I recently read an article called “Vasa Syndrome: Insights from A 17th-Century New-Product Disaster”. I am going to explain what the article is about and also show how knowledge management played a major part.
From reading the article I found the “Vasa Syndrome” very interesting. I will start off by taking the first of the seven points, which is the lack of external learning capability. By building the Vasa Sweden they were trying to show up the enemies. Sweden did not account for what they would do if a disaster should strike, and it was just their luck that 10 of their ships where grounded which altered the scheduling of the Vasa. It became even more imperative for them to get the Vasa up and running. When King Gustavus Adolphus received the news that Denmark planned to build a larger and better-armed ship, he immediately ordered specifications done to the Vasa without researching to see if he had the capability. The biggest mistake made was during the test run of only 30 men. If the ship could not contain 30 men with the entire army it was bound to fail. What today’s managers can get from this is to take the time to research new and more efficient ways to create their products in order to have longevity.
They should also plan ahead for disaster and take the necessary precautions. They should not panic when the threat of competition arises; this should merely be a motivator for managers to see what that company is doing and to do it better with better materials. Managers should know the need of their company and focus on fulfilling it and not over doing it. Goal failures are the next point I want to bring up. The main goal of the Vasa was to be a fighter ship equipped with the adequate amount of firepower to over throw its enemies. These goals were lost due to the king’s over compensating of the fighter ship with art, sculptures, and carved ornaments. The ship’s capacity was 36 guns and it was set to sail with 64 cannons and this was clearly ignoring the goals. The time spent on making the artworks and sculptures could have been put into securing the stability of the Vasa.
The Vasa should have had one specific goal, either to fire from long distance or to fight at close combat. Today’s managers should have clear and defined goals. They should make sure each one of them is complete before moving to the next one and avoiding the anxiousness that may be brought on by competition. Communication barriers are an important topic in this passage among the rest. The communication barriers that the Vasa faced were the fact that there were too many bosses. Three people with three different opinions were over the design so that made it difficult for them to come up with a unison decision.
The king should have allocated one head ship builder whom all decisions would go through before being final. If this had been done properly, maybe then Fleming would have been forced to do another test. In today’s companies managers should make sure that there is a clear line of communication throughout the entire company. Valuable information should be resonated in a precise way. Top-management meddling can be detrimental to an organizations success. While building the Vasa the king continuously wanted to make design changes despite being told not to do so by the master ship builder. The king was not an expert at building ships and he should have delegated one of the master ship builders to be in charge and let that person handle all of the design specs. In today’s organizations managers should learn to delegate. This will have an empowering effect on the employees which will in turn make them want to work harder. Once someone is delegated to oversee a particular item, managers should step down and trust that whomever they delegate will do a precise job.
The King faced increasing return to scale. As the Vasa was already a supreme ship, and achieved the main purpose of being a war ship the king wasn't satisfied and wanted more.
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