Organisational renewal means reviewing organisational beliefs and ideology, policies and procedures, systems and structures and programmes and strategies. It has environmental adaptation as its overarching theme. Structures of leadership are an important aspect of renewal.
Intrinsic to this is the fact that if one element from the issues mentioned above gets tampered with, all others will be affected by such a change — a domino effect. Simply put, if new beliefs, policies, systems and programmes are changed, leadership too must be changed. If it does not, then that organisational renewal thesis will be as good as a hollow rhetoric.
At the centre of any renewal project lies a concept of “the whole” which means that if one element (domino) of an organisation gets tampered with and it falls, all others will fall like dominoes. Need I say more? The concept of “organisational renewal” is simply a reformed rather than a transformed version of “organisational development” which trade unions such as NUM, Numsa, Nehawu, SACCAWU, POPCRU, CEPPWAWU and SATAWU referred to as a corporatist method of organisational assessment and review.
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As a result, there was a collective endorsement of the concept of “organisational renewal” within Cosatu after the release of the September Commission report in 1997. A workshop on the concept was later convened by Cosatu at the Elijah Memorial Training Centre, in Yeoville, Johannesburg, in 2007. The union general secretaries who made thought-provoking arguments and presentations on the concept included Frans Baleni (NUM), Silumko Nondwangu (Numsa), Fikile Majola (Nehawu), Bones Skhulu (SACCAWU), Randal Howard (Satawu), Welile Nolingo (CEPPWAWU) and Nkosinathi Theledi (POPCRU), with Mahlengi Bhengu as a chairperson on behalf of Cosatu.
Gino Govender, Jerry Malatji and I were also present as resource persons from the DITSELA Workers’ Education Institute. Each union affiliate had to spell out its unique organising and recruitment challenges, remedial means employed and proposed resolutions to a bargaining conference that was to be scheduled later. One takeaway from that meeting was an indicated shift from using steel trolleys in favour of cheaper plastic stock in the retail sector; a development which directly affected both Numsa and SACCAWU in terms of organising, recruitment and bargaining in the manufacturing and retail sectors.
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