the curve. The secret to constant growth is to start a new sigmoid curve before the first one peters out. The right place to start that second curve is at point A [where the wave of growth begins to decelerate] where there is the time, as well as the resources and the energy, to get the new curve through its initial explorations and flounderings before the first curve begins to dip downward. "That would seem obvious; were it not for the fact that at point A all the messages coming through to the individual or the institution are that everything is fine, that it would be folly to change when the current recipes are working so well. All that we know of change, be it personal or organizational, tells us that the real energy for change comes only when you are looking disaster in the face, at point B [after the peak of the wave of growth has crested, and decline is evident]on the first curve. "At this point, however, it is going to require a mighty effort to drag oneself up to where, by now, one should be on the second curve. To make it worse, the current leaders are discredited because they are perceived to have led the organization down the hill. Furthermore, resources are depleted and energies are low. For an individual, an event like being laid off typically takes place at point B. At that point, it is hard to mobilize the resources or to restore the credibility which one had at the peak. Therefore, we should not be surprised that people get depressed at this point or that institutions invariably start the change process, if they leave it until point B, by bringing in new people at the top, because only people new to the situation will have the credibility and the vision to lift the place back onto the second curve. "Wise are they who start the second curve at point A because that is the pathway through the paradox, the way to build a new future while maintaining the present. Even then the problems do not end. The second curve, be it a new product, a new way of operating [emphasis added], a new strategy, or a new culture, is going to be noticeably different from the old. It has to be. The people also have to be different. Those who lead the second curve are often not the people who led the first curve. For one thing, the responsibility of those original leaders is to keep that first curve going long enough to support the early stages of the second curve. For another, they will find it experimentally difficult to abandon the first curve while it is doing so well, even though they recognize, intellectually, that a new curve is needed. For a time, therefore, new ideas and new people have to co-exist with the old until the second curve is established and the first begins to wane. "The shaded area [between point A and point B, and between the first curve and the point on the second curve where it becomes higher than the first curve] is, therefore, a time of great confusion. Two, or more, groups of people and two sets of ideas are competing for the future. No matter how wise and benevolent they may be, the leaders of the first curve must worry about their own futures when their curve begins to die. Only if they can move onto the second curve will they have a continuing life in the organization. If they cannot join that second curve they should leave, but it requires great foresight, and even greater magnanimity, to foster others and plan one's own departure. Those who can do it, however, will ensure the renewal and the continued growth of their organization.... "Meanwhile, we have to keep the first curve going. In that way we can manage to live with paradox because we understand what is happening (pp. 50-56)." Understanding such curves, where organizations are on such curves, and what to do about it, is the subject of a book by consultant and UCLA Anderson School of Management adjunct associate professor Ichak Adizes, titled: Corporate Lifecycles: How and Why Corporations Grow and Die and What to Do About It, (1988), with the good news being that corporations unlike individuals need not die, for they have the power of renewal within their hands. The literature of organizational lifecycles is greatly enriched by the following work, which is extensively quoted as a consequence and as a major framework of this research. The corporate lifecycle stages from beginning to end are: Courtship; Infant; Go-Go; Adolescence; Prime; Stable; Aristocracy; Early Bureaucracy; Bureaucracy; and Death. Developed as a "diagnostic and therapeutic methodology for organizational and cultural change," the book begins with descriptions of the lifecycle of corporations including the nature of growth and aging in corporations, along with comparisons of behavior, leadership, goals, and "form follows function" as a means for determining the location on the lifecycle. Adizes then propounds his theory-- uses of tools he has developed for predicting, analyzing, and treating corporate cultures- -including predicting the quality of decisions and relating four roles of decisionmaking. Then follows a discussion on using the tools to predict behaviors, corporate cultures, and "who has control," followed by prescriptions for how to change the organizational culture at each stage. Organizations, like any organism, encounter problems from time to time; "whether a set of behavioral patterns is a problem or not depends on whether the behavior is normal or abnormal for that particular stage in the Lifecycle (p. 5)." Adizes writes: "Normal problems are those the organization can solve with its own internal energy; it can set processes in motion and make decisions that will overcome the problems. If those problems are predictable for that stage in the Lifecycle--if every organization at that stage has them, although with different intensity and duration--I call them sensations. If they are not expected, I call them transitional problems; they will disappear once the transition to the next stage of the Lifecycle is completed. "Abnormal problems, on the other hand, require external, professional intervention. The organization is stymied. The same problems repeat themselves for a longer than expected period of time, and management's attempts to resolve them only produce other undesirable side effects. Abnormal problems that are frequently encountered at a particular place in the organization's Lifecycle, I call complexities. If the abnormal problems are rare I call them pathologies. "When we look at the lifecycle theory, we notice there are many problems which are normal for any given stage. They are predictable and should be controllable within the organization itself. These problems should be regarded as sensations rather than problems that siphon energy. Management can deal with them and still keep functioning and growing. A problem is pathological if management should not have the problem to begin with, and if they are not capable of dealing promptly with the situation. The organization needs help from the outside because it has difficulty harnessing the energy to solve the problem by itself. Pathological problems retard the organization's ability to develop. They stymie and entrap the organization in a particular stage of the lifecycle. "Let us take three examples from organizations: An example of sensation is a shortage of cash. This is frequently encountered in infant organizations; however well-managed organizations can handle it promptly.... An example of a complexity that can turn into pathology is an extremely autocratic management style. This is frequently encountered in the early stages of growth, but the organization may not be able to solve it by itself. In the aging phases, bureaucratization--the decreasing ability of an organization to deal with clients' needs--is the repetitive