The Hidden Organization LO12486

Scott Simmerman (SquareWheels@compuserve.com)
Tue, 11 Feb 1997 11:55:52 -0500

In LO12445, Frank Voehl refers to:

>About thirty years ago, Juran and Feigenbaum first coined the terms
>'the hidden gold in the mine' (Juran) and the 'hidden plant'
>(Feigenbaum). This term actually had two meanings:

>1- the waste that is present in all organizxations, constituting some
>25-30% of annual revenues and

>2- the organization within the organization where the real backbone and
>tensile strength resided.

and asks for a response.

In our team building simulation, teams routinely withhold information from
each other (the theme is mining gold, incidently!) and suboptimize results
by 25% to 35%. Sufficient resources exist for all the teams to be
successful, yet they choose to compete rather than collaborate and thus
view the situation as scarcity rather than abundance.

Another reality is, "Nobody ever asks the Expedition Leader for advice."
Only permission. The EL is frames as "his role is to help teams be
successful" and "the goal is to maximize ROI." This parallels my
experience as Sr. VP of Operations for a 126-store chain of retail stores
-- nobody ever asked for help.

We also have a Low Country Trail, where teams get bogged down in the mud.
Sound familiar? We often find that teams get bogged down in their
perceived cultural reality and thus waste lots of energy.

We've developed a great international cross-organizational database that
seems to be pretty consistent across companies and cultures.

So, in our own little way, we verify the above. We get an absolute
confirmation of these themes in a simulation - teams tend to play the game
like they tend to work (only faster!).

Are there any other groundings in the literature for this kind of result?

-- 
For the FUN of It!

Scott Simmerman Performance Management Company 3 Old Oak Drive, Taylors, SC 29687 (USA) 864-292-8700 fax 292-6222 SquareWheels@compuserve.com

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>