The Power of Collaborative Leadership:

Iva M Wilson, JoAnne Wyer, Bert Frydman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781136356285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Bridges the gap from the theory to the practice of learning organizations
Demystifies the organizational learning principles
Explains the leadership skills required to create a learning organization

Part 1

The Vision

When you engage with the promise of organizational learning you are being asked to open yourselves to the following ideas:

1. It is not only rational and desirable but also necessary for us to pursue the goal of organizational transformation;

2. The field of knowledge known as organizational learning holds great promise for the positive transformation of our organizations.

The learning organization is a compelling vision because it holds out a two-fold promise. It promises greater competitive effectiveness through improved learning on a collective scale, and it promises a more honest, life-affirming, energizing workplace.

Underlying the promise of organizational learning is another premise: that, ultimately, greater competitiveness and workplace transformation go hand-in-hand. They are inseparable. The one is not sustainable without the other.

And there is a further implication that has to do with the way in which the promise of organizational learning is to be realized. It seems that organizational learning requires that many of the old rulebooks be set aside. Specifically, we do not change our organizations as we ordinarily do: by tinkering with or manipulating them. We do not create learning organizations by restructuring, reorganizing, reengineering, or downsizing them. These options are not precluded; rather, they are transcended. Manipulation and control are superseded, replaced by a deceptively simple notion. We transform our organizations by doing the hard work of trying to transform ourselves and the teams we are part of.

This idea is quite profound. It is also fraught with difficulty because we do not yet know exactly how to transform ourselves. We are still finding our way. The road is only partly illuminated. Furthermore, there is no one path that everyone can follow. It is a highly individual journey, yet it is also a collective journey—we are on the road, exploring, finding our way together. In a sense, we are the journey.

Chapter 1

The Premise and the Promise

Bert: The term “organizational learning” may seem too theoretical or conceptual or visionary. There’s nothing wrong with theories or concepts or visions, but I want to give people a sense of what it would be like if it were real and alive.

I think it was Guaspari who said about Total Quality Management (TQM), “I’ll know it when I see it.” I have the same feeling about organizational learning. People need to know what it would feel like if their organizations were learning organizations. If they walked around the halls where people were truly living organizational learning out, what would it look like? Would it be dramatically different? Are we all talking about the same thing? Here’s my vision:

A Learning Organization: A Practitioner’s Vision

• People speak in terms of continuous improvement:

e.g., “Leave it better than you found it.”

• People are more involved in rapid decision making without being sure:

e.g., “Seven out of ten is better than three out of three.”

• People openly speak of failures in a reflective tone and without fear of reprisal:

e.g., “If you haven’t failed recently, you are not trying hard enough.”

• People openly share what they are doing, without ego and in the spirit of teaming and collective discovery:

e.g., “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

• People are not limited to vertical thinking and are ready to revisit the old ways and reconnect or rebuild past practice:

e.g., “You have to break an egg to make an omelet.”

• People view training as an investment, not a cost:

e.g., “People are our only sustainable competitive advantage.”

• People value diverse opinions and actively seek them out:

e.g., “The successful companies will be the ones that see the future and its opportunities faster than the competition and act on them.”

• People share openly and willingly and, at the same time, steal good ideas shamelessly, replicate, and give credit and honor to innovators:

e.g., “The popularizers will inherit the earth.”

• People build on each other’s ideas using phrases like “yes, and …” instead of “no” and “but”:

e.g., “Great oaks grow from small acorns.”

Iva: We also need to tell people how we first became engaged with organizational learning through the work of Peter Senge. Senge’s work started the shift in our thinking. In particular, his five disciplines influenced the way we introduced OL into our organizations.

The Five Disciplines of Organizational Learning

In The Fifth Discipline, Senge defined five “component technologies” that can help organizations learn, that is, develop the capacity to realize the highest aspirations. These are the primary tools of organizational learning. They are described below.

• Personal mastery—learning to expand our personal capacity to create the results we most desire, and creating an organizational environment which encourages all its members to develop themselves toward the goals and purposes they choose.

• Mental models—reflecting upon, continually clarifying, and improving our internal pictures of the world, and seeing how they shape our actions and decisions.

• Shared vision—building a sense of commitment in a group, by developing shared images of the future we seek to create as well as the principles and guiding practices by which we hope to get there.

• Team learning—transforming conversational and collective thinking skills so that groups of people can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of individual members’ talents.

• Systems thinking—utilizing a way of thinking about and a language for describing and understanding the forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems. This discipline helps us to see how to change systems more effectively and to act more in tune with the larger process of the natural and economic world.¹

The premise of Senge’s book was that these five disciplines, or areas of practice, if introduced and cultivated within an organization, could help to enhance the learning capacities of that organization. Organizational learning is the means by which an organization might transform itself and its members.

Iva: As I’ve reflected upon my experience I see now that the five disciplines are just one way of thinking about OL.

Bert: It could be that each company’s definition of organizational learning will be slightly different, depending upon what learning means to them.

