With a new CEO and 160 years of history to live down, we began our
Transformation in Jan 1995 with a comprehensive shared vision process
involving as many of our 1200 staff as were interested. In Sept 95, 14 of
us went off-line for 4 months to redesign the agency. We hired MIT's Linda
Booth as our learning guide. The learning disciplines were incredibly
helpful in the successful creation of a radically new design for the
organization.
We are now hot and heavy into implementation of the new structure and are
learning what it means when they say the redesign is the easy part. But it
is a fabuous learning adventure for those of us guiding the stressful
reorganization (no layoffs, not downsizing, but change nonetheless). I no
longer think that being a pioneer is glamorous work, but I also think
we're on the right track, with the right methods to do better work with
kids and families. And I love seeing order gradually emerge from chaos.
Personally, I have a master's in community health and have been at
Hillside since 1979, in quality. I write fiction for fun (perhaps one day
for profit), collect ancient and antique beads, and am trying to gain a
more international perspective in my work. I've enjoyed the list,
especially now that I've figured out getting individual messages is much
more manageable than the digest.
-- Susan B. Price prices@vivanet.com
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>