Newsroom With A View

(Originally posted on June 17, 2010)

If you have ever been in a newsroom that has been through a reorganization, there’s a good chance you noticed at some point that while titles had changed and people may have changed places, the actual tasks being performed weren’t different and the stories being produced weren’t different. <a href=”http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/to-change-an-organization-focus-on-action-not-the-org-chart/” title=”It’s not true of all reorgs, but it’s common”>It’s not true of all reorgs, but it’s common</a>, Steve Buttry writes. Focus on actions and the desired result, not the newsroom structure:

“Every organization has strong default settings – that gravitational pull – that will override most changes in the org chart. … You achieve innovation by changing what people are doing. Structural changes need to be something that is incidental along the way. In that way, the tweak in the org chart is seen as logical because people can see that it supports the new things you are doing.”