Personal Journey LO9547

Rol Fessenden (76234.3636@CompuServe.COM)
28 Aug 96 00:56:33 EDT

Replying to LO9485 --

I am changing the title because the original -- Deming and Senge Comparison no
longer seemed relevant. Keith Cowan wrote a brilliant response to my
description of the evolution of culture in my organization. I described what I
felt was my responsibility as well as the responsibilities of everyone else in
this process. I described some of my own actions. I described what I felt were
some favorable outcomes, but we must all be clear that it is still -- always --
preliminary.

Keith made a number of excellent points. I will respond, by and large, by
agreeing with them and perhaps enriching them. Then perhaps I can tell why the
title I have selected.

== Keith ==

Rol raises the issue of individuals approaching their work in their own
way. He also illustrates that his way of managing is likely different than
other managers in his organization.

I believe this is the root of executives' difficulties with adopting a LO
style. They have few ways of measuring whether their actions are having
any real effect. If nine managers in Rol's company try to encourage the
individual initiative like Rol did, there would likely be 9 ways this is
attempted with 9 different outcomes. Because the managers have their own
individual styles, the interaction will produce different results. Add to
that the employees' individual styles and you have an exploding number of
outcomes: 9 managers each with 9 employees will result in 81 "flavours".

== end Keith ==

Keith is exactly right on, and my management team (totalling 13 managers or
senior managers) is doing exactly that under my direction. Each of them has
their own take on what it is they have learned from my actions and my
communications. They have taken what they 'learned' and added in their own
predispositions, liberally salted I presume, with corporate vision and goals
that they believe in, and from this soup created their own view of what the
culture should look like, and how they will get there. Through ongoing
communications and performance planning, continual refinements occur, but
nevetheless, each of the 13 has a distinctly different flavor to their outcomes.

To a great extent, this is ok with me, and also meets the needs of the
corporation. The diversity creates the seeds of further learning among all of
us. It is also the case, however, that a clever person can camoflage an
unhealthy organization. I have direct experience of this that I learned of once
when a manager left the organization, and I was unhappily surprised at the
chaos, bad morale, and poor performance that underlay the surface. In
retrospect, I believe the signs were there if I had been more sensitive to them,
so I learned something.

== Keith ==

Measuring is only practiced infrequently through surveys and these are
vague by their statistical nature. Tighter "control" would disempower the
managers by checking up on them in real time. So the change process when
it comes to "style" is unmanageable because the results cannot be measured
in the timeframe needed to make any corrections. This is what gives Rol
the flexibility to try what he wants in managing. But it hinders any
corporate wide change. It is similar to throwing the concepts at the wall
and hoping some of them will stick. Long term change is possible through
repeated indoctrination and through selective hiring and firing, but, even
this is hard to measure.

== end Keith ==

It is actually worse than that. We measure "Feedback for Improvement" (FFI)
which is an anonymous opportunity for employees to give organized, systematic
feedback to their bosses. The person who consistently, year after year scored
highest on these surveys was VERY nice to people who reported to him, but his
business performance was the weakest among people who reported to me. This
survey is similar to others used in other companies, and has been validated by
respected psychologists. But it does not correlate with good business
performance.

One year I decided I wanted to give people more autonomy to make their own
decisions. We provided training, we provided opportunities to just chat about
big issues they wanted to share, and I stopped taking command at certain times.
They were OBLIGED to make the decisions, and there was no escape. My scores on
autonomy went way up, but my scores on providing clarity and security went way
down. I learned something, but I did not improve my scores.

So I agree that at least so far, we cannot measure what it is we want to create.
Based only on my experiences, I think each and every person has to make their
own personal journey to understand how they will create the 'right' environment
for themselves. The important thing to find out is are there any common themes.

This is perhaps easier to see in other milieux, and I can describe it better in
education. I once observed a school literally struggle mightily with certain
tasks which were key to becoming better, more effective educators. The teaching
staff struggled with it as a group, and they were free to do almost anything
they wanted. However, the goal was more effective education, and they were
pretty firmly agreed on what that meant. After two years of trying and
discarding different approaches, they had a process and methodology that worked
for them, and they began to test it. Most observers thought it was wonderful,
and that it met the goal, but there was not test to confirm or deny.

They decided to teach their method to another school, and they met with some
other teachers who were interested. The other school actually had a lot of
enthusiasm, so a plan was launched. It was a disaster, and the reason was that
when it came to certain methods to use in classroom settings, the converts could
not explain why to do it, so they just said to do it, and not ask questions. It
-- the method -- actually worked, but the learning teachers could not accept
this try it and don't ask questions approach, and they had not gone through the
personal journeys of the other teachers, so they were unable to grasp why this
was important. The process was EVERYTHING about this learning.

So what I am doing is setting a few basic ground rules, and letting people
develop their own personal journeys. The ground rules are simple. First,
business performance is the highest priority, on a day-in, day out,
never-ending, unremitting basis, and the goals are challenging. Second, within
the context of the first rule, every person gets absolutely as much freedom as
we can find ways to give them. Third, we give training -- very task-focused --
intensely and frequently. Fourth, we encourage -- almost oblige --
experimentation. In order for someone to experiment, they have to say up front
that something is an experiment, what they will learn, how much it will cost,
and what the up-side and down-side risks are. Experiments are approved 90 times
out of 100.

For me personally, the diversity of many different approaches is critical to
success. We will all learn from each other. There needs to be another ground
rule, but I have no way to enforce it. that is the 'open kimono' rule, which
says from each other we do not hide our failings. We expose them so we can each
learn from each other. We can still learn to be more open.

By the way, this is the plan, but to be honest, we are not where we need to be
yet. We still have much to learn even to bring these four ground rules to life.

-- 

Rol Fessenden LL Bean, Inc. 76234.3636@compuserve.com

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>