Well sometimes shit just happens?
I suspect that management in most large companies now adhere or at least test some form of chaos organizational practices and wants some chaos to control organizational improvement. Unfortunately, I think the application of the CHAOS theory in some cases (OURS) is out of control or at a minimum totally miss-understood. Our leaders have implemented a form of chaos so they do not have to take the blame for idiot moves all the time. Several recent cases have driven that home in my mind.
1. Issue a notice that we are changing all work schedules to conform to the regions set of schedules, then 3 months later issue a notice that now that we have changed we need to change some back to the old schedule to meet local need but not all will shift so now we will have multiple schedules that will be totally uncontrolled except for micro-management from the top on who and when. Makes sense to me?
2. Issue a directive that all phone use will be watched and no personal calls allowed and excessive use beyond set arbitrary limits will be charged back to the employee as it must be personal use that caused them to exceed the limits. No exceptions, except when you can justify that it was not personal and detail out what business purpose it was for. HUH?
3. Since you have to live in a remote place to work half your life we are going to improve the living conditions for you by upgrading the living quarters with pain, new towels and linens and have modern TV’s put in each room. But because the cost of the TV links are have gone up we are going to cancel 70% of the channels we get to save money but your quality of life will be up because you have a better TV now to not watch. Oh and we will start that work on the rooms just as soon as you make enough more money to pay for all this upgrade and we will be watching all this from our offices in the city.
4. We promise to fix the contract and pay issues due to recent changes and the fact that the competition will pay you more to go over there. This will be implemented just as soon as we get rid of all the experienced people and we have put in new people that do not deserve the higher pay and they will have signed a contract to work for less.
All these are chaotic with out a doubt. It would seem that we are left a drift and no one is driving the boat. I tend to agree with this statement that our management may have started out to implement chaos for improvement but detoured or let appointed managers make a detour:
“Organizations lack this kind of faith, faith that they can accomplish their purposes in various ways and that they do best when they focus on direction and vision, letting transient forms emerge and disappear. We seem fixated on structures…and organizations, or we who create them, survive only because we build crafty and smart—smart enough to defend ourselves from the natural forces of destruction.” Wheatley, Margaret J. Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World Revised. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2001.
Then again maybe we have no plan for chaos theory to improve and it just truly is CHAOS in action?