Synergy

An effort by managers and leaders in organizations to bring about continued and systemic forms of change practiced by teams is essential for organizational learning. Yet change is not comfortable for many organizations, and it does not occur automatically.

Organizations display enormous structural and cultural inertia in response to change. However, the costs of failing to overcome this inertia can be damaging to the organization itself.

Kochan and Useem (1992) and Dean (1999) suggest that continuous systemic organizational change must be integrated and consistent among an organization's major components and designed for the long term to provide a more suitable foundation for cooperation, learning, and innovation. They call these organizations transforming organizations.

The systemic change can take place only when the technological, organizational, and human resources are altered and aligned together. One part of the system can be fully realized only when developed with all other parts. Moreover, systemic change involves more than changes within each of these parts. It challenges the underlying assumptions, tacit knowledge, and standard relationships that link these different organizational parts.

To engage in systemic, continuous change and go beyond the isolated shifts and periodic lurching observed in so many organizations, it is essential to have all organizational parts learning together. This integration results in faster innovation and flexibility to reduce the stress of hierarchic authority, centralized control, and fixed boundaries. Then the organizational designs rely on work teams, decentralized decision making, and informal networks crosscutting formal boundaries. Also there is more reciprocal information sharing, shared commitment to sustained cooperation, and a common set of values. Next, the learning organization must have a learning culture that stresses learning above the bottom line. Finally, the learning organization learns from diversity, and does not simply manage it or value it. This approach lays the groundwork for practice of synergy in an organization.