ILR course instructs students to thrive on organizational change

Graduate student team members, from left, Jane Moyer, Michelle Green and Kate Sanderson discuss forging common purpose and sharing information in the People in Agile Organizations class last semester. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

By Linda Myers

Everyone knows someone who lost a job to downsizing, right sizing or reorganization in the early 1990s. Back then the newly unemployed were told that there was no such thing as gain without pain.

Then along came a radical idea: what if organizations were infinitely adaptable to change? What if they rarely had to downsize and never reorganize, but were, in fact, agile enough to adjust to whatever came down the pike? The euro, the economic crisis in Brazil, the sinking value of the yen, the hypercompetitive global economy?

But is agility really a fresh way to do business or just the latest buzzword?

"Agile, or kinetic, organizations are more competitive," said Lee Dyer, a professor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, who co-taught an executive education course on the subject last year. An example is CNN, an upstart cable TV news channel that rose to prominence during the Persian Gulf War. It used the same equipment and technology as its network competitors, but it was able to scoop the networks time after time because staff at all levels within CNN were empowered to make quick decisions. Who can forget Peter Arnett broadcasting in his army fatigues from behind enemy lines?

Dyer thought it might be useful if the next generation of managers learned how to run an agile organization and how to operate within one. So for the first time last fall he offered "People in Agile Organizations" to 24 ILR graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Even more experimental, he decided to design and run the entire course like an agile organization.

What exactly is an agile course and how does it differ from a standard Cornell course?

"We tried to create a student-driven environment," said Dyer, "that adapted to ongoing changes as the semester unfolded."

The commitment to an agile course structure, with the students organized in teams, proved to be a good way to teach them the traits they would need in fast-moving environments in the work world. Among the behaviors essential to people within agile organizations, and courses, explained Dyer, are self organizing, taking responsibility for other people's learning, being able to shift gears rapidly, assuming multiple roles and not being "leader dependent." The group's ability to live by these principals was tested when teaching assistant Jeff Ericksen, an ILR doctoral student, announced at the beginning of one class that the professor wouldn't be in that day. Everyone chose to take the rest of the morning off, instead of sticking around and taking responsibility for one another's learning.

"We had an interesting discussion the following week on whether this demonstrated agile behavior," Dyer said. The consensus was it didn't.

With help from the school's Academic Technology Center, the class established a web site and used it to share knowledge, post relevant articles and take part in thoughtful, stimulating discussions on assignments (see http://courseinfo.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ilrhr662/). In one electronic conversation on agility, Lara Cancian wrote: "Do agile organizations only measure their success against competitors or are they trying to compete against themselves?" To which Rebecca Macey replied: "Hmmmm.... You're right. Perhaps competition must be viewed from more than one dimension. It is that 'never being satisfied with the status quo' that drives AOs to strive for excellence."

An article in a magazine called Fast, on where to find the next Michael Jordan, led to a discussion on how to measure and reward executives as well as how to retain talent. The students agreed that people who demonstrated agile behavior should be rewarded, but not everyone believed that the compensation should be monetary. "Companies should practice random acts of recognition," advised one student. The "Promoting Personal Growth" team favored cash rewards, and to prove it distributed "Dyer dollars," play money with the professor's picture on each bill that could be exchanged for donuts and cider.

For a final project, one group wrote a case study of a real-life agile organization, European-based Oticom, that will be used as a resource in future classes.

The students themselves determined how performance in the class would be measured, in keeping with the principle of "forging a common purpose." Throughout the semester they rated one another in terms of such agile-organization values as "sharing information." How well they did determined some of their course grade. "Not everyone got high ratings," noted Dyer. "Your peers can be pretty tough on you."

To let everyone take responsibility for outcomes -- another agile organization characteristic -- Dyer had to relinquish the "command and control" techniques most professors use to manage their courses. The students gave him high marks for his ability to step back and let them learn. He admitted, however, that initially he was chary of the experiment.

"If it had gotten out of bounds, I would have stopped it. But that never happened."

In fact, the course turned out to be as exciting to him as it was to the students. "It was a fantastic experience to watch them grab hold of an idea and make it happen," Dyer said.

But while most of the students said that they gained a lot from the experimental course, not everyone was comfortable within the agile environment. "The course really demanded that you are prepared to deal with the unexpected and solve problems the day they arise," said Jan Tichy, an ILR student from the Czech Republic. "I really liked the way it was structured, but sometimes I found it challenging."