Scenario

Eagle Aviation Industries

Understand Your Roles in Eagle Aviation Industries

Leadership and Organizational Design Overview (ERAU/3:03)

Throughout this class, we'll be using a fictitious but realistic electric aircraft company as our context for organizational structure and design. That company is Eagle Aviation Industries which you'll read a bit about below.

During the simulation, you'll act as a leader of Eagle Aviation Industries in the individual assignments. The entire class will be a part of the Advisory Board and in the discussion assignments, you will act as an Advisory Board Member. Refer to the details on the Advisory Board Meetings to understand the difference between your leader role and role as an Advisory Board Member.

We'll start our simulation in Module 3 as Eagle Aviation Industries is just launching as a new or start-up company. From there on, we'll work with Eagle Aviation Industries as it evolves through the organizational life cycle. We will leverage our experience and analytical skills to infer what the organization's architecture must look like at each stage of the life cycle.

In doing so, we'll make logical inferences about the processes, systems, and infrastructures that must be behind the scenes to make Eagle Aviation Industries business units, its systems research and development, its logistics operations, and other company functions as it evolves and changes through the life cycle.

As a scenario, we'll look at current events, at the time you're taking this course. There may be significant events happening in the world that affect the company, the aviation and aerospace industry as a whole, or the markets that Eagle Aviation Industries serves. These may be opportunities for growth or other strategic, tactical, or operational challenges that the company needs to recognize and embrace - or distance itself from. As a course-long business simulation, let the real here-and-now provide your context and your scenario!

Please read through all sections before proceeding to the next page, and refer back whenever necessary.

Your Leader Role: Lead Eagle Aviation Industries from the start

You will begin your leadership at Eagle Aviation Industries in Module 3 as the company launches. In Modules 3 through 7, Eagle Aviation Industries will be faced with challenges as it moves through the organizational life cycle. Your job as a leader is to design, implement, and lead strategies for the organizational structure and design to evolve as the company does. This work will be done with the individual assignments in each of those modules.

Please proceed to the Your Advisory Board Role: Provide Expert Advice for Eagle Aviation Industries Leaders section.

Your Advisory Board Role: Provide Expert Advice for Eagle Aviation Industries Leaders

Leaders, especially CEOs, quickly learn how lonely it can be at the top. In many cases, you may be the sole employee when your venture is first created. When it grows and you have a more complex organization with a sizeable staff, accountability for success still rests mainly on your shoulders.
As a leader, employees look to you for guidance and vision. Investors expect you to successfully manage the company and provide them with an excellent return on their investment. When dealing with a difficult situation or approaching uncharted territory, the leader may often feel isolated.

It is for these reasons that leaders often form a Board of Advisors to give them guidance or expertise. An increasing number of organizations are forming Advisory Boards. A strong Advisory Board is made up of subject matter specialists that can help with gaps in knowledge. They are not responsible for the governance of the company or represent its shareholders. Rather, the Board of Advisors exists to deliver advice to the key leaders of the organization.
In the discussion assignments, you will act as an Advisory Board member for Eagle Aviation Industries. The discussion assignments will be formatted as Advisory Board Meetings, where you and your fellow Advisory Board Members (your classmates) will provide guidance and expertise for Eagle Aviation Industries.

Your Mission...

...which you accepted by coming on board this course, is to develop the skills and outlooks, the mindsets, and the perspectives necessary to assist your company in dealing with changes and restructuring as it evolves through its life cycle.

Advisory Board Meeting

A Different Approach to Discussions

This course places you into a business simulation in which each student is a leader at Eagle Aviation Industries, which begins as a start-up firm and follows the organizational life-cycle as it grows and develops. For the discussion activities, all students are part of the Advisory Board for Eagle Aviation Industries where you will be tasked with providing guidance for Eagle Aviation Industries as they face various structural and design challenges for the organization. The Advisory Board Meetings, which are the discussion activities, provide you opportunities for ideas and collaborations on your leadership strategies for Eagle Aviation Industries. Thus, you will be taking on two different roles with Eagle Aviation Industries in this course—as an Advisory Board Member and as a leader within the organization. This simulation - this course - therefore brings a unique set of conditions and processes into play, which we will use to support your learning journey as a student and for your leadership development.

