Dear Hannah, dear strategic learners,
Thank you for your private response to my suggestions. It made me
understand better your needs. I send my answer also to the list, because I
think it fits to the flow of meaning there and also because I am
interested in any comments.
First let me summerize what I understand is the output expected from you:
- profile of required skills/attitudes for each department/person
- profile of current state of skills/attitudes for each department/person
- deviations indicate training needs, including learning by doing,
coaching up to replacing people if necessary
This sounds like a 'just do it' job. But from your writing I sense that
you are tacitly aware that it will not be that easy.
This 'learning plan' becomes a 'strategic learning plan', when the
required skills are not required according to the perception of the
respective department or person or single manager within their scope of
responsibility, but when the required skills are derived from an overall
strategic plan or intended strategic direction for the company or
independent strategic business unit AS A WHOLE. (Deming: "If the various
components of an organization are all optimized, the organization will not
be. If the whole is optimized, the components will not be.")
The most important lesson to be learnt then is that each department and
person can see how hes work relates to that direction, especially in what
aspects NOT to be optimized for the sake of the whole - it is a matter of
SHARED VISION and TEAM LEARNING - what to keep and what to change. Again
such changes, aimed at alignment to the overall strategy, will indicate
further required learning.
The point is, that the strategic learning plan cannot be better than the
overall strategic direction. If the latter is flawed, the learning plan
surely will be as well. When you are looking for best practices outside
your company, it sounds like you are unsure what the required skills are.
This indicates to me, that the strategic direction is not as clear as
necessary and that you are trying to compensate.
My suggestion is that you find out what exactly make you unsure about the
required skills, seek for anwers in the company strategy and if this leads
to questions, ASK THOSE QUESTIONS. If you are not already working for a
best practice company, you will find that often not even top management
can answer these questions straight away. Don't blame anybody for this,
not even mentally. Just suggest that it might make sense to settle those
questions before proceeding with your plan, because otherwise the chances
are high that a lot of money is wasted for finally uncoordinated if not
contraproductive (strengthening the wrong MENTAL MODELS) training. For
example, you can put developing such a strategic direction - concrete
enough to derive required skills from it - on top of your strategic
learning plan and leaving the further plan open, depending on those
results. You are free to use the logic I provided here for you.
The biggest obstacle on the surface level will be, that unwilling top
manager may blame you for what they didn't make clear, even worse, for
what they feel that they are not clear about self. This will require a
high amount of bravery (liveness, spareness, openness), diplomacy
(otherness, fruitfullness) and integrity (wholeness, sureness) from you.
(At, and strugglers with the essentialities, how do you like this?) You
will have to decide whether you have the guts for it. It burns down to
taking over leadership over the official leaders without letting them know
that you are doing so.
The biggest obstacle on a deeper level will be that the strategic plan
does not reflect SYSTEMS THINKING as profound as necessary to guide the
company successfully into the future. Top manager knowing this lack of
systems thinking tacitely lead to the resistance which cause the obstacle
above. It is this lack of systems thinking, which guided me to compile the
references as I did in my first answer to your question.
I can imagine that you feel quite uneasy now that you have read up to this
point. If this is true, then I think that you feel intimidated like 'I
understand, but I cannot do it.' Hannah, this would be fully o.k. and in
fact, I hope that this is the case. Why? There is absolutely no need that
current reality matches the vision or the ideal as long as we have a firm
grip on current reality as it is without compromising the vision (PERSONAL
MASTERY). You would have an experience in emotional tension vs. creative
tension. Just take the emotions as part of current reality. Can it not be
that while you are feeling this unease you realize that it is the same
unease any top manager feel when s/he is confronted with the task to
develop a consistent and coherent, profoundly based strategic plan? That a
kind of comradeship with your most important customer - top management -
starts to develop?
In case that you feel mentally and from your position that you can not go
into questioning the overall strategic direction as I suggested above
TODAY, this does not mean that you cannot do it LATER. It just takes time.
In this case I suggest that you do the following meanwhile (setting you on
the path I am on right now):
Create the expected output above as good as you can do today with what you
know about the strategic direction and what makes sense to you. In
parallel start to read through my suggestions and connect your experiences
and mixed feelings with what you read there. You will sharpen your sense
for the vision as well as for current reality. One day you will be able to
stand up and say what need to be said although you cannot say it today.
If my suggested reading does not resonate at all (you better read Deming
not in the beginning, I would recommend to start with the Goldratt Novels,
then start to work through the Management Dilemmas case studies while
reading the Senge material), you will have to find another path for you.
I wish you all the best.
Liebe Gruesse,
Winfried
P.S.: Some readers may find this contribution still unpractical, somewhat
unrealistic etc. Although I have tried to really connect At de Lange's
theory of creative learning with Senge's five disciplines in a practical
way, many may find this still theoretical and idealistic. I have a lot of
empathy for this feeling.
Therefore I want to make explicit an assumption behind not only this but
all my contributions. An assumption which is not justified in maybe the
majority of cases. An assumption which comes from my vision, not from
current reality - thus giving my writing a special idealistic,
non-realistic, theoretical touch.
The assumption is: People are striving for constructive outcomes.
My firm conviction is, that if people in reality strive for destructive
outcomes than this is not a statement about the people but about somewhere
flawed systems thinking.
--"Winfried Dressler" <winfried.dressler@voith.de>
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