Does Your Organization Have a Learning Disability?

Extraordinary Organizations… Are those that engage people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in the organization Will recognize that the only truly sustainable competitive advantage is the rate at which organizations learn Nothing compares to the exhilaration that comes from working within learning orgs.

Ordinary Organizations…. Learn slowly if at all Characterize an organization that you are aware of…..

Disciplines of the Learning Organization Personal Mastery Mental Models Shared Vision Team Learning Systems Thinking

All human endeavors are systems

Personal Mastery Continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision

Mental Models Deeply engrained assumptions, generalizations

Shared Vision Where there is genuine vision, people excel “Where there is no vision the people perish”

Team Learning The synergy of teams is the ultimate exhilaration Some people, having experienced it once, spend the rest of their lives looking for it

The Fifth Discipline IS, OF COURSE, SYSTEMS THINKING Subsumes and permeates all of the other disciplines By enhancing the other disciplines, it continually reminds us that the whole can exceed the sum of its parts But ST also needs the other four disciplines to realize its full potential

Metanoia--A shift of Mind The recreation of ourselves through learning Becoming able to do something we never were able to do Re-perceiving the world and our relation to it Extending our capacity to create There is within each one of us a deep hunger for this type of learning

Putting the Ideas into Practice SENGE: The greatest societal problem facing us today is the increased complexity of our systems FORRESTER: Systems are counterintuitive. Consequently, naïve policy makers implement policies that have just the opposite of their intended effect

Senge’s Metanoia Originally, he was interested only in public sector problems But then corporate leaders came to him for help –These were thoughtful people, deeply aware of the inadequacies of their own organizations –All shared a commitment and capacity to innovate that was lacking in the public sector

Who were these people??? William O’Brien of Hanover Insurance Edward Simon from Herman Miller Ray Stata, CEO of Analog Devices Trammel Crow Arie De Geus of Shell Oil Co Leaders from Apple, Ford, Polaroid, 4000 Managers who attended the Innovations Associates workshops over eleven years

“I am my Position” We are trained to be loyal to our jobs—so much so that we confuse our job with our personal identity. Most people see themselves within a system over which they can exercise little control There is a kind of myopia in American organizations that causes individual workers to focus only on their small part rather than on the larger system as a whole APICS is trying to address this problem We need to see ourselves in the context of the larger system

“The Enemy is out There” Generally, we tend to see the problem as outside us –“no one can catch a ball in that darn field…” “Thou shalt always find an external agent to blame” –Marketing blames manufacturing—quality is poor, due dates are missed, etc. –Manufacturing blames Engineering –Engineering blames Marketing

“The Enemy is out there” is actually… A byproduct of “I am my position…” –Because of the non-systemic ways of looking at the world that it fosters –When we focus only on our position, we do not see how our actions extend beyond the boundary of that position –When those actions have consequences that go beyond our position, they come back to hurt us

“The Enemy is out there” manifests itself with statements like.. the Japanese are killing us The labor unions are killing us The government regulators are killing us But this is always an incomplete story that fails to recognize that “out there” and “in here” are parts of the SAME SYSTEM

The Illusion of Taking Charge Being proactive is in vogue –Just ask Steven Covey This means face up to difficult problems, stop waiting for someone else to do something, solve problems before they grow into crises, etc. We have a hooked on heroics culture—one that always looks for leadership from the top

The Illusion of Taking Charge All too often pro-activeness is re-activeness in disguise True pro-activeness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems

The Fixation of Events We are conditioned to see life as a sequence of events The situation unfolding in Kashmir is viewed as a sequence of escalating events The situation in Israel/Palestine again is seen as a situation involving events which can be used to justify the position of either side

The Fixation of Events The media reinforces the fixation on events That is what they report It is part of our programming Distracts us from seeing the longer term patterns of change that underlie events and from understanding the causes that underlie the patterns

Today, the primary threats to our survival…\ Stem not from events but from slow gradual processes –The environment –The erosion of public education –Generative thinking cannot be sustained if people are focused on events

The Parable of the Boiled Frog What is it???

The Delusion of Learning from Experience We learn from taking an action and observing the consequences of these actions –What happens when we cannot observe the consequences of our action? –We all have a learning horizon—a span in time and space within which we assess our effectiveness We learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions

The Delusion of Learning from Experience Most people have short memories If cycles last longer than a year or two, they are particularly hard to see and thus learn from To reduce the breadth of impact organizations are decomposed into components But the departments create stovepipes that reduce the observability of complex issues that cross functional boundaries.

The Myth of the Management Team Most management teams spend their time fighting for turf

Disabilities and Disciplines

Prisoners of the System, or Prisoners of our own Thinking

The Retailer

The Wholesaler

The Brewery

Structure Influences Behavior

Redefining Your scope of Influence

Learning disabilities and Our ways of Thinking

The Laws of the Fifth Discipline

Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions IT solutions of yesterday are today’s “problems” –Bringing integration, complexity –And along with complexity The potential for Chaos The potential for Catastrophe

Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions THE CARPET BUMP: Jump on the bump and the bump reappears somewhere else Why are sales of autos so slow this quarter? –Because o f the tremendous rebates and zero interest promotions of the previous quarters

The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back

Behavior grows better before it grows worse

The easy way out usually leads back in

The cure can be worse than the disease

Faster is slower Particularly when mistakes are made

Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space

Small changes can produce big results--but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious

You can have your cake and eat it too, but not at once

Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.

There is no blame

Copyright C 2012 by James R. Burns All rights reserved world-wide. CLEAR Project Steering Committee members have a right to use these slides in their presentations. However, they do not have the right to remove this copyright or to remove the “prepared by….” footnote that appears at the bottom of each slide. Prepared by James R. Burns