Exercise 2

• Failing to account for employees’ ability to learn safe machine operation methods by experimenting on their own with ways to speed up production and thereby reduce the effort they are required to use.

• Putting all employees through the same orientation program regardless of differences in cultural interpretations of organizational hierarchies and thereby missing the potential for conflict among employees and between employees and management caused by different expectations of roles.

• Disciplining one employee, expecting a modest change in that employee’s behavior but getting a massive union response.

• Changing a work process without considering the role of communities of practice on work performance.

• Assuming that employees will not reallocate work assignments based on their perception of the best arrangement even after receiving work allocation assignments from management.

• Ignoring the speed with which the informal organization can transmit messages and, therefore, failing to manage rumors in a productive manner.

• Failing to treat the organization’s dominant logic as an emergent property of the system and, instead, treating it as something that can be imposed on the system.

• Looking for one bad apple in a group as a strategy for improving work quality, when the quality of output may be an emergent property of the group.

• Conducting careful market analysis to determine whether to release a new product but ignoring the fact that the release of the new product may change the market in such a way as to make the market analysis incorrect.

• Offering a premium to internal workers for extra production without expecting the change in reward structure to affect relationships with suppliers