Geoff asks:
>One of my biggest lessons learned over the last .... years working at a
grass roots level is (with regards to learning organizations).
My biggest lesson is that it can take a lot of time for something to
become real, especially something as vague as a Learning Organization.
Unlike some of the other trendy management concepts of recent years (like
rightsizing, 360: feedback, etc.), Learning Organization meant nothing
tangible here and the whole concept of systems thinking never really came
through. It sounded good, it seemed to open doors to the future and it
made us look like we were keeping up with the times, but in effect it was
mostly a term we were throwing around in annual reports and corporate
training plans.
We have been using the term Learning Organization around for the last five
years, but it is only in the last year that we have finally begun to
understand and apply it - we needed a new President for that to happen.
The bottom line is that management spoke of this new approach without
really knowing what the heck it meant. We kept on doing with what we had
always done - we never took the time to 'really' look at our systems, to
analyse them honestly, to come up with better and more long term
solutions, and then to "implement" them.
There are a few lessons I learned personally:
- Be patient, very, very patient, when you are trying to introduce
something new into a system. All aspects of an organization are
interrelated and when you start changing things, the dominos start
falling. This makes people very nervous and you had better be ready to
deal with the consequences.
- If you are near or at the top (management), make sure you support your
champions of the new model
- if you are a champion, make sure management understands and supports
your initiatives
- what has worked for me is posting exerpts from this list on our E-Mail
on a bi-weekly (or so) continuous basis for the last 1 = years. Before
that everyone would say, 'Oh, the learning organization thing, go see
Suzanne', I was the keeper and official interpreter of the concept. Now I
think most everyone understands Systems Thinking and Continuous Learning
concepts, and are even incorporating them into their modus operandi. A
sustained teaching effort is imperative if you want people to understand
and assimilate it.
And the learning goes on......
Suzanne
ssauve@mus-nature.ca
"That which transforms things and fits them together is called change,
That which stimulates them and sets them in motion is called continuity,
That which raises them up and sets them forth before all people on earth is called the field of action."
I Ching
-- Suzanne =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Sauv=E9?= <SSAUVE@MUS-NATURE.CA>Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>