Flint Water Crisis Case Study
may be able to claim that one poor moral decision generated many more.
Failure
The Flint Water Crisis began with a decision about cost as many poor ethical decisions are. Flint wanted to switch from Detroit water to the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA) and enlisted ROWE Professional Services to facilitate this transition. The switch was said to be more reliable, equal in quality, and reduced in price compared to Detroit water (Connexions, 2013). And in order to save about $5 million in the two years that it would take to switch to the KWA, the city decided to treat water from the Flint River for use. This decision may have been made with the best of intentions as Flint is working towards a comeback, but what resulted led to great controversy. …show more content…
The Flint decision-makers were Democrats; the Governor is a Republican, and the various agencies and appointees are a mixed bag. It was a disaster and people were hurt by poor ethical and leadership decisions. Leaders must have a vision for change. Creating a vision for change is one of the critical aspects in the successful implementation of change efforts (Kotter and Rathgeber, 2006; Goetsch and Davis, 2010; Brown and Harvey, 2006; Susanto, 2008). Without a clear vision and strategy in place to drive the organization through the implementation process, the change efforts eventually divert into a sequence of detrimental tasks that might have negative effects on the desired change (Chiloane-Tsoka, 2013) such as the ones that occurred in Flint, Michigan. It is leadership responsibility to make sure that the vision for change and the strategy to be employed during the change implementation process is clear and understood by employees at all levels (Chiloane-Tsoka,
Failure
The Flint Water Crisis began with a decision about cost as many poor ethical decisions are. Flint wanted to switch from Detroit water to the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA) and enlisted ROWE Professional Services to facilitate this transition. The switch was said to be more reliable, equal in quality, and reduced in price compared to Detroit water (Connexions, 2013). And in order to save about $5 million in the two years that it would take to switch to the KWA, the city decided to treat water from the Flint River for use. This decision may have been made with the best of intentions as Flint is working towards a comeback, but what resulted led to great controversy. …show more content…
The Flint decision-makers were Democrats; the Governor is a Republican, and the various agencies and appointees are a mixed bag. It was a disaster and people were hurt by poor ethical and leadership decisions. Leaders must have a vision for change. Creating a vision for change is one of the critical aspects in the successful implementation of change efforts (Kotter and Rathgeber, 2006; Goetsch and Davis, 2010; Brown and Harvey, 2006; Susanto, 2008). Without a clear vision and strategy in place to drive the organization through the implementation process, the change efforts eventually divert into a sequence of detrimental tasks that might have negative effects on the desired change (Chiloane-Tsoka, 2013) such as the ones that occurred in Flint, Michigan. It is leadership responsibility to make sure that the vision for change and the strategy to be employed during the change implementation process is clear and understood by employees at all levels (Chiloane-Tsoka,