My first experience with "systems thinking" was with a small group
of professionals where I work who were interested in how to develop first
level managers into generative, effective leaders. We homed in on the
fact that in our organization, promotions to first level managers were
most often based on technical achievements, not leadership skills. The
new manager was then mostly left to discover how to manage by himself,
except for an obligatory 40 hours of "supervisor training." Staff
meetings did not discuss management skills, but technical problems or
"administrivia." We did a lot of system diagramming and came up with the
concept of Support Groups of new and experienced managers who would work
together on ways to learn management skills-mostly skills for solving
"people problems", since we believed this is where the greatest leverage
is for effective leadership. We experimented with establishing several
support groups, but the experiment fell apart after a key member of the
group retired. But it was a great learning experience of dealing with
systems thinking.
I'm slowly working my way through the LO archives, so I am not
familiar with all the topics covered to date. I'm interested in ideas and
thoughts about how to develop and implement effective "metrics" for
measuring organizational performance. If this topic has been treated,
forgive me, and point me to the correct area of the archives.
Our organization is caught up in massive change. Having "won" the
cold war, the Defense Department is undergoing severe downsizing,
consolidations, base-closures, and mission redefinition, and
organizational re engineering. We are transitioning into a Competency
Aligned Organization and combining over ten widely dispersed sites into
one organization responsible for Naval Aviation - we have almost no common
processes (financial, personnel, you name it), we have very different
cultures. People throughout this 40,000-person organization are in
various stages of anger, denial, depression, acceptance, excitement-the
whole gamut.
We are trying to develop metrics for measuring our progress to the
Vision Organization, which we hope to implement by October of 1997 (we're
two years into this transition process). How does one develop and
implement metrics that can't be "gamed?" If you state a desired objective
that every employee will have at least 40 hours of training during the
year, you suddenly find that people are counting everything as training,
including a five-minute discussion of safety at a staff meeting. I think
that a metric should be something that measures progress to a desired
future state. It should be measurable and not require massive amounts of
effort to get the measures. The metrics should not be used as punishment
(otherwise you encourage "gaming"). We are not a "production"
organization, but a research, development, test and evaluation
organization-we don't manufacture things you can measure tolerances on.
Just finding the right things to measure is difficult. Has anyone in an
R&D organization been through this kind of experience? I'd appreciate
your thoughts, ideas, references to books or articles.
I will endeavor to keep my posts shorter in the future.
jlatimer@owens.ridgecrest.ca.us
(-: Jack :-)