problem that must be resolved. Since Prime is the most desired place to be on the Lifecycle, and it is not necessary to depart from this stage, whenever the organization cannot reverse this deterioration by itself, aging can be diagnosed as an abnormal phenomenon that should be treated as well." An important point to be noted from this previous passage is that Adizes believes that organizations can reverse the problems of decline and return to the Prime stage, therefore avoiding the stages preparatory to organizational death and the death itself. "Curative treatment would be to remove the organization's pathological problems so that it can move on to the next stage of the Lifecycle and experience a new set of normal problems. Preventive treatment would be to develop the organization's capabilities to avoid abnormal problems in future stages of the Lifecycle, so that no new complexities or pathologies evolve (pp. 5-8)." In his description of aging organizations--organizations that are no longer growing or even in their prime, but rather stable or declining--Adizes writes that: "the company is still strong, but it is starting to lose its flexibility. It is at the end of growth and the beginning of decline. Organizationally, it suffers from an attitude that says, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' The company is beginning to lose the spirit of creativity, innovation and encouragement of change that made it into a Prime organization....It has developed a sense of security that may be unfounded in the long run. Creativity and a sense of urgency still occurs from time to time, but they are short-lived. Orderliness prevails and conservative approaches are adopted so past achievements are not endangered. "In the Stable organization, people spend more time in the office with each other than with clients or salespeople, as they did in the past....Several changes take place during the Stable stage. One such change occurs in budgets. Resources for research are reduced in favor of developmental spending. Similarly, budgets for marketing are reduced in research to boost the profitability of the company. Management development is substituted with management training. Short-range profitability considerations start taking over. "The second change that occurs is a power shift within the organization. Finance people become more important than marketing or engineering or research and development people. Return on investment becomes a dominant performance indicator; measurements replace the conceptual soft thinking. The organization takes fewer risks and has less incentive to maintain its vision. The organization is still growing, as measured by sales, but the underlying causes of decline are already present: entrepreneurial spirit has dwindled. "In this stage, interaction between people within the organization becomes important. The growing stage produced conflict. Thus, in the growing stages, interpersonal relationships were not of major significance. In the Stable stage, where there is not much change, conflict diminishes. There are fewer disagreements and an important 'old buddy' network emerges. This lack of conflict does not produce any noticeable dysfunctional results at this stage of the Lifecycle; only the negative investment is made--the results will appear later. "If creativity is dormant long enough, it begins to affect the company's ability to meet customer needs. The slide into the next phase of the Lifecycle, Aristocracy, is subtle. There are no major transitional events as in the growing stages. From Prime on, the movement along the Lifecycle is a process of deterioration. "When organizations grow, you can see the transition points, bud and then flower. When they age, there are no distinct points, just the process of continuous incremental rotting. "In organizations, the decline of entrepreneurial spirit leads to Stable and then to Aristocracy. It is a process of increasing self-preservation and distancing from the clients. This stage can often be mistaken for Prime, particularly by those in the organization. It has the purpose, activity, integration and administrative competence of an organization in Prime. However the energetic activity of entrepreneurship, proaction is not there. The seeds of decline are on the surface (pp. 61-63). "Enchanted with its past, the Aristocratic organization is paralyzed to deal with the future (p. 69)." Adizes then postulates a theory which he calls "the present value of a conflict." Similar to the concept of the present value of money, where a dollar to be received in the future is not worth the same as a dollar in hand today, he believes that the same can be true for a future problem. In the Aristocratic organization, where making waves is not a favored activity, "a problem in the future is not as costly as the same problem facing us today. The anticipated, dreaded future might never occur....It is increasingly difficult to get cooperation across organizational lines to make changes happen (pp. 73-74)." Under this theory, Aristocratic organizations make no waves, or changes to avert future problems, until one day it is the future and the problems have arrived: "Desperate over the continued loss of market share, with revenues and profits in a nosedive, the Aristocratic organization enters Early Bureaucracy. This does not happen slowly; it is quick and forceful....Knives are drawn and the fight for individual (not corporate) survival begins. Welcome to Early Bureaucracy....Whom does the Early Bureaucracy sacrifice?...Those who seek to reform an Aristocratic organization from within often do so at the price of their own careers. The organization eventually forces them out, even if it benefited from their efforts. Thus, the creative employees the organization needs most for survival either leave or become useless and discouraged....What kind of people are left...? Administrators! Entrepreneurs come and go; administrators accumulate. Since the administrators have only to administer, the company converts itself into a full-blown Bureaucracy, with its sole emphasis on rules and policies, and no obvious orientation toward results or satisfying customer needs(p. 75-79)." Bureaucratic organizations are seen to be rule-bound, worshipping the written word, and with no apparent results-orientation, inclination to change, or teamwork. "A Bureaucratic organization is disorganized. Clients' efforts to get a decision on something are met with a request for another document....This behavior occurs because no one in the Bureaucracy knows everything that should be done. Everyone has a small piece of the necessary information... In other words, in order to make things happen, one needs the cooperation of others, which in a bureaucracy is difficult to get because the changes necessary are complicated and a single executive cannot mobilize all the people needed across organizational lines to make those necessary changes.... "Bureaucratic organizations may survive a protracted coma. This happens when they are able to operate in isolation from the external environment. Examples of such organizations include monopolies and government agencies. Unions or political pressures may keep them alive because no one dares eliminate an agency that provides employment. This results in a very expensive prolonging of life. "Real death may take years. "Death occurs when no one is committed to the organization anymore. It can happen before bureaucratization occurs if there is no viable political commitment to support an industry or a company. In a Bureaucracy, death is prolonged because the commitment is not to the organization's clients, but to political interests that keep the organization alive for political reasons (pp. 81-84)."   Next