This story describes events associated with the handling of hazardous,
non-hazardous, and radioactive waste that occurred over a number of years
in a regulated manufacturing environment.
As the site began applying (or in some cases, adding to) these regs, many
departmentalized functions ended up with "pieces" of the processes. Some
of these functions included Material Control, Planning, Environmental,
Engineering, Waste Certification, Operations, Waste Storage, RadCon, and
Transportation, to name a few. There were a number of new and old
regulatory drivers, all with different sources at the state and federal
level, as well as site policies and procedures.
The area manager, a natural systems thinker, quickly sensed there were
lots of people working the pieces, but no one function seemed to be
viewing the overall picture or managing the overall process. So he called
a meeting of all the functional pieces that had anything to do with waste.
About twenty folks attended this meeting.
During the discussion of the problems, the elephant picture was passed to
the area manager as a suggestion for explaining what appeared to be the
core problem. He saw the obvious analogy and used it with the group.
Later that day he posted the picture outside his office. He labeled the
elephant as "waste", and labeled each of the blind men with the functions
in his organization that had a piece of the process. That picture stayed
on the wall outside his office for a couple of weeks as he met with the
group and worked to integrate all the functional pieces with the waste
process.
Although no formal post evaluation was performed to determine if the
picture helped in resolving the problem, my observation was it made a
difference in how the twenty people came to view and understand the core
problem. The picture helped them take on a systemic view, which lead them
to resolve the territorial barriers created by the functional parts...
--Geof Fountain tfyy93a@prodigy.com
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>