Cawsey, Deszca, and Ingols: Organizational Change, 3e
END–OF-CHAPTER EXERCISES
TOOLKIT EXERCISE 3.1
Critical Thinking Questions
Presentation by H. Marten on how learning is necessary for organizational change.
• Explain Marten’s key takeaways about how an organization can best learn.
• Discuss any change experience you’ve had and how they compare to Marten’s
description of organizational learning.
Obeng talks about our ever changing world, how our learning has changed and the
importance of smart failure.
• Describe how you perceive failure.
• Describe how others you’ve worked with in the past have dealt with failure in
themselves as well as people around them.
• Discuss how you might begin changing an organization to treat failure more like
Obeng describes in the video.
Cawsey, Deszca, and Ingols: Organizational Change, 3e
TOOLKIT EXERCISE 3.2
Analyzing Your Organization Using Nadler and Tushman’s Model
Use the congruence model to describe your organization or any organization you are familiar with.
1. Describe the key input factors that influence the organization:
a. The external environment (including political, economic, social, technological and
ecological factors).
b. The organizations history (including its culture) and the resources it has access to.
2. What is the strategy of the organization? Is it in line with the organization’s environmental inputs
and its history (including its culture) and resources?
3. Are the components of the transformation processes well aligned with the input factors and the
strategy? These elements include:
a. The work
b. The formal organization
c. The people
d. The informal organization (part of which is the culture that manifests itself in different
parts of the organization.
Cawsey, Deszca, and Ingols: Organizational Change, 3e
e. How do they interact with one another in ways that influence the outputs produced by the
organization?
4. What outputs are being achieved? Are these the desired outputs?
5. When you evaluate your organization’s outputs at the individual, group, and organizational
levels, what issues should the organization address?
6. Are there any aspects of how your organization works that you have difficulty understanding? If
so, identify the resources you would need to access to help with this analysis.
7. Use your answers to fill in the visual model.
Cawsey, Deszca, and Ingols: Organizational Change, 3e
The Transformation Process
Emergent/Informal Structures
Output
Tasks
Designed
Structures
People: Change Leaders & Recipients
Input