Prototypes

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Prototypes

• Fall 2010

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Contents

• Recitation
• Chapter 13 Openness
• Chapter 14 Localness
• Chapter 15 A Managers Time
• Chapter 16 Ending the war between work and
  family
• Chapter 17 Microworlds Technology for the
  Learning Organization
• Chapter 18 The Leaders New Work

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Recitation

• What is the role of the subconscious in personal
  mastery?

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Recitation

• Mental Models are important because
• Shared vision has the effect of..
• Team learning is supported by what other
  disciplines?
• Inquiry and reflection are used by what
  discipline?
• What two conversational techniques does Team
  Learning use?

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Part IV Prototypes

• Senge, Chapter 13--OPENNESS
• THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE

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Prototypes

• Are essential to discovering and solving key
  problems
• We are in the prototyping stage
• Significant innovation requires prototyping

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Where are we (in the Rawls COBA)?

• Somewhere between invention and innovation
• To what extent are we open to innovation?
• To what extent are we willing to address
• new curricula
• new organizational structures

Prepared by James R. Burns
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What explicit innovations would we like to see
prototyped?

• Many of these will fail
• Out of these failures workable structures will
  evolve
• Sometimes this is the only way to learn and
  advance the state of practice
• For some firms a culture that encourages trying
  new things even though they will fail fosters
  learning
• To what extent do we provide a laboratory for
  research in organizational learning?

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Another Reality Business Integration

• Integrating themes
• Information technology
• Quality
• Entrepreneurship
• Leadership
• Systems thinking/System dynamics
• Projects and processes

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Business Integration
IS
FIN
MAN
MAR
ACC
Information Technology
Quality
Leadership/Entrepreneurship
Systems Thinking/System Dynamics
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Back to prototyping

• How to encourage openness
• the elimination of politics and game playing
• How to discourage localness (Ch 14)
• the distribution of responsibility widely, while
  retaining coordination/control
• How do managers create the time for learning (Ch
  15)
• How can the war between work and family be ended
  (Ch 16)
• How can we learn from Microworlds (Ch17)

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Openness--Chapter 13--Outline

• How to eliminate politics and game playing
• Building an environment where self interest is
  not paramount
• Participative Openness and Reflective Openness
• Openness Complexity
• The Spirit of Openness
• Freedom

Prepared by James R. Burns
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How to eliminate politics and game playing

• A political environment is one in which WHO is
  more important than WHAT
• Who proposes the idea is more important than the
  idea itself
• Some individuals lose political power at the
  expense of others
• The wielding of arbitrary power over others is
  the essence of authoritarianism

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Is there anything that can be done about org.
politics??

• In most orgs, no, Senge says, so dont even dwell
  on it
• Yet very few people want to live in organizations
  corrupted by internal politics and game playing
• Challenging the grip of politics and game playing
  starts with building shared vision

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Shared vision

• Galvanizes people beyond their personal agendas
  and self interest
• We want an organizational climate dominated by
  merit rather than politics, where doing what is
  right predominates over who wants what done.

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Openness

• The norm of speaking openly -- participative
  openness
• The capacity to continually challenge ones own
  thinking -- reflective openness
• Openness is needed to break down the game playing
  that is deeply embedded in most organizations

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Building an environment where self interest is
not paramount

• Badaracco and Ellsworth in Leadership and the
  Quest for Integrity assume that practitioners
  believe that people are motivated by
  self-interest and by a search for power and
  wealth
• The assumption can be self-fulfilling assume
  this and you will have a very political org.
• Really, people want to be part of something
  larger than themselves
• Personal Mastery encourages people to look beyond
  themselves for personal vision

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Shared Visions

• Draw forth this broader commitment and concern
• Begins to establish a sense of trust that comes
  naturally
• Start by getting people to talk about what is
  really important to them
• When people hear each others visions, the
  political environment begins to crumble

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Honesty begins to Prevail

• Honesty and forthrightness must pervade every
  relationship
• Cannot sanction lying to anyone, administrators,
  students

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Unlearning the habits of politics and game playing

• Shared vision, once it takes root, does not
  completely dissolve game playing

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Participative Openness and Reflective Openness

• Most Common, Part. Openness-the freedom to speak
  ones mind
• Because participative management is widely
  espoused.
• But total honesty does not prevail
• There is little real learning

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Reflective Openness

• While Part. Openness gets people speaking out,
  reflective openness gets people looking inward
• Starts with the willingness to challenge our own
  thinking

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Reflective Openness, Continued

