The Butterfly Effect is something
I heard about many years ago. I didn’t
really understand what it meant other than it was part of a chaos theory in
that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Hawaii there will be an earth quake in South
America or something similar to this.
There was also a movie called The Butterfly Effect (2004) where the main
character Eric has the ability to change things by focusing his mind he could
go back to a time period and make subtle changes. When something bad happens to his friend he
tries to go back to change just that one thing but instead it changes
everything. Each time he goes back to
fix what he messed up he made things worse.
The premise of the movie is, change one thing change everything. In this case every small change made cause
many bad things to happen.
In the text when talking about the butterfly effect we
learn that making small changes within the organization can have great results. So unlike the movie where one small change
caused more chaos, making a small change within your organization can yield
very big results. A prime example of
this is when we decided to go with a call center to answer our toll free number
back in 2010. By simply routing our
calls to one central location that was open 24/7 our enrollment went up,
customer satisfaction went up, and more financial aid was paid out which made
upper management very happy. Just one
change created vast improvement within the whole organization because the issue
of not being able to keep up with the call volume we were losing students,
enrollment was not where should have been and the stress level of the counselors
were going up because the pressure to handle so much was getting to us.
Another example of one small change having a big impact
was when Worldwide take over the Veteran’s Affairs component that the Daytona
Beach campus had been handling for years back in January of 2012. Within a month of taking over the VA, the
number of students who were able to get answers such as when paperwork was
processed went through the roof. VA
students can now rely on quick turn around on paperwork and even a quicker time
frame for getting their refund. By being
able to come together and work through issues that we were having with both of
these changes, we made a difference in not only our department but many other
departments across our organization.
By implementing the complexity theory into our
organization we can learn that we may not always have the same views and may
even work independently of each other but the goal is still the same in the
end. We can also use the Wu-Wei approach
by observing without taking immediate action and actually learn a lot about our
followers and our customers. It can also
be used to show that it is ok to let go of certain control and the fear of
chaos reigning will not be an issue in most of the cases.
We continue to make small changes for the better of the
customer (the student) and the organization as a whole towards a vastly changing
future. By adapting and embracing change
and understanding the complexity instead of being afraid of it we can propel ourselves
to the next level. Right now there are
many changes happening within our organization that will put into place a
better strategy for the operation as a whole.
Some changes may not make sense at first especially to those who have a hard
time embracing change but as it is being implemented everyone will learn to
adapt to change as well. I can’t say it
enough that if we cannot learn to do this one factor and that is to adapt we
will be left behind in many ways. You
can’t stop progress. It will happen with
or without us.
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