I'm changing the title of my response to a message addressed to "No
learning without feedback" to try to avoid thread drift.
Jacqueline V. Coppola wrote asked eloquently why an employee ("associate")
should feel ownership in their work when they were treated as expendable
parts. I think this has been a very serious problem in U.S. businesses
for the past decade or more that has not been well addressed. Everyone
knows that the "reengineering" fad turned into the "get rid of people"
fad. [As an aside, I think this is a shame because there is a lot of good
that can come from truly taking a reengineering approach to intractable
problems -- without the intention of downsizing.]
And, while this certainly is not a major cause of the downsizing trend, I
think that System Dynamics unwittingly contributes to the mindset that
people are expendable.
What? (I can hear you ask, loudly.)
Just take a look at the examples of system models in business that we use
to teach SD. How many of them have a feedback loop that includes
hiring/firing? And how many of these hiring/firing loops are used, in the
model, to adjust size of workforce in response to economic pressures from
elsewhere in the model?
I believe this sends an unintended dangerous, and old-fashioned, message
to managers -- namely, that it is okay to use firing and layoffs as a
lever to make the system work.
To those who still think this is part of the manager's "bag of tricks" I
would simply say that these simple models do NOT include loops to
represent the unintended consequences of layoffs and firings and early
retirement. They do not include loops that capture what is becoming more
and more the essence of the value of any business -- its core
competencies, its knowledge, its information. And, because the models do
not include this essential piece, the models do not reflect what happens
to a company's knowledge base and competence when its most experienced and
most highly competent people leave. Because if we have learned nothing
else from the past decade of downsizing, at least we have learned that the
people you can least afford to lose are among the first to go -- because
they can. They're the ones smart enough to see the writing on the wall
early, and they're the ones most able to find other employment.
John
--"John W. Gunkler" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>