Research and Insights Archive

Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations

Reflections: Sociotechnical Systems Design and Organization Change

This paper by William Pasmore, Ph.D. (Center for Creative Leadership), Stu Winby (Spring), Sue Mohrman, Ph.D. (CEO) traces the evolution of sociotechnical systems design from its origins in the coal mines of Great Britain to the present day and beyond, into our digital future.

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Adapting to Disruption: Frameworks and Lessons from the Field

In this webinar, Chris Worley and Sue Mohrman from USC’s Center for Effective Organizations and Beth Gunderson, Senior Director of Organization Capabilities at General Mills, will present field based learning and new frameworks for continual transformation. General Mills, like all processed foods companies, has been exposed to severe industry disruption. Beth will discuss approaches they have taken through the lens of the new models and frameworks that are needed to routinely respond to disruption.

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HR Analysts: Unleash Your Inner Storyteller

HR Analysts: Unleash Your Inner Storyteller

John Boudreau shares how telling a story is well-recognized as essential to HR analytics and acknowledges that “insight” is at the top of the data analytics pyramid after data becomes information. HR analytics systems even offer pre-programmed storylines with deeper analysis.

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Weaving Change Capability into the Fabric of the Organization

Organizations are in the midst of fundamental shifts in how they are managed and designed. They are being forced to compete in an environment full of moving pieces, activist stakeholders, and volatile marketplaces. Chris Worley, Sue Mohrman, and special guest Becky Spears (Oracle) discuss these issues.

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Top-down, bottom-up, outside-in, and from the middle out: Where traditional change processes fall short, 12/12/14, recording/slides

Eric Severson, Senior Vice President, Global Talent Solutions at Gap, Inc., talked about the integration of the many vectors of change that have been simultaneously unfolding as Gap Inc. has worked to achieve sustainable effectiveness as defined by business/financial and market success, meeting the needs of today’s global workforce, and pursuing world-leading corporate responsibility.

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Are Monetary Rewards Compatible with Lean Systems?

Gerald E. Ledford, Jr. (CEO) argues here that the lack of attention to rewards in the lean systems literature is a mistake. Decades of academic research confirm that pay exerts powerful effects on employee attitudes and behavior.

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So you Want to be Agile? Find a Balance Between “Fat” and “Muscle”, 1/10/2013

In this webinar, Chris Worley and Sue Mohrman will describe their learnings about designing organizations for agility. There are many paradoxes inherent in such designs. Agility requires accepting a certain amount of slack that absorbs the risk of investing in their future while relentlessly driving down costs in present operations; experimenting on the one hand while systematically incorporating what is learned on the other; and developing people to be ready for the future while making them expert in the present. In agile organizations, change is routine.

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Beyond Change Management: From Traditional Phase Models to More Robust Models of Transformation Amidst Chaos, 2/7/2011

Chris Worley and Sue Mohrman highlighted the characteristics of more advanced models of continuous change and transformation suitable in today’s complex and dynamic environments. They noted that many organizations faced with overlapping cycles of changes that may or may not be nicely integrated in a neat and tidy model and that cannot be fully aligned, and also that an organization’s resilience is based on creating and preserving diversity in talent, strategies, and systems.

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The Organizational Sustainability Journey: Introduction to the Special Issue

Susan A. Mohrman (CEO) and Christopher G. Worley (CEO) share how sustainability has become a prominent topic in the popular press, corporate boardrooms, political arenas, and academia. Conversations and debates about what it is, why it is important, what should be done about it, and how quickly we should act are pervasive.

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Agility and Organization Design: A Diagnostic Framework

This article by Christopher G. Worley (CEO) and Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) describes one comprehensive agility framework called “built to change” and the diagnostic process developed to assess an organization’s agility.

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