Tom Abeles wrote:
" Now we are seeing a model where small units coalesce around a problem.
When that problem is solved then the group breaks up and the individuals
reform around another problem. This, in essence is the antithesis of a
learning organization and becomes more like a social organization such as
ants and bees, even with knowledge workers. There is the force which
drives the larger organization and which acts to have the workers,
knowledge or otherwise, gather around a problem and go from problem to
problem....... In essence, the need to retain knowledge within the
corporation becomes less than critical if it can be obtained on an as
needed basis. .... organizations will be driven by a few, the bankers, and
skill based persons, even those in the knowledge arena will be inventoried
to be drawn from "supply" on an as needed/ as available basis.
People have used sports as the ultimate model of team building and the
need to have a cooperative organization when, in fact, today, we see
individuals moving as easily between teams as needed, often working for
the same team more than once. Sports- the ultimate ephemral or virtual
learning organization
The idea of not down sizing in reorganizing and the idea of a permanent
community of workers retraining and rebuilding the organization as it
evolves may be a vision trying to recapture the past."
In my view there are three large problems with Tom's proposition:
(1) Where the decision about 'what is needed' might come from is
problematic. As postulated by Tom the way in which what knowledge is
needed might be determined becomes a systems process which results in
progressively increasing conservatism in decision making. I concede that
over-stable organisations also have powerful conservative forces at work,
but to me this merely indicates the need to think more about what exactly
are the forces at work here.
(2) The sports analogy is highly problematic. If anything I would
interpret the evidence of professional sports as tending towards a
refutation of Tom's proposition. I don't know about those impenetrable US
sports of baseball, American football and basketball, but out here in the
rest of the world there are plenty of indications that the mobile
club-trotting professional team sports player is leading to a
deterioration of both skilled performance and of team coherence, and
therefore declining performance. Sports results are, of course, the
ultimate benchmarking activity. Perhaps - as the CEO of a client
organisation said to me recently- "the trouble is that we're looking good
because we are benchmarking against organisations which are as lousy as we
are."
(3) If my suggestion regarding the sports analogy is correct, then my
explanation would be deeply grounded in consideration of organisational
culture ( by which I mean the taken-for-granted processes in any social
system). For me the function of cultural phenomena is to facilitate the
effective functioning of a social system in the achievement of shared
goals. This implies that cultures need to be able to evolve to deal with
changing environmental conditions.
It seems to me that within a culture there is somewhere an optimal degree
of personnel change which allows the system to dynamically evolve (i.e.
learn and create new knowledge) and that the level of this is a function
of the rate of environmental change. But when the level of personnel
change goes beyond the optimal level, then the cultural glue moves from
creative evolution into disintegration. This model leads me to the
proposition that restructuring and downsizing disasters can be explained
in part by the fact that the rate of change thereby imposed causes the
disintegration of the culture such that it can no longer function
effectively in its environment.
arohanui
Phillip Capper
Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business (WEB Research)
PO Box 2855
Wellington
New Zealand
Ph: (64) 04 499 8140
Fx: (64) 04 499 8439
--"Phillip Capper" <pcapper@actrix.gen.nz>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>