Hi John
>I am involved in a current project in which there is expected resistance
>to LO and TQM principles. Much of it centers around the dreaded issue of
>"compensation".
I probably neeed more data about the nature of the resistance to offer
much but I do have one story.
We did some work last year with a brick/tile manaufacturing company who
were working on a Deming based transformation, they had been doing
training for a year and we came in at a pint whereby they wanted to work
further on strategic planning and thinking about the prioirities as they
moved forward. They decided to involve a large cross section of the
system in this strategic planning/thinking and we were working witht he
planning of a large scale (150 people) meeting - we were working in
collaboration with another consulting comapny who had been supporting the
education process so far. They had already been tampering with the pay
system with the aim of moving it away from the piece rate it had been on
for many years. (this had winners and losers as some had been on
extortionately high rates because of a variety of historical factors)
In the design team for the event we found this pay issue was a huge area
of disatisfaction - with the microcosm we tried having them desribe a
preffered future (for themselves and the success of the company) in this
area which seemed to work well. We also discussed the processes by which
you might get there it led us into all sorts of discussions about profit
and strategic options and we agreed that a way forward would be to use the
quality approach which we ahd been discussing - ie set up a process
improvement team in this area.. In the event itself the design team were
worried this isse would dominate - the plan was to have the whole group do
the same sort of futuring we had done and to set up the improvement team
with advice from this huge group in terms of what the vision was and what
they would need to cover in getting there. The work was completed in less
than an hour and the meeting moved on with some sense of having dealt with
a highly emotive subject in a positive manner - and only 2 of the
evaluations even mentioned the topic....
I must check back in with the other consulting team how work has
progressed in this area...
Julie Beedon
VISTA Consulting - for a better future
julie@vistabee.win-uk.net
--Julie Beedon <julie@vistabee.win-uk.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>