Instead of "discussions," we'll be using the Canvas Discussion tools to host and conduct Advisory Board Meetings. In these activities, you will adopt the role of an Advisory Board Member for Eagle Aviation Industries. An Advisory Board is a group of experts who provide the organization and its leaders with expert advice. Advisory Boards have no formal authority and responsibility, and their members are not company directors. Advisory Boards do not take part in corporate governance but only provide advice.

In your assignments, you then will adopt the role of a leader in Eagle Aviation Industries, where you can leverage the expert advice in the Advisory Board meetings to make your decisions for Eagle Aviation Industries.

You will each come and go in this conversation, as week by week the "Advisory Board" - the entire class - applies the concepts and ideas to the task of leading an organization through the various stages of the organizational life cycle. That's the purpose of these meetings.

At the Advisory Board Level (across the entire class) where you provide expert advice on the various tasks and challenges, Eagle Aviation Industries is facing. This is done in the discussion activities.
At the leadership level, where you are part of the leadership team at Eagle Aviation Industries use the expert advice from the Advisory Board, your knowledge, and the organizational resources (course materials) to complete your individual assignments.

Your Responsibility as an Advisory Board Member

This means that your success as a meeting participant requires that you:

COME PREPARED. Read up on the topics raised in the agenda. Think more in-depth than the first surface - use the "Five Whys" or Kipling's Six Wise Men (Who, What, Where, When, How, and Why) to peel the layers of the topic back. Look for implications. Hypothesize.
PARTICIPATE. Each week, the meeting (the Canvas discussion) will challenge you to build upon what Eagle Aviation Industries has and is facing for organizational challenges in previous modules. You'll need to exercise critical thinking and judgment to determine what needs to be carried forward that week, and how to put it to use for the current agenda; you'll also need to judge which items, topics, questions, or problems have been explored enough already that they don't need to be brought up again.
Take Intellectual Risks; Explore the topic, but use evidence to support what you say. Your inputs to the meeting process are not "miniature research papers" put forth as mini-presentations, nor are they an oral defense of a thesis. Discussions should, however, make appropriate use of evidence-based reasoning. Synthesize your experience and knowledge with supportive evidence. This does not mean you need to formally write your input and responses to APA citations and references. Approach your input to the meetings as if you were in a board room and how you would provide your expert advice in that role. Consider this a data-driven leadership or evidence-based management approach.
Be Surprise-Tolerant. Throughout the discussions, the ad-hoc Advisory Board Member (your instructor) may provide additional information, more questions, or modify the agenda and actions the Advisory Board Members have to cope with as you and your classmates continue the conversation. You'll need to incorporate those thoughts, ideas, and questions into your thinking as you read, investigate, and get creative; then, respond during that week and subsequent weeks.

Please proceed to the Good Meetings section.

Good Meetings

Meeting Productivity

Because businesses hate unproductive meetings almost as much as you do, conduct these discussions like an efficient business meeting that you'd feel good about taking part in.

Eagle Aviation Industries and the rest of the real world need you to make the meetings (the discussions) count. It takes everybody investing their time and effort in it to make something important take place. In the real world of business, discovery of the real issues behind the organization's strategy and direction can take time, as you ferret out the unspoken assumptions and turn educated guesses into testable hypotheses. Even so, meetings are expensive. They consume an organization's most important assets - the thought power and time of its people.

Each of us has the opportunity to set the conditions for that people power to rise up and shine. Making effective conversations happen is a powerful way to do that.

Rules of Thumb

Start early, share often.
Think always; look deeply and broadly into the topic and everybody's responses and position statements.
Politeness is always good, but a re-engagement that doesn't move the conversation along by several conceptual steps isn't useful. In the real world, helping the organization or the department move to success is how you earn your keep; so, too, in this simulation.

