Kathleen,
What you write is good common sense,that often lacks on many organizational structures
that create change combined without clear understanding,how they have to proceed. But let us assume the following situation that can occur now days:
You go swimming in a river. You've gone
swimming at this spot in this river many times before and have enjoyed it and its
been refreshing. But one day something has changed. As you swim out you realize
that there is an undercurrent that has taken hold of you and is rapidly
pulling you down river towards a very dangerous waterfall. You suddenly find
yourself struggling with all your might to swim upstream against this
overwhelming and invisible force. Your brain is screaming "This can't be happening" yet
it is. You look around and realize that you are alone. No one is on shore to
help you or throw you a line. You know the danger that awaits you and fear
has gripped your mind. So what do you do now? Your relaxing summer dip in your
familiar swimming spot has become a life and death matter. Your brain is
racing to try and figure out what to do. Despite your good physical condition as
an excellent swimmer, your strength is not enough. You are tiring quickly as
you struggle against the invisible and relentless current that is pulling you
closer and closer to certain death.
This is what happens to the unsuspecting PM. Many experienced 'Managers' suddenly
find themselves dealing with complex issues/wicked problems that threaten
their program and can ruin their careers. So what do they do? What skills can
they invoke to gain control? How could they have known that conditions have
changed?
In this forum I have been trying to advocate 'Systems Thinking and interactive Planning Methodology', not without a cause,
since most of you are excellent practitioners
but lack the fundamental systemic understanding of the phenomena you deal with, as well as what is 'Interactive Complexity' with which we deal so often now days. I will give a brief expose of 'our'
methodology that up to now has been universally successful:
Systems Thinking and Interactive Planning
A method of planning that eliminates the need for forecasting, and
substitutes the use of assumptions and contingency planning in its place, because the
ability to forecast and predict is deteriorating at an alarming rate:
1- The society is changing at an accelerating rate, and
2- Complexity is growing at an increasing rate
Assumptions are about possibilities; predictions and forecasts are about
probabilities.
Therefore, any method of planning that is critically dependent on the
accuracy of forecasting is doomed to fail.
Internal Markets, Multi-Dimensional Structure and Planning Boards
Three different design ideas that make an organization to work as a system.
In particular, the three design ideas that enhance and facilitate
interactions among organizational units.
Internal Markets: Large proportion of units in most of organizations are
bureaucratic monopolies supported by allocation of resources from top
management. Their customers do not have the choice of alternative sources. These units
have the following characteristics. Internal market structure mirrors the
success of market economy.
The Circular Organization : Today people are generally the most
underutilized resources in corporations. To capture the underutilized potential of
educated workers, managers must learn to rely less on “power over” and more on “
power to”. The organizational structure and processes of most corporations
preclude effective management of interactions; they are structured for the
supervision of actions. We pursue democracy in the public sphere but accept
autocracy in our corporations. The circular organization is a design for
participative organizational planning. In order for the external as well as internal
stakeholders of an organization to be able to participate in the decision
making process, a structure is needed to institutionalize participation and
organizational learning.
The Multidimensional Organization: The Multidimensional concept of
organization eliminates the needs for reorganization when the relative importance of
the criteria for dividing labor changes:
All three activities, input, output, and market are used at each level of
the organization,
Therefore, changing priorities can be reflected by reallocation of resources
among organizational units without changing the organization’s structure,
The multidimensional organization structure also makes it easy to add or
subtract units without serious disruption of the organization.
Problem Solving Strategies
There are several problem strategies. Theses include:
1.To absolve -- is to ignore a problem and hope it will go away or solve
itself.
2.To resolve -- is to select a course of action which yields an outcome
which is good enough, one which "satisfices" the need and objectives of the
system., I.E., Clinical approach.
3.To solve -- is to select the course of action that is believed to yield
the best possible outcome, the one that "optimizes.”, I.E.,Research approach.
4.To dissolve -- is to change the nature of either the system with the
problem or its environment, so as to, in effect, “remove the problem.”, I.E.,
Design approach.
Business Model Innovation -- Idealized design as an "open innovation" process
In industry after industry, companies with superior performance are
displaying innovation in the totality of the way they are doing business. This
explains why a recent IBM survey
(http://www-1.ibm.com/services/us/bcs/html/bcs_ceostudy2006.html) of over 765 CEOs shows: Business Model Innovation is on the
top of their list. In the absence of a single genius entrepreneur/leader,
one of the challenges confronting the businesses today is to develop a process
of “open innovation,” that taps into the creativity of the stakeholders and
in particular the employees of the organization to create a successful
business model. Traditional models of innovation, which relied solely on "creative
types," usually within R&D functions, are being replaced with "open
innovation”. One of the most potent open innovation processes, is idealized design.
Originally conceived as an internal process to facilitate corporate planning,
idealized design thinking is now being used for opportunity recognition.
Trans formative Leadership
Radical transformations are seldom easy. For things to happen there is a
need to transform management from the old style, command and control, to the new
style, inspiring leadership. Leadership consists of guiding, encouraging, and
facilitating the pursuit by others of ends using means, both of which they
have personally selected or the selection of which they approve. In this
formulation, leadership requires an ability to bring the will of followers into
consonance with that of the leader so they follow him or her voluntarily, with
enthusiasm and dedication.
Development vs. Growth
Growth and development are not the same thing. Neither is necessary for the
other. Nevertheless, many managers take development to be the same as growth.
Most efforts directed at corporate development are actually directed at
corporate growth. To grow is to increase in size or number. To develop is to
increase one’s ability and desire to satisfy one’s own needs and legitimate
desires and those of others. A legitimate desire is one that, when satisfied,
does not impede the development of anyone else. Development of individuals and
corporations is more a matter of learning than earning. It has less to do
with how much one has than how much one can do with whatever one has.