• Requires that we test our views, assumptions
  against other peoples views, assumptions and
  revise them as necessary
• Requires inquiry and reflection discussed in the
  mental models chapter

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Localness

• Senge Chapter 14
• THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE

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How to achieve control without controlling

• LOCALNESS--extending authority and power as far
  from the top or corporate center as possible
• More akin to the word EMPOWERMENT
• Learning organizations are ones in which thinking
  and acting are merged for every participant
• Localness is especially needed in times of rapid
  change

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Two new challenges emerge

• How to get senior managers to give up control to
  local managers
• How to make local control work

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Giving up control

• Will this make senior managers dispensable?
• Senior managers must assume responsibility for
  continually enhancing the organizations capacity
  for learning--THEIR NEW ROLE

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Other questions about localness

• How can locally controlled organizations achieve
  coordination?
• Synergy between business units?
• Collaborative efforts toward common
  corporate-wide objectives?
• How can the local organization be something other
  than just a holding company

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What experience has shown

• Rigid authoritarian hierarchies thwart learning
• Hierarchies fail to harness the spirit,
  enthusiasm, and knowledge of people throughout
  the organization and to be responsible for
  shifting business conditions
• Failure has sprung up from not being able to
  relinquish control

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Learning organizations

• do less controlling of peoples behavior
• invest in improving the quality of peoples
  thinking
• invest in improving the capacity for reflection
  and learning
• develop shared visions
• develop shared understandings

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The illusion of being in control

• Most senior managers would rather give up
  anything than control
• Senge illustrates the illusion of control from
  the top with roller skates connected by springs
• Even though senior managers think they are in
  control, they are not

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Vacillation

• When business is going well, localness prevails
• When business is not going well, control gets
  returned to central management
• Such vacillation is a testament to a deep lack of
  confidence
• Is an example of a shifting the burden archetype

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Beliefs

• Unless senior management believes
• that the quality of learning
• the ability to adapt
• the excitement and enthusiasm
• the human growth
• ARE WORTH THE RISK, they will never choose to
  build a locally controlled organization

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Today Expediency

• Many organizations are cutting management levels
• Becoming more locally controlled, to cut costs
• But these arrangements do not last a business
  downturn, usually

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Control without controlling

• Local decision making may not be wise
• Local decisions can be myopic, failing to
  appreciate the impacts of decisions
• Just because no one is in control does not mean
  that there is no control
• Central control is too slow and too unaware of
  what is happening locally

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The Tragedy of the Commons Archetype

• What is right for each part is wrong for the
  whole
• This is also called suboptimization in the
  context of quality management
• Each individual focuses only on his own needs,
  not on the needs of the whole

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Tragedy of the Commons Archetype, Continued

• Occur frequently in businesses where localness is
  valued
• When several divisions share a common support
  group

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Corporations Depletable Commons

• financial capital, productive capital, technology
• community reputation, good-will of customers and
  suppliers, morale of employees
• When a company decentralizes, local divisions
  compete with each other for those limited
  resources
• Andersen

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The experience

• Breaking business into smaller pieces is supposed
  to encourage local initiative and risk taking
• IN FACT, IT DOES JUST THE OPPOSITE

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The experience, Continued

• Divisionalization and autonomy has created more
  short-term oriented managers, managers who are
  more driven by the bottom line
• These aggressive division managers are driven by
  short-term profits only

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Managing COMMONS structures

• Who will manage the commons?
• Depletion of the commons will work to everyones
  disadvantage
• Establish signals that will alert local actors
  that a commons is in danger
• Do not take below the waterline risks as was
  the case for the Titanic

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The new role of central management

• Identifying and managing the COMMONS
• Become a researcher and designer
• Test new structures in a simulative environment,
  and recommend those that succeed
• Encourage organizational learning
• Encourage risk-taking

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Forgiveness

• Localness must encourage risk taking
• To do so is to practice forgiveness
• If you are making mistakes, that means you are
  making decisions and taking risks--and we wont
  grow unless you take risks
• Making the mistake is punishment enough

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A Managers Time

• Senge Chapter 15
• THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE

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How do managers create the time for learning?

• How do we expect people to learn when they have
  little time to think and reflect, individually
  and collaboratively?
• Even when there is time to reflect,...
• Most managers do not consider the impact their
  actions have had carefully
• Managers are too busy contemplating their next
  move to consider why their previous policy did
  not pan out

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What do American Managers do?

