Terri A Deems wrote in a reply to Fran Alexander:
> Is improvement never enough for us when we are 'in it'?
> Are consultants and researchers and authors more willing, or more able, or
> more compelled to see change?
Your assumption within that last statement is interesting: that change is
present, and that members of an org just can't see it. I don't think that
consultants, researchers and authors are more willing or able to see
change; if anything, perhaps, some are simply more easily taken in by the
illusion of change. Maybe some of them see change because they are
willing to look at the appearance, rather than the quality or way of
being.
I wonder whether there is generally a gap between perceived versus actual
change in an organisation. In my work on evaluating and comparing methods
and practices in software engineering and business re-design I came across
papers which reported a gap. [G ibson and Senn], for instance, asked
software maintenance people to rate the ease of maintenance of selected
application programs. They then compared these ratings with measurements
of program maintainability. The subjective perception and the objective
measurements differed wildly. To check this danger, [Moynihan] asks
subjects for their opinions of functional decomposition and
object-orientation, and measures the subjects' task performance when
applying these methodologies to cases. The subjects made considerably more
positive comments on functional decomposition than on object-orientation
while their task performance was only slightly better with functional
decomposition.
[Gibson and Senn] V.R.Gibson and J.A.Senn, "System Structure and Software
Maintenance Performance", Communication of the ACM, pp 347-358, March
1989.
[Moynihan] T.Moynihan, "An Experimental Comparison of Object-Orientation
and Functional Decomposition as Paradigms for Communicating System
Functionality to Subjects", Journal of Systems and Software, pp 163-169,
May 1996.
Can these findings be generalized? Does a similar gap also exist for LOs?
Meaning that after LO methods and principles were introduced, people
perceived changes that actually did not happen in everyday organisational
life? Or vice versa: did not perceive changes that actually happened.
Has anybody made observations to this end with LO methods? Or know of any
reports and papers treating this subject for software engineering- or
business design methods?
Thank you and best regards
Peter Stecher
Peter Stecher/France/IBM@IBMFR
--Peter Stecher <stecher@fr.ibm.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>