Replying to Julie who said
>I am struggling with this tolerance to diversity point - could you say
>more about what this means? I just have this sense that we could lose
>really wonderful contributers because we never listened to them.... and in
>the earlier post I seem to remember only 20% actually wanted to go in the
>same direction (60% were indifferent?) as the 'rest of us'.
What the 2:6:2 model suggests to me is that for any initiative, the most
constructive way of focusing management effort is to support those who
positively support the initiative, allow those who are not immediately
enthusiastic to be drawn in to something that is happening, and not to
directly focus on persuading those who are against the initiative to
commit to it. This is based on the fact that resources are finite and
management has to make some decision on how to spend a finite amount of
time.
Now the anti's may have very good reasons for not wanting to be part of an
initiative, but if the organisation has chosen a basic path to go down,
the honest thing for anyone who fundamentally disagrees with that path to
do is to join a different organisation, although they may content
themselves with operating on the margins of the organisation and create
paths which the organisation may choose in the future.
The point about diversity is that there is not one true path for the
organisation to find and follow, but the organisation has to chose a path
or set of paths at any moment in time. There will always be a significant
minority who do not want to take those paths, for whatever reason.
An example from my life:
I was a manager in a marketing company owned by a distance learning
university financed by government. Our role was to commercially exploit
the materials produced by the university, including publishing casebooks
for students to buy. The board decided that they wished to focus on
developing the company's own publishing activity, generating income for
the university in that way.
As resources are finite, this meant spending less effort on marketing the
distance learning materials already being produced by the university. As
Sales and Marketing Manager I disagreed with this strategy, and eventually
was asked to leave.
I now believe (although not at the time) that the board were absolutely
right to ask me to resign (which is the polite English way they did it),
my only regret is that I did not have the self-awareness and maturity to
jump before being pushed. I still disagree with their strategy, but I
don't want to discuss whether the strategy worked for them or not, as that
is irrelevant to the issue of diversity, and subject to interpretation. I
also think that the company was too small to tolerate someone operating on
the margins, which gives one advantage to being in a large organisation
that does have a tolerance for experiments on the margins.
Another common example would be the conflict between partners in a new
business which has the opportunity to grow rapidly. Some may want to go
for that growth, others may want to stay small. If the company is to have
a direction it has to do one or the other, so some partners may choose to
leave.
Another example, closer to the interests of some other people on this
list, may be of a company deciding to go down the ISO 9000 route. Some
people may honestly find this bureaucratic and stifling, and choose to
operate on the margins, or leave. Again, I don't want to open up a debate
on this, just to acknowledge the diversity of opinion which exists.
I suppose I could be advocating the primacy of Personal Mastery over
Shared Vision - not everyone can buy into the shared vision (and not
everyone can be directly involved in creating it), so if you can't buy in
to the shared vision, being true to your sense of personal mastery is an
option.
Malcolm Jones
prodeuro@atlas.co.uk
(Sorry Rick, I haven't got this signature thing worked out yet)
[Host's Note: No real problem. My software automatically adds the internet
standard sig, as below, if you don't provide it. ...Rick]
--prodeuro@atlas.co.uk (Malcolm Jones)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>