Systems Thinking Paper for Exxon Company



Systems Thinking Paper for Exxon Company

Introduction

Bringing the improvement in the system does not mean to change the outlook of the system but having the same old system. However, the real improvement requires changing the system from inside out and streamlining the entire system from its roots. The forces of change are found to be of two types such as external forces and the internal forces. The external forces arise from outside the company however; the internal forces come in front from within the organization. The paper intends to explain the forces of change for the Exxon Company by highlighting the issues which the company has been facing for a long time. The Exxon Company went through the crisis which stimulated the company to consider bringing the change. The most publicize crisis which the Exxon experienced was the incident of oil spill into Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989. This accident resulted in bringing numerous changes in the environmental policies of Exxon. The case of Exxon requires the change of organizational system as it refused to engage in the communication and even involved in the unethical communication which need to be revised. The study intends to apply the system thinking approach over this concern. Moreover, the study attempts to highlight the current and the desired state of the company as well as analyze the gap between the current and desired state. The paper has also presented the solutions and strategies to overcome the chances of the occurrences of such events and the contingency plans to respond to the disastrous accidents.

The crisis of Exxon was the largest oil spill in the history of United States which spread more than over 3000 square miles and spoiled the most pure and natural areas of the entire country. This incident is still considered as the most disastrous event which has adverse impacts on the lives of sea animals even today. Experts still believe that the event has negative environmental and economic disasters at present. The requirement for the improvement came in front when the Exxon did not accept its mistake and communicated in an extremely unethical manner over its ineffective plan of oil dumping. This event caused to portray the very negative image of the company (Susi, 2002).

Discussion

Current State Analysis

It is a normal thing that the companies with the toxic substances usually go through such spills but it requires proper way to handle the situation (Waddock, 2008). The same case happened with the oil company Exxon when it spilled millions of gallons of oil into the water and killed millions of fish, sea otters, and other sea animals, polluted hundreds of miles of coastline, and became the reason of impacting the livelihoods of numerous fishermen. Even at the extreme disasters of this event, the Exxon did not react promptly on its mistake rather it made falsified statements (Regester and Larkin, 2008). This event also resulted in impacting the global environment.

When the event occurred, Exxon waited a long time ...