Hi Tony,
Quite a situation you are in there.
I work for a large, old bureaucracy (federal site) and share some of your
challenges. I have been using a grass roots approach for the last seven
years, so here's my two bits. Patience and persistence are required here.
Use systems thinking concepts to explore understanding of a problem that
is important to your organization/manager, preferably a problem that
involves a number of subsystems (cross-functional interfaces) and just
won't go away. Get others to see the systemic relationships by asking
them leading questions. An example might be "If ten other people were put
in that exact situation, what's the likelihood that some of them would
have done the same thing ?" That get's people to think systemically
intuitively. Use familiar terms like "processes".
Here's a generalized suggestion on finding partners. Identify those folks
that are visual thinkers and work with them. Using NLP modeling skills,
watch those who "look up" when they are thinking - they're visual. Some
people seem to have very little capacity for visual thinking - you can
spend a lot of time with them and they still won't "get it". You can pick
them out - they are always talking, never reflecting, their eyes go
side-to-side and rarely look upward to access their visual mode.
As far as communications, the ladder of inference and skills of
reflection, advocacy, and inquiry are outstanding tools for group
learning. I am right now in the process of briefing my department
management team on these skills so we can enhance the communication in our
strategic planning sessions. The response has been very good - they seem
to pick up on it without a lot of head scratching. Perhaps they see how
the tool can really help with communication, even though they have not
practiced it yet. Next Tuesday will be the first "test" as the group
meets again.
--Geof Fountain tfyy93a@prodigy.com
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