Solution 10: Closing down the organisation

Organisations have a life cycle. They are founded, grow and mature, and, most of them, die. Some organisations seem to have eternal life, but those are the exceptions. One only has to consider the huge number of organisations founded every year to realise that most of them have to disappear again.

Considered this way disappearance of organisations is not a disaster, it just is part of a natural process. But that is an analysis at a distance. Because, if attached to an organisation and its ideology and goals, and having spent a good deal of one's working life in it,  the process of closing down an organisation can be mournful and difficult.

The key questions in this topic are:

• when to decide closing down an organisation?
• how to prevent the closing down becoming a trauma?

When to decide closing an organisation.

Many good reasons exist to take the decision to shut up an organisation.

• The 'best' reason is to conclude that the goals at which the organisation was aiming, are realised. Some organisations, anticipating this moment, choose to broaden their scope and to add other related goals in their mission, in order to legitimate their prolonged existence. If this move is endorsed by the constituencies and the members of the organisation, it is OK. But sometimes, if this search for a prolonged organisational life becomes a bit too assiduous, suspicion may rise continuity being of higher value than the goals themselves.
• Another good reason to close down the organisation, is that the once unique pioneer is now just one between peers. Especially if the leaders or the other members are deep down still the same pioneers, loving to undertake something new and exiting.
• Yet another reason could be the impossibility to compete with market oriented peer organisations. If subsidy is no longer available and all kinds of commercial initiatives enter the same market, it can be hard to survive as a former subsidised organisation. The turnover in organisational culture needed for reaching the same level of competition, is sometimes too much asked.
• The same goes for an organisation who is forced to become market oriented, while the still existing demand in the market apparently has no buying power. In such a case there is no other solution then to close down and/or going back to the status of action group. (Look at solution 3.)
• Other reasons, less obvious honourable but nevertheless compelling, can be  found in insolvable internal conflicts leading to the conviction that muddling through might harm the case more than closing down.

How to prevent the closing down becoming a trauma?

In any case actively closing down an organisation is much better than letting it die. The process of gradual dying, even if it is a natural death, will cause the outsiders opinion that the organisation was a failure. Actively closing down makes such an end-conclusion less likely.

There are two divergent ways to actively close down the organisation:

• celebrate its successes
• setting the still existing problem on the agenda.

In both cases the organisation could organise a congress or hold a meeting for the constituencies, peer organisations, related institutions and representatives of the government. Successes are presented and the main question is put forward: who becomes the next relay team who will fight the still existing problems.