Joe,
Thanks for your thoughts which I both enjoyed and directly related to my
recent experiences occasionally "working" as a volunteer director on our
local community pool board. I literally have to tear my org consulting
hat off my head and jump on it at times to stop myself intervening a la
consultant and stomp around in the social dynamics and processes. I force
myself to be friendly observer and a reflective contributor - thereby
allowing any useful role they might have for me to emerge naturally.
Sometimes this is really hard and I empathise with your wife! I also think
it is probably good training on being a consultant!
I agree with you - as the truism goes - that the the informal social
system in such cases is responding and doing its best at that time with
what it has evolved from ... i.e. in my case the social involvement and
byzantine power gyrations serve important purposes - they enable the many
unpaid people to feel a sense of ownership, involvement, power, etc ... So
yes, their inefficient process serve in many indirect ways.
Your words could lead me all sorts of ways - though time and a plane to
catch restrain me. I think the main comment I have is that from a social
constructionist viewpoint process is all there is .... life is a flow of
never ending reconstructions of meaning. therefore every person will
usually construct their own meaning of an outcome even if the process
looks identical for all involved. Similarly the process will be viewed or
constructed differently. When one person walks into a new group and
explains what process was used it will be re-negotiated again, and so on
... So if we accept the notion that social constructionism occurs we are
left with how we might gain shared meaning, shared learning, etc. What are
the processes within the processes so as to speak ..
This is where the IRL folks are going - and they demonstrate how learning
is co-construction of a story or meaning, i.e. learning occurs in a social
context and is a result of a social process. Similary they suggest
learning is more about becoming a practitioner - than it is about learning
about the work process itself.
As one example - John Seely Brown related the story of a project manager
from Philips Electronics who was able to lead his project teams to
completion in outstanding fashion - though the way he started the process
- he said "would drive his people crazy". He would put them in a room and
they would jointly decide what the meaning of the project was - to the
point where everybody had a shared meaning of the project. This is what
everyone does - right -- the exception is that in his case this might take
up to 3 months! The point is that only by ensuring such a rigorous quality
to the co-construction of meaning was everyone able to move forwards with
the same mental maps.
I immediately related this to the car redesign project that MIT Org
Learning Centre has on its web site - and the lessson that slower in the
beginning may be better, as is often attributed to the Japanese decision
making models . However John reminded me that the Philips guy case is
qualitatively different ... it is not simply a case of using better
processes to identify problems earlier rather than a case of allowing the
time for the deeply shared co-construction of meaning inside a work group.
Actually your #76 also reminds me that Peter Vail used to say that OD is a
process for improving all other processes! Another twist on life!
As an aside Joe, one of your colleagues was a while ago trying to convince
me that management was about creating a thing. That in the end it was all
about a thing that one could hold in one's hand. Interestingly I was
re-reading some of Built to Last yesterday and Dave Packard is quoted
saying that the thing he was most proud of "making" was the company design
- its philosophy- (the HP way) and that the products happened along almost
opportunistically. Whether this is somewhat poetic I don't know? In your
QMS you discussed did you ever corrrelate to "fit" with HP way?
Thanks Joe, I look forward to your next piece.
Tony
--Tony Kortens <tkortens@silcon.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>