• They adopt a strategy
• When it runs into problems, they switch to
  another strategy
• Then to another and another
• Possibly to 4 or 6 different strategies, without
  once examining why a strategy seems to be failing
• Senge calls this the READY, FIRE, AIM atmosphere
  of American Corporations

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Learning takes time

• When managing mental models, it takes
  considerable time to surface assumptions, examine
  their consistency, their accuracy, and see how
  different models can be knit together into more
  systemic perspectives

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The example of Hanovers OBrien

• Doesnt schedule short meetings
• Only considers complex, dilemma-like divergent
  issues
• Only makes 12 decisions a year

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Hanovers OBrien, Continued

• If a manager is making 20 decisions a day, the
  manager is looking at convergent issues that
  should be dealt with more locally or is giving
  insufficient time to complex problems
• Either way its a sign that management work is
  being handled poorly

Prepared by James R. Burns
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For top level managers

• Their job should be consumed with identifying
  important issues the organization must address
  and helping others sort through decisions they
  must make

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In the future, Senge suggests

• High-level managers will spend more time
  reflecting, modeling and designing learner
  processes
• Because reflection and inquiry are integral to
  the development of valid mental models

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Managers must set aside time for thinking

• The way each of us go about managing our time
  will say a good deal about our commitment to
  learning

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Ending the War Between Work and Family

• Senge, Chapter 16
• THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE

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Introduction

• Finding a balance between work and family--number
  one issue
• Learning organizations will, Senge believes, end
  the imbalance between work and family
• Personal visions are multifaceted--personal,
  professional and family lives
• The boundary between work and family is anathema
  to system thinkers

Prepared by James R. Burns
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The Structure of Work/Family Imbalance

• Success to the Successful Archetype, page 308

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Success to the Successful
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This is very unstable

• Once it starts to drift one way or another, it
  will tend to continue to drift
• There are several reasons why it tends to drift
  toward more and more time at work
• Income
• pushing ahead at work becomes a convenient excuse
  for avoiding the anguish of going home to an
  unhappy spouse
• The imbalance is not self-correcting--it gets
  worse over time

Prepared by James R. Burns
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The Futility of Managing your Life Within this
Structure

• One-time improvements in family tend to get
  overwhelmed by escalating pressures at work
• Eventually, people realize that the structure
  itself must get changed

Prepared by James R. Burns
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The Individuals Role in changing the structure

• Is it really your vision to have a balance
  between work and family?
• Making a conscious choice will entail setting
  clear personal goals for time at home.
• being home for dinner, giving up weekends for
  family, reduce evening business meetings
• Be willing to pay a price for taking a stand for
  a vision of balance between work and family

Prepared by James R. Burns
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The Organizations Role

• By fostering such conflict, orgs. distract and
  un-empower their members
• By fostering such conflict, orgs. fail to exploit
  a potential synergy that can exist between
  learning orgs, learning individuals, learning
  families
• Bill OBrien says the skills of leadership in a
  learning organization are the skills of effective
  parenting.

Prepared by James R. Burns
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What does Leading involve in a Learning
Organization?

• Supporting people in clarifying and pursuing
  their own visions
• Helping people discover underlying causes of
  problems, and empowering them to make choices
• Looking for synergy between productive family and
  productive work life

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Senge believes

• these changes will lead more organizations to
  undo divisive pressures and demands that create
  family/work imbalances
• orgs will acknowledge that strong companies
  cannot be built on a foundation of broken homes
  and strained personal relationships

Prepared by James R. Burns
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Steps Orgs. can Take

• Provide day care for single parents
• Support personal mastery as a part of the orgs
  philosophy and strategy
• Make it acceptable for people to acknowledge
  family issues
• Where needed, help people obtain counseling and
  guidance for how to make effective use of their
  family time

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The conflict of work and home is ...

• a conflict of time
• a conflict of values
• but can be perceived as something else entirely

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What the parent learns at home.

• can be used at work
• how to build self-esteem works in both contexts,
  for example

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Lets take a break

• Stand up
• Walk around the roomin single file
• Bet its been a few years since youve been asked
  to do that
• Now return to your chair
• Now, touch the top of your head with your left
  hand
• Now sit down

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Microworlds The Technology of the Learning
Organization

• Senge, Chapter 17
• THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE

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How can we rediscover the child learner within us?

• Human beings learn best through firsthand
  experience.
• Learning by doing only works so long as the
  feedback from our actions is rapid and
  unambiguous
• But learning from experience is neither rapid nor
  unambiguous because the consequences of our
  actions are separated from us in time and space

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How then can we learn? Microworlds (MW)

• MWs enable managers and management teams to begin
  learning by doing
• MWs are nothing more or less than interactive
  simulations
• MWs compress time and space so that it becomes
  possible to experiment and to learn when the
  consequences are in the distant future and in
  distant parts of the organization

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Transitional objects the way children learn

• Children have a rate of learning that is truly
  astounding
• They rehearse with transitional objects dolls,
  blocks, play-houses, etc..
• Managers too have their transitional objects
  MWs
• When teams go white-water rafting, participate in
  a role playing exercise, participate in a
  dialogue practice session, they are engaging in a
  microworld.

