by Don Willerton
Los Alamos National Laboratories
Dealing with the Weinberg workshops has always had an uneasy feeling for me. I had good intuition about the value of increasing the awareness of the human side of me and others, but that perspective has always been rather singular when it came to see it in the context of “management”. The comments that I would receive from peers and managers when I would tell them of our activities could be summed by “That’s really nice to learn how to do personal therapy and beat on pillows, but what did you learn about management?”
And even though I had no trouble thinking that I would be a better manager for knowing and becoming more facile in skills related to understanding “humanhood”, I always wished for a larger, perhaps more formal, context in terms of how the Weinberg workshops fit (or didn’t) into regular or more fully described management models and theory.
At one of our meetings, I tried desperately to translate “more fully human” into doable tactics, procedures, and processes. In particular, I made the statement that if we can’t translate “more fully human” into tactics, procedures, and processes that contrast to the more traditional ways and structures of work and management, then we’re not going to be able to “create” organizations that are self-perpetuating.
Weeeeellll – I read an article last week by Peter Senge, from the Sloan Management Review in Fall, 1990. I read The Fifth Discipline when it first came out, but this article shows that I didn’t read it well enough.
The title is: The Leader’s New Work: Building Learning Organizations. The structure of the article is like this:
First, current managment practices sometimes create the very conditions that doom them to mediocre performance. They do things that prevent people from doing well.
Second, the better organizational model for management practices is to cause learning to occur. This will produce a far higher performing organization and the organization will be a source of its own energy.
Third, There are three critical roles of a leader in a learning organization: designer, teacher, and steward.
Fourth, to support the roles, there are new skills necessary for leadership: building shared vision, surfacing and testing mental models, and systems thinking.
Fifth, to support the skills, there are new tools, and he then identifies 3 examples: systems archetypes, charting strategic dilemmas, and a “surfacing mental models” exercise.
Sixth, to support the development of these roles, “learning laboratories” are a good instrument to teach the tools and skills. But these laboratories are really hard to do, because they deal use “system dynamics simulation games that compress time and space”.
Two particular quotes stood out:
“The role of leader as teacher starts with bringing to the surface people’s mental models of important issues. No one carries an organization, a market, or a state of technology in his or her head. What we carry in our heads are assumptions. These metal pictures of how we perceive problems and opportunities, identify courses of action, and make choices.”
and
“The idea that mental models can dominate business decisions and that these models are often tacit and even contradictory to what people espouse can be very threatening to managers who pride themselves on rationality and judicious decision making. It is important to have tools to help managers discover for themselves how their mental models operate to undermine their own intentions.”
I hope that this sounds familiar. It did to me, and suddenly I had a context for what PSL and Change Shop and SEM is all about. It’s not about learning management for my organization today, although it helps, but about learning skills for evolving my organization into what it needs to be tomorrow. In Senge’s nomenclature, a “learning organization”. In the article, there’s an interview by Senge with William O’Brien, CEO of Hanover Insurance. In response to a question about the high rate of change in management and organizations, O’Brien responds: “The ferment in management will continue until we find models that are more congruent with human nature.”
Obviously, he must be a Change Shop graduate.
So now I feel like I have a “wholistic” feeling for the overall picture and it’s perspectives and analogies to traditional management thought. And now I’m even more impressed with what Jerry has identified as a critical need: the creation of a “learning laboratory” whose focus is to boldly face the skills needed to create a new generation of organizations, which has to start with a new generation of managers, who have to first face themselves in terms of self, others, and context.
(For a longer exposition by Don, placing his managerial and training experiences in perspective, see A Perspective: The Weinberg Training.)