Source: Woods, J.A. & Cortada, J.W. (1996). Qualitrends: 7 Quality Secrets that will Change your Life. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Management Minute 4
Does your organization have a "learning disability"? According to Peter Senge of MIT's Sloan School of Management, even the most successful companies fall short of their true potential due to the fact that "they" are poor learners. He states: "It is no accident that most organizations learn poorly. The way that they are designed and managed, the way people's jobs are defined, and, most importantly, the way we have all been taught to think and interact create fundamental learning disabilities" (p. 18). Senge asserts that these occur not because people are ignorant, non committed, or close-minded. Rather, they occur in organizations with very bright, committed, and open people. The flaws come because of ingrained belief systems rather than ineffective practices. For this, Senge identifies seven organizational "learning disabilities":
1. I Am My Position: This happens when we confuse our jobs with our identities. This disability creates resistance to change and improvement because it changes the way we do our jobs; therefore, it changes our identities. This also limits interaction because it creates little sense of responsibility for any other position. Extracting the results, activities, and job from the people involved helps overcome this.
2. The Enemy is Out There: "There is in each of us a propensity to find someone or something outside ourselves to blame when things go wrong" (p. 19). Senge states that extracting ourselves from the dynamics of the problem, by setting up an adversarial "us and them" relationship, limits our understanding of how we solve and don't solve problems.
3. The Illusion of Taking Charge: Sometimes being "proactive" creates more problems than it solves. What this does is favor "taking action" over analyzing the situation thoroughly. Senge states: "All too often, proactiveness is reactiveness in disguise" (p.21).
4. The Fixation on Events: "We are conditioned to see life as a series of events, and for every event, we think there is one obvious cause" (p. 21). However, the actual causes of problems are not directly linked with events and usually come from slow, gradual processes that are too complex to explain with one event. "If we focus on events, the best we can ever do is predict an event before it happens so that we can react optimally. But we cannot learn to create" (p. 22).
5. The Parable of the Boiled Frog: Senge uses the extended metaphor: if you place a frog in boiling water, it will immediately try to scramble out. But if the frog is put into cool water that is gradually heated, the frog will stay in the water and get increasingly groggier from the heat until it is unable to climb out of the pot. "Why? Because the frog's internal apparatus for sensing threats to survival is geared to sudden changes in his environment, not to slow, gradual changes" (p. 22). This shows that we cannot correctly identify threats that occur over long periods of time, as we can with immediate occurences.
6. The Delusion of Learning from Experience: Senge states that the "most powerful learning comes from direct experience", but "we each have a `learning horizon,' a breadth of vision in time and space within which we assess our effectiveness. When our actions have consequences beyond our learning horizon, it becomes impossible to learn from direct experience" (p. 23). Since most of our important decisions involve factors beyond our direct experience, our focus cannot provide insight into those factors. The traditional way to get around this is by breaking the problem into components and delegating out those parts, but the whole becomes lost because the factors are "answered" in isolation from each other.
7. The Myth of the Management Team: Senge quotes Chris Argyris: "Most management teams break down under pressure" (p. 24). Instead of working collectively, the teams largely fight for turf, but give the "appearance of a cohesive team" that hides the underlying differences that are never dealt with. Senge states that the "management team" is endowed with the myth of being a savior, when it merely encompasses the same organizational problems it was meant to solve.
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Does your organization have a learning disability?
As we progress through life we are required to learn new skills to advance to the next level. Even when we enter the working world we are required to learn new skills. We stop growing and advancing as soon as we believe we have learnt everything we need to know. At that point we begin vegetating.
The same can be said for organizations. Every organization grows with enthusiasm up to a point and then it slows and even stops. An organization needs to learn to grow. When an organization believes it knows everything it needs to know it will stop growing. The problem, in the case of an organization, is that it needs to learn just to stay in one spot let alone advance.
Think about how computers have changed the face of business. By refusing to learn about computers a company today could not hope to compete. Without computers there are very few companies that can survive and thrive.
In 1983 a Royal Dutch/Shell survey found that a third of the firms in the Fortune 500 in 1970 had vanished. They were not just smaller but they ceased to exist. The survey estimated that the average lifespan of a large industrial company is less than forty years. Not long considering all the effort that goes into building a company.
Peter Senge in his book “The Fifth Discipline” identifies 7 learning disabilities found in organizations. Over the next 6 eZines I will cover each of these disabilities. If you can see any of these disabilities in your company then we really suggest you put some effort into solving the problem. We addressed one disability “The Myth of the Management Team” in a previous eZine. Follow this link to read about that disability http://www.aweber.com/z/article/?arcturusadvisor.
The best way we have found to create a learning organization is through Best Year Yet. http://www.arcturusadvisors.com/partners.htm. Everything that is needed in a transformation is addressed within the program.
Learning Disability 1 - “I am my position”
We are so loyal to our jobs that they have begun to define who we are and how we think. Many people can’t see themselves doing anything else and when asked what they do for a living will respond “I am an accountant” or the equivalent. They usually do not see the purpose of the organization they work for or how they contribute to the whole. Most see themselves within an organization over which they have little influence.
A job is seen as that, a job - defined by limits and tasks. Something which we try and cope with and do our time in, according to the job description. Jobs and functions do not overlap. We do not see how our job has any impact on another function within the organization.
The problem with “I am my position” is that we see the organization as a bunch of silos, none interacting with the others. An accountant only does accountant work and a marketing manager only does marketing work. The accountants are not concerned with how their decisions impact any other positions or functions within the company. They make accounting decisions based on accounting impact and not organizational impact.
The other problem associated with this learning disability is that people have little sense of responsibility for the results attained when the different silos interact. They only see their responsibility for their silo and no more. As a result when problems occur it can always be blamed on ’someone else’. Problems get lost and nothing is learnt from unexpected results.
A learning organization on the other hand ensures systems thinking - the process of seeing the organization as a whole interacting organization. Where each decision is evaluated on how it impacts the whole. Holistic management in Best Year Yet terms.
Do your people interact? Do they understand how their decisions impact the entire organization?