<Although our systems advance with ever increasing speed, we leave behind
the same speed of growth in our human potential for positive interactions.
Page 1 of most newspapers says as much. Potential for positive human
interaction exists within process improvement work in business or anywhere
else. By means of such interaction we may stumble upon some means of
advancing the greater use of our capacious minds, only a small percentage
of which we regularly harness.>
This issue I have pondered myself--our over-attention to things mechanical
and technical and the short-shrift given to things human--especially in
business.
I guess if we look at the development of business, this is no surprise.
It started with fiefs and lords, slaves and masters, and then apprentices
and owners and now employees and stockholders. We have never held values
that cared for the well-being of workers. We talk today about the "gap
between the haves and the have-nots"--but look at only 100 years ago!
Our values and our actions are beginning to shift. It seems like we have
been talking and writing about this issue for so many years, with so
little effect. (I'm thinking of Drucker, Deming, McGregor and Bennis,
Harold Leavitt, Ron Lippitt, and their predecessors.) And yet we have such
a limited perspective on time. I picture humanization of the workplace as
a wave that is forming, with great energy and power behind it, swelling
higher and higher, but we haven't yet come to the point where it breaks
and crashes over, sending its evergy over the land. We work and hope and
look for this to happen, but when or if it will, we do not know.
Some of my associates use a model of organizational culture depicted as a
circle containing all the elements of a business. The circle is divided in
half, with Operational elements (functions, tasks, resources, technology,
etc.) in one half and the Human elements in the other half (values,
relationships, attitudes, communications, etc.). Acknowledging that most
managers have mastered the operational concerns in their business,
interventions focus on the human half of the business that has been so
thoroughly ignored and avoided. As John Warfield said in a recent
message, this approach leaves the content to the client while the
consultant manages process--acting as facilitator for developing new human
skills. The goal is to increase the use of our full human potential and
the sense of personal satisfaction that can engender.
Then I see the first page of the newspaper again, and I wonder... What is
our full human potential?
-- Diane Weston DMWeston@aol.com