Abstract
In the fall of 2018, the Vice-President Academic (VPA) of Royal Roads University (RRU) requested senior faculty and staff form a working group to propose organizing the institution differently. The VPA tasked the group with creating and reporting back new approaches and administrative models to address the following areas of concern: 1. To design the university more efficiently; 2. to suggest how departments might communicate with each other more effectively; and 3. to liberate academic and senior administrative resources for higher value work. The following document is the story of the Structure and Organizational Design Working Group participants’ experiences as they strive to articulate their assumptions, develop potential responses and complete their assignment. Their story, rendered in the form of a learning history, is a narrative account of the organizational change initiative told from the meta-perspectives of participants. The purpose for creating a learning history is to document the experiences of participants involved in a critical organizational initiative and to transfer the learning gleaned from their experience to other groups within the organization. This type of learning history forms part of an overall approach to encourage “collective learning” within an organization (Kleiner and Roth, 2000). A learning history may also be defined as “a document that tells an organization its own story researched through interviews and deliberately presented in an engaging fashion” with a goal to “increase participation in a dialogic reflection on past action for creating desired future practices” (Bradbury and Mainemelis, 2001).
Presenters
Douglas ThorntonStudent, PhD in Organizational Change , Hult International Business School - Ashridge Business School, Herefordshire, County of, United Kingdom Jennifer Walinga
Professor, School of Communication and Culture, Royal Roads University, British Columbia, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Value of Culture and the Demand of Change
KEYWORDS
Organizational learning, Organizational culture, Higher education, Organizational design, Decolonization
