Surgery With Blunt Tools: Restructuring and Ambiguity at Umbra Health Partners

This case explores the transformation of Umbra Health Partners (Umbra), a privately owned Canadian healthcare organization, as it undergoes an extensive restructuring, through the perspective of the branch manager, who is a recent graduate of a master of business administration program in health services administration. The first part of the case examines the branch manager's role and the last part of the case examines his new role in the corporate office. When he is first hired at Umbra, he assesses the organizational problems inherent in the branch office and in the organization as a whole. As branch manager, he attempts to find solutions to those problems and improve the reliability of his branch. Later, he is promoted to a position in the corporate office, where he addresses the organizational problems at the corporate level (some of which mirror those at the branch office), such as a lack of interdependence and a vague sense of the direction in which the organization is headed. Taken together, the case offers a host of material to discuss the complexities of organizational change.

• Collective Mind
• Operations Management
• Leadership
• Success and Failure
• Ambiguity of Change