The U.S. Army has captured the essence of the learning organization as
espoused by Peter Senge (1990) in his book The Fifth Discipline. One of
the disciplines discussed by Senge is mental models. Essentially, this
expresses the need for a common understanding of an organization's
culture. One aspect of an organization's culture is its terms, artifacts,
symbols, etc. DA Pam 25-105 (The Army's Culture) provides some explanation
of terms that are in the Army context, that might be used in many
organizations.
" When providing mentorship or instruction on staff briefing, particularly
to senior civilian officials, use the following terms to convey the
meaning identified with each:
1- Essentially Complete-Meaning: It's half done
2- We predict...-Meaning: We hope to God!
3- Risk is high but within acceptable ranges of risk - 100:1 odds, or
we're
10 times over budget using 10 times the people we said we'd employ.
4- Potential show stopper - The team has updated their resumes.
5- Serious but not insurmountable problems - It'll take a miracle...
6- Basic agreement has been reached - The @##$%%'s won't even talk to us.
7- Results are being quantified - We're massaging the numbers so that they
will agree with our conclusions.
8- Project Review Task Force - 7 people who are incompetent at their regular
jobs have been loaned to the project.
9- Not well defined at this time - Nobody's even thought about it.
10- Still analyzing the requirements - See #9
11- Not well understood - Now that we've thought about it, we don't want to
think about it anymore.
12- Requires further analysis and management attention - Totally out of
control!
13- Results are promising - Turned power on and no smoke detected - this
time...
Ah. That was fun
" When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble
a nail." - Abraham Maslow
" ...strategy is nothing until it degenerates into work." - Peter Drucker
Stephen R. Swan
ITT Research Institute
AB Technology Group
2374 Hell On Wheels Ave
Fort Knox, KY 40121
502-624-6806
Web Site http://147.238.100.101/fxxitp.htm
--"Swan, Steve R. SETA CONTR" <SwanSR@ftknox5-emh3.army.mil>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>
"Learning-org" and the format of our message identifiers (LO1234, etc.) are trademarks of Richard Karash.