Have an Agenda

Good meetings have an agenda; that needs to happen here in this class as well. The agenda for the Advisory Board Meetings will be posted in each discussion's agenda section. A typical agenda will have some broad, far-ranging subjects or actions to deal with and may also have some very specific ones more tightly focused on the details of a technique or process.

Use the agenda to drive your investigation, inquiry, and preparation throughout the week. Let items on the agenda trigger you to respond with:

Statements or questions
Logical arguments that examine and confirm or dispute the correctness, completeness, or fitness of the agenda item to the problem at hand
Proposals or suggestions for other actions/items for this week's meeting
Suggestions for continued investigation

Please proceed to the Using Canvas Discussion section.

Using Canvas Discussion

Post and Reply

In Canvas terms, that means you'll post and reply as you see fit, a minimum of three times evenly spread throughout the week, to put your thoughts into words (or video contributions) as follows:

At least one POSITION statement, in which you present a draft solution or assessment of what the agenda raises. This position statement should be supported with evidence, assertions, conclusions, or other findings, which are drawn from credible, authoritative, and relevant sources.

A position statement is not a miniature research paper in disguise. Use your knowledge and sources to help you identify the needs, issues, or problems raised by the agenda. Explain what you need to, but no more.
A position Statement can ask questions that you need to raise, either about possible assumptions or about the agenda itself, or about an item on it.
Your first position Statement each week can be a straw man or draft - you can caveat your logic or your findings as preliminary without fear of penalties for any mistakes you make in the first post, so long as you correct those as the discussion evolves.
Update your position statement throughout the week as circumstances, conversation, further research and reading, and your own learning dictate.
At least two RE-ENGAGEMENTS with the agenda or its items, either by responses to other students' positions or Re-Engagements or to something they or the instructor might ask.
Re-engagements are your opportunity to clarify, expand, or even correct something in your initial position statement, as well as opportunities to work with classmates by further developing what they've said, asked, or offered in evidence.
Use the Six Wise Men or the Five Whys to look at what you're responding to deeply. Dig into it. Then share what that digging and poking and thinking has led you to conclude.

Never-Ending Discussions?

"Professor, are you saying the discussion never ends?"

Yes.

Real-life shows us that we all go through multiple overlapping and concurrent OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act) loops every day; we join in conversations at various steps in that OODA cycle; our teams and organizations do as well. Solving a particular problem or dealing with an issue may mean that one thread of one set of such OODA loops comes to a close. For now. Murphy's law, though, reminds us that what we settled at last month's meeting probably won't stay "dealt with" for very long.

Not Your Normal Discussion Process

In many online classes, the discussion forum tends to focus on assigned readings or lines of inquiry by asking students to post a synopsis of what they've learned and what it might mean as if the instructor asked: "can anybody tell me what last night's readings said about X and Y?" That works in a lot of learning situations. It doesn't usually fit a problem-solving, team-based inquiry process.

"Professor, does that mean you don't care if we do the readings?"

To be blunt, that's correct. What we need to see is what you can do with what you've learned from the readings, and from everything else you've been doing so far in this course and in life in general.

The readings should enable you, inform you, and equip you to deal with the situations facing the team as it works together to meet the challenges of managing information risks facing the organization. Use the readings; use the other resources use the lessons you learn from the other activities.

But don't just parrot them back to the class or to your instructor. All that proves is that you can relate a piece of the question to a piece of the readings. That's a good start, but it's not enough to get work done.

Please proceed to the Grading section.

Grading

As you'll see in the Meetings Rubric, your work in this type of Canvas discussion is graded on three key elements:

Logically, thoughtfully addresses the agenda with course-related argument and evidence

This takes some balance and judgment on your part. Too narrow a focus on the topic risks the team being "blinkered," not seeing the larger context or a contrarian viewpoint as possibly adding value to the team's thought process. Going too far afield doesn't help much.
Your posts should be free of the common fallacies of reasoning and be complete as a chain of reasoning.
That said if you must present a "blind leap of logical faith," tell us why; support the need, and point out where that leap needs help in the form of further inquiry or development.
Support with evidence and synthesize your experience and knowledge accordingly.

