DDBA 8581 Week 1 Succession Silence Discussion Example

Week 1 Discussion: Why Future Losses Go Unnoticed

Why No Alarm Sounds Before the Only Controls Engineer Retires: Backing an Attention Account of Organizational Silence About Future Losses Against a Political One, and Naming the Evidence That Would Decide Between Them

My Explanation and the Role

I back the attention account. At a composite specialty chemicals manufacturer in Louisiana with two plants and about 1,400 employees, one controls engineer maintains the distributed control system that runs the larger plant's reactors. She is 63, has worked there for 31 years and wrote much of the control logic herself. No one has written down what happens when she retires. The silence is not hostility; it is that nothing in the organization routes a future absence to anyone who decides.

Two Explanations

Ocasio (1997) argued that what organizations attend to depends on the issues and answers available, the situation decision makers find themselves in and the channels through which issues reach them: procedures, meetings and communications that give some issues a route to attention and leave others without one. A future loss has no channel. Monthly operations reviews report downtime, safety incidents and output, all of which measure the present. A retirement three years away generates no metric, no incident and no agenda item until it is close enough to become a staffing request. Rothwell (2010) observed that many organizations begin succession planning only after a loss has already disrupted operations, which fits an organization with no channel for losses that have not yet happened.

The political account sees the silence differently. Bachrach and Baratz (1962) argued that power operates not only in decisions but in nondecisions, keeping issues off the agenda so they never reach the point of choice. On this view, incumbents with valuable knowledge, or managers who would be embarrassed by an admission of fragility, keep succession off the agenda because raising it threatens their position. That account deserves its full strength: a sole expert may reasonably fear that documenting her knowledge makes her replaceable, and a plant manager may prefer not to report that the plant depends on one person.

Why I Side With Attention, With a Concession

In this case, I see no sign that the engineer or her manager suppressed the issue. When asked directly in an interview, both said they had assumed someone in corporate HR tracked retirements. That is a channel failure: each believed another channel existed. I concede, however, that the two accounts can operate together. Once someone raises the issue, political reasons may keep it from being acted on.

What Would Decide Between Them

If the issue had been raised and then dropped, without a decision, the political account would gain. If it was never raised by anyone, the attention account gains. Meeting minutes and interview records over the past five years could show which.

Question for Classmates

In your organization, has a future loss ever been raised and then dropped, or simply never raised?

Reply to Kendra

Kendra, you blame leaders who do not care about succession. What channel would have brought the issue to them, and did it exist?

Reply to Paul

Paul, you call the silence political. Can you point to a moment when someone raised succession and the subject was turned aside?

References

Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. S. (1962). Two faces of power. American Political Science Review, 56(4), 947-952. https://doi.org/10.2307/1952796

Ocasio, W. (1997). Towards an attention-based view of the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 18(S1), 187-206.

Rothwell, W. J. (2010). Effective succession planning: Ensuring leadership continuity and building talent from within (4th ed.). AMACOM.