Dynamic Stability

To keep up with today's volatile marketplace, an organization should be able to adapt to its environment so that it is able to stay competitive. In order to accomplish the often times difficult task of continuous growth, in all its facets an organization has to plan and be prepared to change in the ever evolving business world.

Changes have been documented to have caused organization chaos, initiative overload and in some instances, complete collapse of organizational structure. One option to overcome the uncertainty of organizational changes is to develop a plan that implements the concept of Dynamic Stability. Dynamic stability could be defined as continual but relatively small change efforts that involve reconfiguration of existing practices and business models rather than inventing new ones. An organization will be able to achieve dynamic stability more easily through establishing the concept of tinkering, kludging and pacing. The practice of tinkering involves finding new applications for your products, or accumulating all your untapped resources to develop new products. Tinkering is often quicker and less of a financial burden than kludging. Kludging is basically tinkering but on a larger scale and often involves the combination of external and internal resources. Thus, it is often a financial drain to the organization as it involves tremendous effort and time. As for pacing, it is the concept of timing changes at the most critical intervals in order to prevent destabilization of the organization. Although pacing will not lead to any direct financial burden, it is crucial as it could make or break an organization.

Some of the most successful adopters of dynamic stability stress the importance of four operating guidelines; rewarding shameless borrowing, appointing a chief memory officer, tinkering and kludging internally first, and finally hiring generalist. First, rewarding shameless borrowing exemplifies the concept of imitating before innovating in order to reduce the time and cost of organizational change. Second, appointing a chief memory officer provides the organization with a historical journal of an organization's activities in order to prevent past mistakes from occurring again. Another important operational guideline would be to tinker and kludge internally before outsourcing to increase the control of dynamic stability. This modeling technique will help to assess risk, and inevitably reduce time