Communicates Courteously, Professionally, and Effectively

Virtual teams depend upon making relationships work in ways that suit the place, the times, the topics, and the context. They need a proper amount of "social glue" to help that process along, such as a "high five" or a sympathetic "I got fooled by that too."
Effective communication is on topic and on point. It helps the Advisory Board and organization solve its problems together. That takes more than just a courteous "I agree."
Professional communication should be grammatically simple, straightforward, and correct, with few errors in construction, word choice, or spelling.

Engages Early and Often

Graduate school should not be a place of "by the numbers," and discussions in this class support that goal. "Early and often" means at least three good, thoughtful and thought-provoking posts across the week.

It's also easy proof to see that the more interactions a conversation has, the greater the potential for both learning and enjoyment. Posting all of your contributions to the meeting (your discussion entries) late on the last night of the module week denies anyone else the opportunity to interact with and engage with your ideas; it's as counterproductive if you came to an important but routine meeting five minutes before its end time, made your pronouncements, and then left.

Student Orientation

for Course Success

Your Role as a Student

If you’re going to think about risk, you need to think in evidence-based cause-and-effect terms. That simply cannot be done if you don’t keep track of the pedigree of that evidence — where and how you found it, what transforms or cleanups you’ve done to it, and so on. To do that means more than just “citing sources in APA format.” It means thinking about what you use and how you use it while keeping a “chain of custody” for those germs of thought.

Find Deeper, Root Meanings

There are many ways to do this: you might be a Five Why’s kind of person, or you use Kipling’s Six Wise Men to help you evaluate. Or, you might see everything from an organizational development perspective (which always looks for proximate and root causes). How you do this doesn’t matter, what does matter is that you take everything you read or view or encounter and tear it apart with questions, questions, questions! Do this in discussion; do this as you take notes about sources; do this in every step of every assignment.

Be Daring, Be Original

You’re encouraged to take risks as you develop answers to questions or solutions to problems that are posed to you in this course. Acclimate yourself to the resources the course provides; digest them, think about them, and get creative! Breaking the “quote and paraphrase habit” means you start thinking the moment you first start looking at a source. DO acknowledge sources as you use them. Stand on the shoulders of those who’ve worked hard to lay out some of this road before you. Give those sources the courtesy of a citation and a reference listing, but then move right into what you are going to say based in part on their work. You’re also encouraged to take a good first shot at an assignment and post or share your early thoughts, ideas, concerns, and questions. You would do this in the workplace as a member of a team or a work unit; you’re safe doing that here. But, just like at work - deadlines are deadlines, and most work has “success criteria” or hard and fast requirements set for it. Assignments here do as well. Read the assignments carefully. Identify all of the things each assignment is asking for. Analyze the task you’re given; break it down step by step, item by item, and use that list to make sure you answer all that you were asked. Suggestion: Do that at work, too. Make sure that your boss or your manager gains what they need from you.

No Quotes. Don't Paraphrase.

Instead, apply what a source teaches you by putting it directly into action.

Think things through yourself. Business leaders don’t have time to be “lectured to” about what the sources say; they depend upon their lawyers to interpret the “letter of the law” for the decisions they have to make or the actions they have to take to lead the company. If they need to see the text of the regulation or see that opinion piece that you have started from and built your recommendations on, then let them ask for it.

Analyze Current Events

Look for current events (preferably no older than the year prior to the current academic term) for sources to analyze current thinking and ideas. Yes, you may have to use “classic” sources to support or provide depth. That’s fine. But we need to focus on the now, more than on the recent past.

Life Cycle

The Organizational Life Cycle

Historians and academics have observed that organizations, like living organisms, have life cycles. They are born (established or formed), they grow and develop, they reach maturity, they begin to decline and age, and finally, in many cases, they die. The study of the organizational life cycle (OLC) has resulted in various predictive models. These models, which have been a subject of considerable academic discussion, are linked to the study of organizational growth and development. Organizations at any stage of the life cycle are impacted by external environmental circumstances as well as internal factors. We're all aware of the rise and fall of organizations and entire industries. Products too have life cycles, a fact that has been long recognized by marketing and sales experts. It seems reasonable to conclude that organizations also have life cycles.

