Been A While!

School has been keeping me busy the past few weeks (who would have thought that getting a PhD was time consuming) but I wanted to post some thoughts that I’ve been studying the last couple of days.

When talking about organizations you come across all sorts of ideas and thought processes regarding best management practices and research to support such ideas. One school of thought, that is consistent across a lot of the research, is that of revolutionary change vs. evolutionary change. Every organization out there, be it a police department or a food establishment, goes through the process of change at some time or another. Now, it’s important to note that most people within organizations don’t like change (bosses included) and will sometimes fight change “tooth and nail”. The whole discussion of whether change is necessary and what process is best to facilitate it is a completely different conversation for another day. Let’s spend a minute talking about types of change.

Evolutionary change is something that an organization goes through to improve upon a product, service, or process that is essential to the business. Have you tried the new Wendy’s hamburgers? Wendy’s spent a lot of money (think millions of dollars here) to improve their hamburger and give it a face-lift. They were part of a huge marketing campaign to flaunt their new burger and to get everyone to try it (I admit that I tried one after seeing it on TV). Is Wendy’s new hamburger evolutionary or revolutionary? I would make the argument that Wendy’s new hamburger is an evolution of their old hamburger. The new one still has the trademark square patties and is piled high with the same type of condiments. What changed was the compression ratio of the meat, the types of buns/pickles, and some other miscellaneous tweaks. This type of change happens all the time as businesses try to refresh their products.

Revolutionary change occurs when a business shakes the very foundation of the business itself. This type of change is monumental and usually results in an end product that is very different from the original. For an example of revolutionary change I would like to present Coke. Coca Cola introduced this thing called “New Coke” a few years back that was a complete departure from what they were doing. Coke was built on a very old recipe that had been marketed very well to millions of people. The execs of Coke, under pressure from Pepsi, tried to modify the familiar formula into something new. You might be thinking to yourself that this sounds a lot like the Wendy’s example and sounds more like evolutionary change. I disagree. Coke was built on one formula that had been in use for a hundred years. When someone messes with that kind of familiarity and history it is labeled as revolutionary change. Now coke’s revolutionary change was not for the better and it came back to bite them in their profit margin, but there are plenty of companies out there that successfully navigate through revolutionary change. Let’s face it; some revolutionary change needs to happen.

How does all this apply to Location Based Policing? In the small amount of time that I have spent in some of my classes I’ve had the chance to discuss some ideas with my fellow scholars. They, like me, believe that we are on the cusp of a revolutionary change in policing as we know it. Budget cuts, violence, and prison overcrowding are symptoms of a much bigger problem. The “times are a changin’ “ and what we used to do is not going to translate well into what we are going to do ten (10) years from now. Sure, policing has evolved over the last few decades, but when was the last evolutionary change that rocked the foundation of policing? We’re due for something revolutionary and Location Based Policing might just be that first step.

Tags: Change, Revolutionary

This entry was posted on December 20, 2011 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.