Friday, August 20, 2010

The developmental model (stage 2)




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Organizations go through life-cycles much like people go through infancy, child-hood and early-teenage phases. Each phase in an organization's life cycle can be tracked based on the needs of the group in that phase; learning to survive, reacting to environmental challenges; maturing and gaining a sense of “self”.

As people mature, they (hopefully) understand more about the world and themselves and develop an approach to cope with the challenges in life and work. They learn to plan and to use a certain amount of discipline to carry through on those plans. To survive, organizations need to do this as well. Features of new organizations are usually markedly different from older and larger organizations. As seen in the diagram below, the life cycle model portrays groups going through four stages: Entrepreneurial, Collectivity, Formalization and Elaboration.
These are described in the table below:(click on the table to enlarge)

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The boxes in the above diagram are intended to show the issues that the organization needs to deal with in order to progress to the next stage. These could be seen as somewhat “epigenetic”, however, the intrinsic “predetermined unfolding” quality that marks Erickson's model is lacking. The diagram does show a development from small to large as the organization progresses.
This model, developed by L. E. Greiner at the Harvard Business school (1972), is totally business oriented. It looks at the management, organization structure and leadership styles he thought was needed at each stage of increasing complexity.

A more dynamic graphic of the same model, with "crisis points" identified at each stage of growth, shows what Greiner thinks is the resolution of each.(click on the graphic to enlarge)



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In the 5 Life Stages of Nonprofit Organizations ( 2001), Judith Sharken Simon, provides another perspective on life cycles of nonprofit organizations. She identifies:
1. Stage One: Imagine and Inspire ("Can the dream be realized?")
2. Stage Two: Found and Frame ("How are we going to pull this off?")
3. Stage Three: Ground and Grow ("How can we build this to be viable?")
4. Stage Four: Produce and Sustain ("How can the momentum be sustained?")
5. Stage Five: Review and Renew ("What do we need to redesign?")
(Simon, 2001)
Simon points out that the focuses of nonprofits are not simply product/service oriented, but idea based. The power of concept and guiding philosophy of an organization is accounted for in this model.
Taking these types of business based developmental models and applying the epigenetic principles to them, as well as expanding the concepts to human organizations in the larger sense, will be the focus of the next blog post.
Greiner, L.E. (1972) “Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow,”
Harvard Business Review 50
Simon, J.J. (2001) 5 Life Stages of Nonprofit Organization, Wilder Foundation.