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Transitional objects Are they the best?

• A white-water rafting trip doesnt produce
  powerful insights into strategic business issues
• Role-playing exercises do not show us whether our
  personnel policies are aligned with our
  manufacturing and marketing policies

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What about computer simulations?

• PC is ubiquitous and getting more powerful every
  month
• These simulations will prove to be a critical
  technology for implementing the disciplines of
  the learning organization

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How Does Organizational Learning Occur?

• According to Shells Arie de Geus, by
• Changing the rules of the game (through openness
  and localness)
• Through play
• Microworlds are places for relevant play

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MWs allow for.

• issues and dynamics of complex business
  situations to be explored through trying out new
  strategies and policies and seeing what might
  happen
• Costs of failed experiments disappear
• Organizational sanctions against experimentation
  are nonexistent

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MWs are being used today by managers.

• for managing growth
• for product development
• for improving quality in both service and
  manufacturing business
• and they build upon the system archetypes

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MW1 Future Learning Discovering Internal
Contradictions in a Strategy

• Lying behind all strategies are assumptions,
  which remain implicit and untested
• These assumptions have internal contradictions
• Such internal contradictions cause the strategy
  to also have internal contradictions
• Such internal contradictions make the strategy
  difficult to implement

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The Business Plan of Index Computer Company

• GOAL reach 2 billion in sales in four years
• Reqd. James Sawyer, vice pres. of sales, to
  double his sales force
• Other top managers were unsympathetic saying you
  will work it out
• While uncomfortable, Mr. Sawyer did not want to
  become a nay sayer.

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Executives split into 3-person microworld teams
to play out the consequences of the sales plan

• They constructed an explicit model of the
  assumptions behind the plan
• 20 annual sales growth
• Hire 20 more salespeople and you make 20 more
  sales
• Sawyer says wait a minute...not all salespeople
  are equalthere is much they have to learnbefore
  they can sell a single system

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Sawyer continues...

• we got most of our sales people originally by
  hiring away from competitors
• today 20 is so many people that we cannot
  possibly get experienced people from our
  competitors
• assumptions were changed to show inexperienced
  sales people to be only 1/3 to 1/4 as productive
  as experienced salespeople

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Consequences

• could not reach goal of 2 billion in sales in
  four years
• could only get to 1.5 billion
• Attempts to get to 2 billion resulted in having
  to double the sales force in the fourth year
  alone
• This would wreak havoc on the sales organization
  and the personnel budget

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Sawyers assessment

• There would be a lot of pressure on our veterans
• And, our veterans would have to train the new
  salespeople
• This wold result in more veterans leaving
• This would create a vicious cycle
• Many of our veterans came to us to escape this
  kind of situation somewhere else

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Then Susan Willis, Director of Human Resources
had her say

• sales people resist any call to invest their time
  in training and developing new salespeople

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Further, Susan Willis said

• Sawyer said this was because of hiring the most
  aggressive salespeople who get their kicks and
  their commissions from closing a sale in the
  field
• There are no incentives or commissions for
  helping newcomers
• The proposed strategic plan would simply
  reinforce this problem

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Conclusions of the MW session at Index

• Train new sales people more quickly
• Establish new rewards for sales managers to
  develop their staffs
• Get more support to help senior sales people
  mentor and train new sales people
• Create a MW for training new sales people

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MW2 Seeing Hidden Strategic Opportunities How
our Beliefs Influence our Customers Preferences

• Here again MWs are helpful in surfacing different
  assumptions and discovering how they can be
  related in a larger understanding
• Bill Seaver and John Henry are president and VP
  for Meadowlands Shelving Company
• They have reached an impasse in the way they saw
  their customers and their market

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Seaver believes...

• That the key to success in the market place lays
  in having good products priced competitively

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Henry agrees but...

• Also felt service quality could play a big part
  in whether or not customers chose Meadowlands
• Believed the company should invest in upgrading
  its service through training Meadowlands dealers
  in performing a wide range of services from
  better account management to office design and
  troubleshooting customers problems

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Seavers response was...

• These are good ideas but he didnt support
  spending significantly more on dealer support
  because he was convinced that it would not have
  significant impact on Meadowlands sales.

