Background to my question
I am working with a company that has about 80 sites around the country.
The company is in the building industry, has been a market leader for many
years, and is a division of a larger diversified organisation.
We are right in the middle of a large scale change process focused on the
introduction of a new 15 year strategic direction. The process involves a
series of large scale conferences in which every employee is a
participant. The first series of four two day conferences involving around
one third of the workforce (all levels) was themed around Vision & Design
and focused on the whole system and its environment. Following this
series of conferences we put in place a number of support systems
including teams such as a large systems team, a design team, and a
"together team", along with communications systems and a feedback system
along with others. The second series of one day Planning Conferences will
involve every empoyee and is focused on coherently linking the whole
system with local workplaces. Subsequent conferences are intended to be on
Organising for Effective Action and are focused on dealing with the fact
that system fights back and that we need to learn how to work together if
we are comitted to moving in the same direction.
During the first series of conferences participants used an anonymous
electronic voting system to vote on whether they bought the case for why
the company needed to change, what it needed to change to, and how to
change. There was a yes option, a no option and a yes but... option. The
conferences were highly successful in terms of building commitment to
change as indicated by the results of the votes and a written survey three
months after the conferences.
Foreground to the question
Once we had agreed the case for change participants had the option of
joining several workshops. One of these was a conversation about how best
the company could provide practical help in dealing with the sorts of
typical challenges participants faced in their workplace in implementing
change. They came up with a list of questions such as "what do I do when
my boss is in the way?". We subsequently developed some self complete
forms that we hoped would help people who faced these sorts of typical
challenges to find good ways of meeting them. We called these forms
"Helpmates" and created three icons to help communicate the key ideas of:
- "look at your challenge relative to the big picture first" - which
turned into "the wise owl"
- "make sure you have a good range of options before you decide what to
do" - which turned into "the suggester"
- "use a conscious decison making and learning process to maximise your
chances of success" - which turned into "the critic"
Each of these icons has a matching graphic and a by line that helps to
illuminate their strength and their weakness ie the wise owl may be great
for the big picture but isn't much good for the detail. So we developed a
more or less standard format within which to address each of the top 10 or
so challenges raised during the conferences. We then tested this format
with front line staff to ensure that what we had done was going to be
useable at that level.
My question and its immediate context
"How do we introduce this new know how in such a way that it delivers in
terms of peoples original requests for help in their workplaces?"
Some of the goals we have are:
To deliver practical support to people who want it in their workplaces
To provide tools that work to people whose job is to support others
to become more effective in their workplaces
To encourage a learning orientation to peoples approach to the
challenges they face
To lift the quality of the thinking that tends to happen before
action is taken
Some of the beliefs I have at present about how to approach this are:
Use an "organic growth" approach
Conduct conscious experiments
Work intially only with team leaders and coaches who express interest
Design a workshop and support proccess to introduce the
concepts/practices
Integrate helpmates into the "planning as learning" folders that we
are developing for every employee - these folders will contain a
cartoon version of the companies strategic direction, local area
plans, workplace plans and a personal planning system, along with
scorecards, job related info and a customised range of personal
sections.
At this point the sort of process I have in mind is:
- sign off goals, beliefs, process outline and review process
- get a small team of enthusiasts together to refine the process
- communicate the opportunity to get involved
- run test workshops/support process and monitor closely
- refine based on results
- communicate whatever results we have achieved
- offer further workshops or support as appropriate
- monitor and report on progress
I wonder what ideas are out there that can add to this approach,
given the goals we have and the context of the situation?
--Mark Feenstra mark@winwin.co.nz Win Win Group PO Box 99 193 Auckland, New Zealand Ph. 64 9 307 0888 Fax. 64 9 307 0891 Yours for creative action aligned to the well being of the whole
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>