ILRHR 6620 Agility and Complexity in Organizations
Spring. 4 credits. Prerequisites: ILRHR 5600 or equivalent and permission of instructor. L. Dyer.
The need to compete in increasingly tumultuous environments is leading many companies to search for new ways of enhancing their adaptability, nimbleness, resilience, or agility. Most are focusing on flexing their basic bureaucracies and the first part of the course explores these efforts. A few, though, are tentatively exploring the desirability/feasibility of using basic tenets from complexity science to create new organizational forms that are capable of driving continuous innovation in the marketplace without having to go through internal change. The rest of the course focuses on these efforts and, at this point, the pedagogy shifts from traditional to experiential. Participants are provided opportunities to not only experiment with these new organizational forms, but also feel first-hand what life in them is like. The overall purpose of the course is to assist students in becoming knowledgeable forces for organizational transformation in the 21st century.