Evolution toward LO LO5254

Julie Beedon (julie@vistabee.win-uk.net)
Wed, 31 Jan 1996 14:52:14

Replying to LO5234 --

Dave Birren asked what he framed as a 'tough question'

>The question: What evolutionary stages, or phases, must an organization
>go through in order to practice learning concepts?

Not sure that I have 'an answer' - I suspect there are many but I thought
it might be worth sharing my story/experience and some thoughts

I worked for 6 years as Regional Quality Co-ordinator for the West
Midlands Employment and during that time we were progressing a Deming
based transformation which led us to LO etc... When asked to contribute
to a book on organisational change in the public sector we did a review of
our story and pulled out some key stages which we seemed to progress
through..... this was all done with hindsight we did not have a grand
strategic plan to progress through this way we just PDCA'd our way through
reviewing and responding to data.....

The phases (in brief- each lasted approximately a year) were:

pre - transformation effort

we were a typical hierarchical bureaucracy with a mainly (65%) clerical
work force interacting with the public and processing paperwork and
computer input. People were trained to deliver correct actions and were
largely deskilled and disempowered (don't question just follow proceedure,
for everything other than routine get a supervisor's signature - even if
you have to tell them the right answer!) We had done some experimental
work with customer focus and active management

Phase one - preparing to go.... during this phase we researched and read
books, engaged consultants, tested techniques and processes and involved
and educated senior managers to the stage where we decided to roll out
over 110 offices and 5000 people. We appointed a number of facilitators
and planned our implementation.

Phase two - a 'training task' - the decision to roll out to all staff had
major implications in training terms as we were committed to giving
everyone the skills to be involved in decision making and quality etc...
(7 quality tools - CI stuff) At the same time senior managers continued
studying the system... but getting the training done was our obsession.

Phase three - leadership and projects - feedback led us to understand the
top and bottom pincer was creating issues and we worked on the leadership
role of middle managers in the system. We learned more tools for planning
and improvement and developed team learning with the senior management
team and produced a vision which was revised through consultation with
staff.... Many successful project were conducted and bottom line
performance began to be impacted

Phase four - strategy and breakthrough - we developed our understanding of
strategic planning and began to use it more successfully aligning
strategies and tactics with our strategic intent. We used breakthrough
technologies to achieve a quantum leap impact on our key bottom line
performance indicator. We discovered and started to use large scale
change methodologies...

Phase five - alignment and key process management - we used large scale
meetings of the 'whole system' to do interactive strategic planning and
achieve alignment. We worked on major process redesin and alignment using
the data from these meetings.... We removed a layer of management ....

Lessons along the way -

- it was hard to see the organisation as a system until we had shared and
integrated all perspectives in our whole system events

- empowerment can easily become a buzz word and is not a helpful concept,
rather focus on understanding the dependency dynamics in the system we
found people will take responsibility for the system once they have a
common database of information, feel their voice has been heard and see
the strategic purposes as relevant

- we were clear about the concept of 'no blame' initially but it took some
time to integrate that thinking into the way we did business and treat
everyone as 'good', initially we only used the 'champions' and we made far
more progress once we started to use those who are most cynical and
critical in planning change and listen carefully to what they had to say

There were many things we were still struggling with when I left:

- developing effective processes for sharing learning across the
system
- the difficult role of the middle manager with responsibility for
delivery units (the only place in the organisation that
responsibility for the whole system comes together - ie *not* an
awkward frozen layer)
- integrating new leaders (external to the system learning
experiences - ie from other parts of the system) into the new ways
of doing business (mental models take time to develop)
- how to share information with everyone in a fast ongoing way
which does not result in overload (we were experimenting with
Notes)

Hope this is helpful

--
Julie Beedon
VISTA Consulting - for a better future
julie@vistabee.win-uk.net