Development is better reflected in quality of life than in standard of
living. Therefore, the level of development of a corporation is better reflected
in the quality of work life it provides its employees than in its
profit-and-loss statement. If an undeveloped country or corporation was flooded with
money it would be richer but no more developed. On the other hand, if a well
developed country or corporation was suddenly deprived of wealth, it would not
be less developed. A well-developed country or corporation can do more with
its resources than one that is less developed. This is not to say that the
amount of resources available is irrelevant. Resources can be used to accelerate
development and improve quality of life, but they can best be used for these
purposes by those who are developed.
Integrative (Synthetic) Project Management (for complex project managers)
Despite significant progress in the development of computer-aided project
management tools to help plan and manage projects, "more often than not capital
projects overrun their budgets, fall behind schedule, and fail to meet their
business objectives." This apparent paradox stems from the nature of the
"traditional paradigm applied to project management, which relies on existing
knowledge - knowledge gained from studying traditional approaches."
The current approach has limitations. Generally, it is good for doing
projects in a stable environment. The problem with project performance is
paradigmatic, i.e. using a wrong mindset. The new approach requires the project
managers to mange the interaction of the parts of the project rather than managing
each part separately.
Recreating Capital Projects
Effective capital project management is an important discipline for
international bodies, governments, and corporations because capital projects
typically require large investments and involve significant potential benefits and
risks. A large number of project management techniques and tools have been
developed but this proliferation has not led to great project success. In fact,
the governmental project that meets or exceeds expectations seems almost the
exception rather than the rule. Large corporations do not seem to be doing much
better. Using systems thinking to show how the capital project can be
re-created and improved through integrating successful aspects of various
real-world projects within a systemic framework to develop an improved project
system.
Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management (including the use of
channels and platforms To tap into the rich tacit knowledge (knowledge that
resides in people’s heads)
Why do corporations, on average, have shorter life spans than the people who
populate them? Because, say the theorists, people are more capable of
learning from experience than are corporations.
With change the only constant in today's economy, the key to competitiveness
is the ability to adapt to changes we can't control and to learn about the
ones we can control. The decline of some well-established firms and the
diminishing competitive power of others have made learning an essential competence
for organizational success.
Organizational learning (OL) is the set of processes and structures that
help people create new knowledge, share their understanding, and continuously
improve themselves and the results of the enterprise. OL builds competencies
for supporting transformation throughout the organizational system. Most
important, it considers human, operational, and technical issues at work,
including ways to build processes and structures that deal with philosophical,
psychological, and sociological forces at play in every organization.
“Building Corporate ‘Black Boxes’: A Different Perspective on.
Organizational
Learning.”
Most of us are familiar with the role of “black boxes” as they exist in
aircraft. We know that they are there to help us learn from mistakes and
thereby improve the performance of aircraft and the aviation system as a whole.
Imagine what would happen if the aviation system did not learn and adapt to
changes quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, this is the case with most
organizations. Nevertheless, a number of corporations have successfully built
learning and adaptive systems.
Unlearning/Learning Organizations – The Role of Mindset
Most learning by adults and organizations occurs when something new replaces
in the
mind that which was previously thought to be known, that is, unlearning.
Unlearning
must frequently precede or at least occur simultaneously with learning.
Nevertheless, the
literature on organizational learning has virtually ignored the unlearning
process until
recently when few authors have given it some attention. Research in the
field of
organizational learning and knowledge management shows that learning and
adaptation
takes place much more easily within the prevailing mindset (view of the
world) than
outside of it.
Unlearning is a challenge because the human tendency to preserve a
particular view of
the world is very strong and the change to a new paradigm not only requires
an ultimate
act of learning but also of unlearning.
Our assumptions about the nature of reality can impose the most severe
restrictions on
our ability to learn. Unlearning these assumptions requires raising them to
consciousness
and this can occur only when we confront the dilemmas that they create.
Therefore,
raising our world view to consciousness is among the most important things we
can do to
enhance our learning and unlearning. It is possible to design systems that
not only facilitate learning and unlearning within the prevailing world view
but it can generate questions about the adequacy of the assumptions that make
up that concept of reality.
When dealing with:
'Creativity and Design'
I reason about:
Design for the consumers
Design with the consumers
Design by the consumers
I also develop, Consumer Idealized Design (CID) as a methodology to generate
design requirements etc.
Nobody in this forum except Tara Joyce, seems to be willing to learn new things,getting out of the box and 'Unlearning
what already is obsolete' and start trying
learning flexibly to change your 'Mindset'.
Subconsciously, I can't help to start thinking about"Cipolla's Five Basic Laws"-
- Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid
individuals in circulation.
- The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any
other characteristic of that person.
- A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a
group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring
losses.
- Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid
individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times
and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid
people infallibly turns out to be a costly mistake.
- A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
The author demonstrates that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all
human groups, irrespective of race, class, creed or level of education
(including Nobel laureates). It is uniformly distributed according to a constant
proportion. He notes: .. The underdeveloped of the Third World will probably
take solace at the Second Basic Law as they can find in it the proof that after
all the developed are not so developed".
Unfortunately, Cipolla fails to consider how the world would function without
"stupid people". For without the problems they create, there would be
nothing for the "non-stupid" people to do. Every action requires an equal and
opposite reaction!
Carlo M Cipolla. The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. Bologna, The Mad Millers
(Imola, Italy, Grafiche Galeati) 1976, 30 p.
Cheers and Happy "Thanksgiving Holli days!"
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