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Sales people said...

• Our competitors are discounting like mad and we
  can only hold our own if we match or better them
• When Henry himself talked with customers,
  frequently they said they would rather have 5
  off on their sales order than have better service
  after the sale
• Still he held onto his belief that there must be
  a way to gain competitive advantage through
  better service

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What the MW showed...

• Continual discounts in the face of poor service
  quality became a vicious circle
• Efforts to maintain customers with better service
  quality lacked credibility because they had
  experienced poor service for so long

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Further, the MW showed

• Investing in service quality took a long time to
  exhibit its effects because
• customers have to experience improved service
  before they take it seriously
• the repurchasing delay in the shelving industry
  took two-to-four years

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Both Seaver and Henry were right.

• Seaver was right in the short run
• Henry, in the long
• Both learned a lot about the way the company
  interacted with its customers and within
  itself.MW3 Discovering Untapped Leverage The
  Drift to Low Quality in Service Businesses

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The Leaders New Work

• Peter Senge, THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE, Chapter 18

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Self-directed teams require a new leadership style

• The traditional style of clear directions and
  well-intentioned manipulation doesnt work
• People with a sense of their own vision and
  commitment would naturally reject efforts of a
  leader to get them committed.
• One leader did not know what to do, now that he
  had a self-directed team

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Our view of leaders.

• Is wrong
• Especially in the West, leaders are heros--great
  men who rise to the occasion
• This view reinforces a focus on events and
  charismatic control of those events rather than
  on systemic forces and collective learning

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Our view of leaders, continued

• At its heart, the traditional view of leadership
  is based on assumptions of peoples
  powerlessness, their lack of personal vision and
  inability to master the forces of change

97
The new view of leadership in learning
organizations

• Leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers
• Leaders build organizations where people
  continually expand their capacity to understand
  complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared
  mental models
• That is, leaders are responsible for creating a
  culture where learning is rewarded

98
Leader as ..

• Suppose your org is an ocean liner and you are
  the leader. What is your role?
• The commonest answer, not surprisingly, is the
  captain.
• Other less common answers include the helmsman,
  the navigator, the social director (making sure
  everybody is involved, and communicating)

99
The neglected leadership role is

• the designer of the ship.
• No one has a more sweeping influence than the
  designer.
• It does no good for the captain of the ship to
  say turn starboard 30 deg. when the designer
  only allowed for 15 deg.
• Yet NO ONE thinks of the designer when they think
  of the leaders new role!!

100
Why did no one think of the designer

• Lao-tzu little credit goes to the designer
• The functions of design are rarely visible
• Consequences today are the result of work done
  long ago in the past
• Design work today will show its consequences long
  in the future

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What must leaders design?

• Policies, strategies, systems, organizations,
  specifically
• Selection policies
• Vision strategies
• Value systems
• Culture systems
• Measurement systems
• Rewards systems
• Criteria by which excellence will be determined

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And what of Design?

• It is an integrative initiative
• All of the parts must fit together and work well
  together as a whole under a variety of
  circumstances
• The leader must view the firm as a system --
  Ray Strata
• Corporate executives must become organizational
  architects -- Ed Simon

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Gives rise to a new discipline Business Design

• Must loose focus on the PL statement
• Look at the long term, instead
• Have to get away from piecemeal reactions to
  problems
• Have to integrate the five component technologies
• Must integrate vision, values, purpose, systems
  thinking, and mental models
• The synergy of the disciplines can propel an
  organization to major breakthroughs

104
First tasks of Business Design

• Design the governing ideas--purpose, vision, and
  core values
• Building shared vision is important because it
  fosters a longer-term orientation and an
  imperative for learning
• Get the systems thinking going early on
• Get the concept of mental models and surfacing
  underlying assumptions going early as well

105
Subsequent tasks of Business Design

• Design the learning processes
• Get personal mastery going

106
The Leader as Steward

• Leaders have a purpose story
• This is an overarching explanation of why they do
  what they do
• how their organizations need to evolve
• how that evolution is part of something larger
• Most gifted leaders have a larger story

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The Leader as Teacher

• First job of leader is to define reality
• Leader must help people achieve more accurate,
  more insightful and more empowering views of
  reality
• Must view reality at four levels events,
  patterns, structures and ultimately a purpose
  story

108
Creative Tension

• What role does it play in leadership?

109
How can such Leaders be Developed??
110
Time to Choose

• Learning or not
• Systems thinking or not
• PM or not
• MM or not
• SV or not
• TL or not

111
THE END

• That is all, Folks
• See you tomorrow

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