Immediate Appeal of the Requisite Organization Theory

Speaker A Why don't you take us back to the context of how we got started and why the process was attractive, uniquely attractive to the veteran. We put this team together in 19. There are several factors that were convergence at the time and how we put together the team. Then a new surgeon general who realized that the army was going to be reorganizing significantly had budget cuts that were coming as well as the fact that for three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall soviet Union as an enemy that whole international picture has changed. We'd just come out of the Gulf war, that picture had changed and that there was going to be continuing reduction in the DoD budget and so we had to find a smart way to carry on as an army medical department. There were then the changes in healthcare as well as a great enthusiasm about managed care. New president who also felt that there was going to hedge his own ideas and came in with some legislation that he was going to introduce in healthcare. And so that all those the convergence of these meant that we were going to be faced a change environment. Now I got first know that general ANU called general cider and said I need a very senior officer to run this, who I know that is respected across town medical department. And he asked me to come in as a deputy because I had written a paper in the army war college and finished in 1990 and very fortuitously had titled it army medical department 2005 looking at what would be the trends that were going to affect army medicine and what would be some proposals for how it would change. And with those ideas would then be able to also bring in other team members and we would proceed with this project. In the course of that of course general Lenoux had heard you speak and you came into our team and introduced us to your work and your study with Dr. Jakes and the reorganization theory and I found it immediately appealing. One it fit with what we do as physicians and medical professionals because it's got this empirical basis to it. It's observational data, we gather data through interview, we review that information and from there we go about systematically make recommendations, check it out and see if it fits. But there are some other elements that immediately were appealing because you could see in the way that the theory had been elaborated it had some developmental theory in it. You could see some of the derivatives of pioget and it looked at the way that people were thinking developmentally as they matured and were able to hold and operate at more complex levels as well as what were some aspects of their more personality development and the general disposition or temperament that people had for being able to look at more complex environments and to again, to survey that environment and make sense out of it. So it had an immediate appeal to me, and I felt that we would use it as a basis for our methodology in our team. Sam.