DLedingham said:
> Over the past year I have been keeping a daily journal in which I am
> recording the change process at our school. I record events under Senge's
> five disciplines and what is obvious when I look back over the year is
> that the key to organic, sustainable and real change in the notion of
> systems thinking. It seems to me, that the geatest barrier in the change
> process is that presented by the predominance of the role culture in
> secondary schools. That is where people adopt the "I am my position'
> mentality and look at everything from that point of view. There would
> appear to be two ways that such a culture could be challenged. 1)
> restructure- change the bureaucratic means of operating. Although this
> sounds an obvious strategy I am not so sure it really changes people. It
> is also dependant on change at a national level and such change, athough
> possible in the next few years is not under the direct control of those of
> us in schools. 2) reculture- which is the approach we are adopting at our
> school. This is a slow and absorbing process but armed with an ethos of
> 'think big, act small' we are beginning to have some success.
Thank you so much for your message. I couldn't agree more with what you
are saying about systems thinking.
I work in an organization which just has been through a major
restructuring - resulting in - not surprisingly - a lot of frustrated
people on all levels who want to be told more explicitly what their role
in the new organization is.
The new organizational model is competence based, and the intention from
the project was that we become a Learning Organization. However, the vast
majority of the the people involved in the project, including management,
had only very vague ideas about what they meant by L.O. They had a
"feeling" that it was the right direction to go in when we talked about
the need to move from being a "fire fighting" company (we are the world
champions!) to looking out for ways to prevent fires from happening.
The frustration that I mentioned was to be expected. Actually - the
organization has coped surprisingly well, but in many cases coped by
trying to revert to the old way of doing business. So there is a gap
between what was said and what we do.
You put your finger on another interesting aspect of system thinking which
I was not really aware of:
> I had a chat with a colleague from a neighbouring school on Thursday and
> he was talking about the frustration he and other managers experience by
> the sheer unpredicatbility of his day to day work. As he said " I can go
> in to school in the morning with a plan and because of events never
> actually get down to getting anything of that plan done". I have found
> that by adopting systems thinking in my day to day work that I don't
> experience the same level of frustration.
I myself have not experienced frustration as a consequence of all the
changes that we've gone through, partly because I was part of the
re-engineering project. But so was over 50 others, and the majority here
seems to be as frustrated as the rest - though probably because of what
they experience as a lack of follow-up. One of the reasons for my lack of
frustration is - I now see - that I always try to look for patterns, to
see why people are doing what they are doing, and see how everything
influences everything else. I knew I was good at seeing the whole picture,
but this is the first time I've really understood how critical system
thinking is in EVERYTHING that we do.
I am working on my thesis which will be on Learning Organizations
(hopefully it will be finished by March of next year!), and I will use my
company as the case, so I'm always looking out for more knowledge, but
more than than - a better understanding of L.O. So thank you very much for
enlightening me!!
--Bjxrg Kaspersen <bkasper@bvemx.ppco.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>