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1.0 Introduction引言
《模拟游戏》是一部关于著名英国数学家阿兰·图灵的电影，它获得了包括金球奖在内的一系列奖项，这部电影不仅讲述了图灵和他的团队为英国在二战中的胜利所作的贡献，还为领导如何管理团队提供了灵感。本文以组织变革理论为基础，分析电影所带来的影响。The Imitation Game was a film about the famous British mathematician named Alan Turing, it won a series of awards including the Golden Globe Awards, the film not only told the story of what Turing and his team contributed to British victory in the World War II, it also provided inspiration for a leader on how to manage a team. In this essay, it was based on theory of organizational change to analyze the implications that the film brought.
2.0 Body主体
2.1 Performance of leadership of the main characters in the firm公司主要人物的领导表现
休·亚历山大最初能够成为球队的领导者，这主要取决于以下四个方面。首先，他是指挥官丹尼斯顿任命的队长。其次，他在批判性的讨论中展示了他在计算能力方面超越他人的卓越能力，加上他在全国象棋比赛中获得两个冠军，征服了其他队员。第三，他所倡导的解码方法被指挥官丹尼斯顿和其他组员所接受，并与其他组员分享了他的愿景。最后，他的自信、决策勇气等个人气质也是他成为领导者的原因之一，他的气质来自于他的能力、履历和指挥官丹尼斯顿对他的赞赏。但是值得注意的是，在休的领导下，团队并没有取得成果，从结果来看，休并不是一个好的团队领导。首先，休缺乏真正解决问题的有效手段和能力。第二，作为一个领导者，当现有的方法没有起作用，图灵找到了一种新的方法时，他没有保持开放的心态，这就是他性格中的缺失。
Hugh Alexander was able to become a leader of the team in the initial, which depended on the following four main aspects. Firstly, he was the team leader appointed by Commander Denniston. Secondly, he showed his outstanding ability surpassing other people in terms of computing power in a critical discussion, coupled with his achievement of two national chess contest champions, which conquered other team members. Thirdly, the method of decoding he advocated was accepted by Commander Denniston and other team members, he shared his vision with other members. Finally, his personal temperament such as self-confidence, courage to make decisions was also one of the reasons making him become a leader, his temperament was from his ability, curriculum vitae and Commander Denniston’ appreciation for him. However, it is noteworthy that the team under the leadership of Hugh did not achieve results, considering from the results, Hugh is not a good team leader. As first, Hugh lacked effective means and ability to really solve the problem. Second, as a leader, when the existing methods did not act and Turing found a new approach, he failed to keep an open mind, this is the lack in his character.
In the later period, Turing was able to become a team leader, which was determined by the following reasons. Firstly, at the beginning, although his ideas was not recognized by other members and Denniston, he persevered in his own way to persuade Churchill, he mastered the personnel and financial power, which showed his strong and firm will, courage and moderate assertiveness to become a leader. Secondly, his abilities and skills allowed him to lead other members to find the final solution to the problem, and his ability was recognized by other team members finally. Thirdly, he showed respect for the talents and opinions that he thought to be useful. For example, in order to ask Joan Clarke to stay and work with the team, he went to her home to persuade her to stay in the team. Of course, as a leader, Turing also has his shortcomings, first, in the early stages, he did not try to convince the team members to understand and accept his idea, leading to that the team members did not recognize him, even after he became the team leader, the members still obstructed his work and even blamed him for his work. Second, in the initial stage, he paid no attention to communication with other members, resulting in estrangement between the team members and him, and it could not form a harmonious team atmosphere.
Turing's success can be well explained by Kurt Lewin’s (1951) model. First of all, in the unfreezing stage, although Turing did not like the team members, he still listened to what Joan Clarke said and took the initiative to send an apple to a team member and joked with them to express his goodwill, thus reducing the team members’ hostility towards his leadership, which helped the team members to begin to understand his thoughts. Then, in the change phase, Turing's act of showing his goodwill was answered, the team members began to make a change to start with an attitude of cooperation with Turing. For instance, Hugh proposed the idea of improving the machine and obtained Turing's approval. Finally, in the refreezing phase, the team members fully embraced Turing's point of view and based on his idea to decode, they faced challenges together and accepted the pressure of possible dismissing, they worked as a team and ultimately succeeded.