While many business and management theorists alluded to developmental stages in the early to mid-1900s, Mason Haire's (1959) work in Modern Organization Theory is generally recognized as one of the first studies that used a biological model for organizational growth and argued that organizational growth and development followed a regular sequence. The study of organizational life cycles intensified, and by the 1970s and 1980s, it was well-established as a key component of overall organizational growth.

The organizational life cycle is an important model because of its premise and its prescription. The model's premise is that requirements, opportunities, and threats both inside and outside the business firm will vary depending on the stage of development in which the firm finds itself. For example, threats in the start-up stage differ from those in the maturity stage. As the firm moves through the developmental stages, changes in the nature and number of requirements, opportunities, and threats exert pressure for change on the business.

Organizations move from one stage to another because the fit between the organization and its environment is so inadequate that either the organization's efficiency and/or effectiveness is seriously impaired or the organization's survival is threatened. The OLC model's prescription is that the firm's managers must change the goals, strategies, and strategy implementation devices to fit the new set of issues. Thus, different stages of the company's life cycle require alterations in the firm's objectives, strategies, managerial processes (planning, organizing, staffing, directing, controlling), technology, culture, and decision-making. Five growth stages are observable: birth, growth, maturity, decline, and revival. They traced changes in the organizational structure and managerial processes as the business proceeded through the growth stages. At birth, the firms exhibited a very simple organizational structure with authority centralized at the top of the hierarchy. As the firms grew, they adapted more sophisticated structures and decentralized authority to middle- and lower-level managers. At maturity, the firms demonstrated significantly more concern for internal efficiency and installed more control mechanisms and processes.

Please read through all sections before proceeding to the next page and refer back whenever necessary.

Multimedia Resources

Organizational Size, Life Cycle, and Decline (ERAU/20:36)

Organizational Life Cycle

You may think the modern era of competitive disruption has made traditional life cycles less relevant, but the opposite is true. Since most of today's industry disruptions are in technologies, life cycles and the conditions that shape them are even more critical because of the speed of change. Cycles that once lasted years or decades can now pass in months.

As you will see, if a business fails to take a proactive stance toward organizational life cycle changes, it is likely to fall into crisis and decline.

Organizational life cycles are the product of human behavior. In organizations, that behavior has predictable patterns that result in foreseeable crises. Preparing for those crises can determine whether an organization moves to the next stage of development or fails.

For example, in a stable, mature organization, people fall prey to the misconception that the "way we do things" is the way it will always be. The inevitable result is stagnation.

If leaders and the people understand the issues that can arise before they happen, the change to the next phase need not be a crisis.

Moving on at the right time

An organization can prepare for moving from one stage to another.

For example, when people hold on to policies and procedures to protect their fiefdoms, you have a sure sign that stagnation is taking hold and can take preventative measures by transitioning management before the crisis.

You can also take a proactive stance by seeking to constantly renew, with parts of the company experimenting with new ideas without disrupting the entire organization.

Organizational Life Cycle Models

From the 1960s to the 1990s, scholars and consultants proposed many models of life cycles. Although the models have many similarities, there are differences in the perspectives and the research methods

Review "Organizational Life Cycle and Life Cycle Models (PDF)" Download Organizational Life Cycle and Life Cycle Models for more details on these Life Cycle Models:

Lippitt and Schmidt Development Theories
Greiner Growth Model
Adizes Ten Stages Model
Miller and Friesen Model

Leadership

The Skills You'll Need

This course is different than many other graduate courses - including other OBLD courses.

It requires you to run your personal OODA Loop. You'll need to:

OBSERVE the course structure, big picture as well as fine-grain within a module or assignment.
ORIENT yourself to the task at hand in any given module; appreciate the journey you've been on thus far, but know that the very next step you take is something different.
DECIDE how to approach each task; develop your own mini-plan for what it takes to accomplish the objectives of the assignment or activity.
ACT to carry out each step in that mini-plan.

