Boeing, the World\'s Leading Commercial

¶ … Boeing, the world's leading commercial aircraft manufacture, recently made some notable changes to its business and product strategies. According to a recent press release, company leaders "announced organizational changes intended to strengthen the company's focus on both performance and long-term strategy" ("Boeing," 2010, p. 1). These new strategies include major executive personnel changes, as well as a new "vision and road map" for production and marketing endeavors, and a fresh approach to global product strategies.

According to Helms-Mills sense-making framework, there are eight elements that need to be integrated into the change process. In applying this framework to the changes at Boeing, the following deductions can be made:

Identity construction

Because people all have their own life experiences that have shaped the way they view things, not everyone will look at the change process in the same way. For example, some people may see the executive replacements at Boeing to be an ominous sign, while others may see it as a necessary part of restructuring the company for a better and more lucrative future. Much of how the situation is identified depends on how the identifiers are affected by the change. The leaders at Boeing need to, as Helms-Mills suggests, handle the situation with care in order to ensure that the majority of both insiders and outsiders will view this 'rocking of the boat' in a positive way. This entails sending out press releases like the one discussed here, that paint the changes in a forward-thinking, goal-oriented light. This helps people to make sense of these changes.

2. Social sense-making

Making sense of the situation at Boeing in socially-oriented way requires an understanding of the interactions between various individuals and groups, and how these changes will affect these interactions. Clearly, the replacement of numerous department vice presidents is going to affect how different groups of employees communicate with their boss, but it can also change the way they communicate with each other.

3. Extracted cues

Managers at Boeing need to do more than merely speculate about how the changes they have implemented will affect their employees -- they need to keep an eye out for 'cues' that will provide them with the inside information they need to make decisions which will cause the least amount of company disruption. It is critical, however, that they interpret these cues correctly. Otherwise, they may "inadvertently create problems for staff in accepting the legitimacy of the change programme and its intended purposes" (Helms-Mills, p. 20)

4. Ongoing sense-making

Ongoing sense-making will require Boeing's leaders to learn from the cues they have previously extracted, and apply what they have learned to change initiatives in the future. For example, if turns out that their new global product strategies are causing frustration and resentment among employees because they require extra work with no extra compensation, then they will need to learn from this mistake and make efforts to circumvent problems like this in the future. Change is an ongoing process and so is learning.

5. Retrospection

In order to make sense of certain situations -- especially those that involve uncomfortable or unfamiliar changes -- people often take a retrospective approach to how they view the situation. In other words, they look back at how similar situations have been handled in the past, and what the outcomes were, and apply those to what is happening in the present. For example, they may remember that the last time Boeing replaced many of its top executives, company morale and production improved dramatically. Remembering this can help them feel less anxious about the fact that their own supervisor has just been replaced.

6. Plausibility

Executives do not want to lie to their employees or shareholders, but they want to paint the situation in as positive a light as possible. At the same time, they need to sound believable or they will lose trust. It is a fine line between sugar-coating a situation to make it more palatable and drowning it in sweetness to the point that it bears no resemblance to the truth.