As a leader, Hugh's failure could be explained by the change capability model (Duxbury, 2003), at the beginning, Hugh had a shared vision with the team members, they all believed that they could decode in their own way, at the same time, he was also under enough pressure to promote their work. However, Hugh lacked sufficient capacity to change, leading to that the team under his leadership could not achieve success of the first step, which hindered his further success.
In addition, it is worth noting that in addition to Turing's own talents and efforts, his success could not be separated from support from the government, including providing huge financial support of 100,000 pounds and support for him even there was no progress for the work for two years, as it was special measures taken in wartime years by the government. In reality, it is difficult for a team leader to gain such support, and a leader needs to consider how to take appropriate action to achieve success under limited circumstances. As far as the case of Turing was concerned, at the beginning, Turing thought that understanding German would be less useful for decoding, but if he was able to attach importance to cooperation with those who were proficient in German, his decoding work would be much smoother, and he would not cost so much resources.
2.2 Implications
Kurt Lewin (1951) divided change into three stages – unfreeze, change, refreeze. In the unfreezing stage, it usually determines new work and research directions, which often leads to team members’ misunderstanding. Turing took the way of giving to an apple and joking to ease the relationship between his team members and him to reduce their resistance towards Turing’s leadership. In fact, he could also take an incentive way to get the members’ support, for example, he could introduce his research ideas more to the members and show them his research results and papers, so that the members would realize that Turing’s ideas and research methods would be promising, which would have a positive impact on the team members to encourage them to cooperate with Turing better (Yukl, 2010). In change phase, a team leader's main task is to unite the entire organization under a common vision. In the film, the team members had begun to cooperate with Turing and made some useful comments, but the team work to a large extent still relied on Turing, other people were not fully involved in the project. Actually, a lot of work must rely on the strength of a whole team to be successful, especially when a complex work is in the bottleneck stage, which more needs to play the roles of a collective power. Turing should be more active to communicate with the team members, allowing the members to more clearly know what they should do in the team, as well as the future value of what they were responsible for, so as to prompt them to participate in the work more actively (Day and Antonakis, 2010). In the refreezing phase, Turing's views and methods, working methods had been basically accepted by the team members, the team work was in a stable state. However, a team's stabile depends not only on its internal factors but also on external factors (Hughes, 2010). The time and money that Turing and his team spent on the project were huge, and his team was almost dismissed and thus failed for that. In the ideal state, Turing should on the one hand try to play the collective strength as much as possible, striving for achieving their goal early goal; On the other hand, he should promptly communicate with his leaders and explain the progress of the work and difficulties that his team met, so that the leaders would understand and appreciate their difficulty, and Turing would obtain more support (Gill, 2011).
3.0 Conclusion
Turing's success in this film was inseparable from his personal leadership, which was manifested in his determined will, courage and moderate assertiveness, professional competence, and his enough respect for opinions and those talents who were capable. Of course, as a leader, Turing also has shortcomings. The inspiration that his performance brought included that it should establish a common vision and take incentives to get members’ support, so that members would understand their own value to promote their to be more active in participation in the work. It should pay attention to the impact of external factors on team work to strive for more external support.
References
Day, D. and Antonakis, J. (2010). The Nature of Leadership. SAGE Press, London.
Duxbury, L. (2003). Managing the Process of Change.
Gill, R. (2011). Theory and Practice, SAGE, London.
Hughes, M. (2010). Managing Change: A Critical Perspective. Active Publications, London.
Lewin, K. (1951). Field Theory in Social Science. Harper and Row, New York.
Yukl, G. (2010). Leadership in Organisations. Prentice Hall, London.
Appendix
Scene 1: Joan Clarke wanted that Turing could get more support from other team members. Turing accepted her advice. Then he personally gave an apple to a member and joked with the members, expressing his willingness to solve difficulties in work for the team members. Through this series of performance, he began to initially get the goodwill of team members.
Scene 2: Hugh Alexander proposed to Turing about improvement of the machine, and Turing also felt that it was a valuable suggestion and readily accepted it. This showed that Turing began to attach importance to what the members recommend, and the members also began to accept the views of Turing’s, and participate in what Turing planed.
Scene 3: The work made no progress, Commander Denniston intended to dismiss Turing and cancel what Turing planed to do. Hugh and other members came forward to support Turing, and finally they reached an agreement with Commander Denniston that they should achieve a result within a month, otherwise they would be dismissed, with this agreement, they gained precious time for Turing to achieve the final success.
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