Which left me with something of a challenging dilemma.... As
someone who came into learning organisations and OD through the
Deming and Quality route and as someone who has valued process
improvement over the years I could relate to what he says. Yet
there is something I have been wrestling with over the last few
months and I am not even sure if I can articulate it now.
I can see the value of a focus on processes and the need to
understand the extent to which the processes we choose affect the
outcome. Then I worry about a focus on processes which takes the
whole system and breaks it down into processes - for we could
improve one and negatively impact the whole. So if we set up
quality or other systems to focus on processes we could be setting
ourselves up to be non-systemic. Perhaps we need ways of seeing
processes as as system of processes and structuring our work on
them so that it is both continuous - ie iterative and based on data
and analysis and discontinuous (did Deming use another word like
continual) ie looks at the whole and systhesises the process data,
considers the aim (or purpose) and considers potential new
outcomes creates new processes and new ways of fitting the old
ones together............... I am beginning thus to wonder if we
should ever do process improvement of one process - rather we
should focus on the whole and do sets of inter-related process
improvements which we set up and constantly review as a whole system
of improvements???
I have already said in a previous posting that I think we need
underlying principles to inform our work - perhaps these are
values (somehow they seem different to me - but that is another
posting - anyone want to try the difference between a principle
and a value??)
I always find a discussion of outcomes essential when considering
process design - and by this I am not meaning outputs (hard numbers)
- but the range of hard and soft things we would like to have
happen because we used a particular process - a meaningful dialogue
about desired outcome seems to me to help people be clear on the
purpose of the process - and then we do not get processes copied or
used for their own sake. The issues I see with a focus on process
without consideration of purpose (outcomes) is that you can lose
the fit of the process into the the whole.........
I think we need system of things happening
* people being clear about the purpose of their
roles/jobs/processes and how it fits into the whole and the purpose
of the whole
* an ongoing open-ness to and interaction with the environment
(intrnal and external)
* a constant questioning and reflecting on our processes, actions
and purposes
* an alignment of systems and processes to fit our purposes (NB how
often do you see a mission which talks about valuing cooperation
with internal systems which are set up to promote competition)
and focussing on any one of those would not get it
Julie Beedon
VISTA Consulting - for a better future
julie@vistabee.win-uk.net
--Julie Beedon <julie@vistabee.win-uk.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>