Embrace the differences that this course embodies by engaging with the following attitudes, mindsets, and skillsets.

Please read through all sections before proceeding to the next page and refer back whenever necessary.

Think Like a Business Leader

This course is about organizations and how organizations need to cope with growth and change involving the organization's structure and design. Throughout the organizational life cycle, the organization must meet its ongoing obligations to its employees, customers, owners, investors, creditors, suppliers, partners, neighbors, and other stakeholders. Throughout this course, you will be a simulated leader of Eagle Aviation Industries. Every action you take must be from that perspective.

For example:

When reading about organizational theory, structure, and design, think about the outcomes you could achieve for your organization if you applied these ideas successfully. Then, go the next layer down: how would you know that you've "succeeded" in that application? What would you measure? What indicators would signal "success" to you?
In data-driven leadership, "impact" is primarily, but not always, focused on the organization's effectiveness. So, too, should your analytical thinking about goals, strategy, and design of the organization. Be goal-oriented in your analysis: how can you improve situations for the organization, measured in organizational effectiveness?
Work through every assignment with your target audience of stakeholders and leaders in your company firmly in mind. Choose a communications style that fits that target audience; this usually emphasizes the BLUF format, putting the "Bottom Line Up Front."

Please proceed to the Get Creative section.

Get Creative

This course is about using leading and designing organizations as they grow and change; from discussions through business writing, from diagrams to presentations, it requires you to think well and truly "outside the box:"

Do what you do best when you create new ideas. Doodle; sketch; mind map; go for a walk or sit on the beach and draw in the sand. Use OODA to look at the situation, find and select evidence, decide what else you need, go get what you need, observe how that fits together with what you already have... and repeat. GET PLAYFUL.
Practice evidence-based reasoning throughout. Use credible and reliable sources to support your position, but speak, write, and diagram in business language. Business decisions must be solidly rooted in facts in evidence, as well as facts in law.

Strange as it may seem, getting wildly creative goes hand-in-hand with evidence-based reasoning. It's the heart of the scientific method, which takes "I wonder if" and follows as it leads to generating and testing hypotheses.

And, of course, this means that you refer to your sources as you use them. It's required by good manners as well as by academic and professional ethics to do so. And it adds weight to your argument (if you've picked and used good sources, of course).

Please proceed to the Do The Business By Being Part of a Team section.

Do The Business By Being Part of a Team

Much of this course revolves around taking active roles in our simulated company, Eagle Aviation Industries, as a way of applying the various concepts, tools, and techniques of organizational structure and design. This is a team sport, one in which you "play" as a member of the leadership team at Eagle Aviation Industries, as part of this class, and as an Advisory Board Member. Share ideas, think together, and help each other create.

Participate in the discussion and activities early and often. Don't wait until the last night of the module week to try to do everything. PLAN AHEAD and engage early. It's the same amount of work - just start it earlier.

Own your own work; be responsible for your own successes and failures. Take your own risks.

Please proceed to the Get Current, Stay Current section.

Get Current, Stay Current

Keeping your viewpoint and knowledge base current is important. You'll be assessing "time-honored, classic" frameworks in organization theory related to structure and design. At the same time, you'll need to be on the lookout for current evidence, case studies, examples, and arguments to inform your work, refute or support the author's points, and as jumping-off points for our explanations here.

The world keeps changing; the environment we operate in as individuals and as members of organizations keeps changing. You cannot let yourself or your company get "caught napping."

"The more things change, the more they continue to be the same." This aphorism by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr applies to organization theory in many ways. On the one hand, some of the basic ideas have stood the test of time; that testing, of course, involves what's new and different in the ways organizations do business, as well as what's new about the nature of work and design of organizations. Each day's experiences with work design and organizational design is an opportunity for the leaders to learn something new, which may reinforce lessons already understood, invalidate prior assumptions and reasoning, or both.

Leadership & Organizational Design