Iva: If there is one thing I have learned through my engagement with organizational learning, it is that there is no “one size fits all” in this work. These ideas should serve only as starting points.

Bert: It’s also true that for some people even these definitions will not be sufficient to convey why these ideas are so compelling. After I read Senge’s book, it was still abstract for me. I didn’t have a real, gut sense about what it was until much, much later—when I had a realization that related directly to my personal experience.

Iva: That is one way in which we are different. I was very stirred by the ideas even just reading the book, but for you it took the experience. My sense is that that is true for our readers as well. There will be differences in what draws them to organizational learning and how they come to learn about it.

Awakening

David Whyte, the poet, in his book about the corporate workplace called The Heart Aroused, quotes a poem written by a woman who worked at AT&T. She wrote:

Ten years ago …

I turned my head for a moment

and it became my life.²

Perhaps for every person who decides to explore organizational learning there comes another turning point … a moment when they turn their heads away from many of the accepted ways of doing things in organizations and begin to consider that there may be another way. And in that moment, however fleeting, they may catch a glimpse of another possibility.

Iva: Bert, do you remember what it was that first captivated you about the concept of organizational learning—the moment when you first said, “Aha! Now I understand. This is the direction we should go in”?

Bert: Yes, I do. It was right after I finished playing the “Beer Game.” I remember the day vividly. We were in the middle of a five-day course on organizational learning being taught by Peter Senge. A whole group of us had just finished playing the Beer Game, and it had been a total disaster for our team! We’d been doing all the things we thought were right to manage the beer business, and what did we have as a result? We had crisis after crisis. First, we didn’t have enough beer to match the orders. Then we had a whole warehouse full of beer and very few orders. So we felt ridiculous. And then we learned that all the other teams had had the same experience. Nobody could prevent the crises. And then we heard that thousands of people have played the game and it always comes out the same. And I thought to myself, “Oh, is there a message in this!” The Beer Game showed me the power of thinking in terms of systems.

Systems Thinking and the Beer Game

The Beer Game is a particularly powerful illustration of the power of systems—and the illusions that trip us up because we do not think in systemic terms. As Senge explains in The Fifth Discipline, the Beer Game was first developed in the 1960s at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. It immerses the participants in a management game simulating the production and distribution of a single brand of beer. There are three main roles in the simulation game: a retailer, a wholesaler, and a marketing director of a brewery. As the participants take on each of these roles, they are completely free to make any decision that seems sensible. Their only goal is to manage their position as best they can to maximize their profits. The primary rule is that the players in the various positions refrain from communicating with each other.

The game has been played thousands of times in classes and management training seminars over the last 30 years by people of all different ages, cultures, nationalities, and business backgrounds. Every time the game is played, the same crises ensue. First, there is growing demand that can’t be met. Orders build throughout the system, inventories are depleted, and backlogs grow. Then the beer arrives en masse, but incoming orders suddenly decline. By the end of the game, almost all players are sitting with large inventories that they cannot unload.

What does the Beer Game tell us? If the same qualitative behavior patterns are generated by literally thousands of players from enormously diverse backgrounds, then the causes of the behavior must lie beyond the individuals. The “Aha!” is that the causes of the behavior must lie in the structure of the game itself. Another “Aha!” is that this same explanation can be applied to production-distribution systems in real business life. Structure often determines how events play out in business life.

When people play the Beer Game, they take on a role, either a beer retailer, a wholesaler, or the marketing director of a brewery. If they “manage their position”—which is typically what people do—they don’t see how their actions affect the other positions. The players are actually part of a larger system, but most perceive that only dimly at best. The game is also designed to limit communication between the roles so that people can see clearly how the lack of effective communication contributes to a system spiraling out of control. That parallels what tends to happen in real life: effective communication across functions is limited, partly by the “silos” created by organizational department structures and partly by our lack of competence in the art and practice of generative conversation.

Senge describes three lessons to be learned from playing the Beer Game:

1. Structure influences behavior. When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results. When there are problems or performance fails to live up to what was intended, it is easy to find someone or something to blame. But more often than we realize, systems cause their own crises, not external forces or individuals’ mistakes.

2. Structure in human systems is subtle. We tend to think of structure as external constraints on an individual. But structure in complex living systems, such as the “structure” of the multiple “systems” in a human body, means the basic interrelationships that control behavior. In human systems, structure includes how people make decisions, i.e., the “operating policies” whereby we translate perceptions, goals, rules, and norms into actions.

3. Leverage often comes from new ways of thinking. In human systems, people often have potential leverage that they do not exercise because they focus only on their own decisions and ignore how their decisions affect others. In the Beer Game, players have it in their power to eliminate the extreme instabilities that invariably occur, but they fail to do so because they do not understand how they are creating the instability in the first place.³

Players can improve their performance in the Beer Game if they learn how to work with these lessons. The lessons of the Beer Game also apply to real life. The deepest insight, Senge says, usually comes when people see how both their hopes and their problems connect to the way the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Talking Revolution
• PART 1. The Vision
• PART 2. The Journey
• PART 3. Leadership
• PART 4. Mapping
• Index