The Five levels of Leadership
LEVEL 5 :
Level 5 Executive: Builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.
LEVEL 4:
Effective Leader: Catalyzes commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear and compelling vision, stimulating higher performance standards.
LEVEL 3:
Competent Manager: Organises people and resources toward the effective and efficient pursuit of pre-determined objectives.
LEVEL 2
Contributing Team Member: Contributes individual capabilities to the achievement of group objectives and works effectively with others in a group setting.
LEVEL 1
Highly Capable Individual: Makes productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills and good
The fifth discipline
The art and practice of learning organization
Learning organizations are organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to learn together.
Learning organizations are possible because not only it is the nature to learn but also we love to learn. What fundamentally will distinguish learning organizations from traditional authoritarian "controlling organizations" will be the mastery of certain basic disciplines.
The disciplines of the learning organization
There are five components that build up learning organizations. Each provides a vital dimension in building organizations that can truly "learn", and can continually enhance their capacity to realize their highest aspirations:
System thinking: Organization are systems as they are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which takes years to fully play out their effects on each other. So it is hard to see the whole pattern of change. System thinking is a conceptual framework, that helps to make full patterns clearer, and help us see how to change them effectively.
Personal Mastery: Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. The essential cornerstone of the learning organization is the organization's spiritual foundation. An organization's commitment to and capacity for learning can be no greater than that of its members.
The discipline of personal mastery starts with clarifying the things that really matters to us, of living our lives in the service of our highest aspirations.
Mental models: Mental Models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. Royal Dutch / Shell, one of the pioneers in the path of organization learning, defines institutional learning is the process whereby management teams change their shared mental models of the company, their markets, and their competitors. They believe planning as learning and corporate learning as institutional learning.
The discipline of working with mental models starts with turning the mirror inward; learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world to bring them to the surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny. It also includes the ability to carry on learning conversations that balance inquiry and advocacy, where people expose their own thinking effectively and make that thinking open to the influence of others.
Building shared vision: A leader's capacity to hold a shared picture of the future inspires organization to excel. There is hardly any organization in any field of operation or business that had excelled in the absence of goals, values, and missions that are deeply shared throughout the organization. Given a choice people will opt for pursuing a lofty goal at all times but there should be a discipline for translating individual vision into shared vision.
The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared pictures of the future that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance.
Team learning: When teams are truly learning, not only are they producing extraordinary results but the individual members are growing more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise.
The discipline of team learning starts with dialogue, the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine "thinking together". "Dia-logos" in Greek means free flowing of meaning through a group, allowing the group to discover insights not attainable individually.
The discipline of dialogue also involves learning how to recognize the patterns of interaction in teams that undermine learning. The patterns of defensiveness are often deeply engrained in how a team operates. If recognized and surfaced creatively, they can actually accelerate learning.
Team learning is important, as teams not individuals are the fundamental learning unit in organizations. Unless teams learn the organization cannot learn.
The learning disabilities
It is common that most organization learn poorly. The way they are designed and managed, the way people's jobs are defined, and most importantly, the way we have all been taught to think and interact create fundamental learning disabilities. These disabilities operate despite the best efforts of bright, committed people.
The first step in curing them is to begin to identify the seven learning disabilities:
1.0 "I am my position": We are trained to be loyal to our jobs - so much so that we confuse them with our own identities. They feel they cannot do anything else but the job they are trained for.
When people in organization focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact. When results are disappointing, it is difficult to know the reason.
2.0 "The enemy is out there": This is actually a by-product of "I am my position". When we focus on our position, we do not see how our own actions extend beyond the boundary of that position. When those actions have consequences that come back to hurt us, we misperceive these new problems as externally caused.
3.0 The illusion of taking charge: Managers frequently proclaim the need for taking charge in facing difficult problems. This means to face difficult issues, stop waiting for some one else to do something, and solve problems before they grow into crises.
But too often, proactiveness is reactiveness in disguise. If we simply become more aggressive fighting the "enemy out there", we are reacting - regardless of what we call it. True proactiveness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems. It is a product of our way of thinking, not our emotional states.
4.0 The fixation of events: Our fixation on events leads to event explanations. Today, the primary threats to our survival, both of our organizations and of our societies, come not from sudden events but from slow, gradual processes. Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization if people's thinking is dominated by short-term events. If we focus on events, the best we can ever do is predict an event before it happens so that we can react optimally. But we cannot learn to create.
5.0 The parable of the boiled frog: Maladaptation to gradual threats to survival is pervasive in system studies of corporate failure. Learning to see slow, gradual processes requires slowing down our frenetic pace and paying attention to the subtle as well as the dramatic.
6.0 The delusion of learning from experience: We learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions. The most critical decisions made in organizations have system wide consequences that stretch over years or decades.
Traditionally, organizations attempt to surmount the difficulty of coping with the breadth of impact from decisions by breaking themselves up into components. The result: analysis of the most important problems in a company, the complex issues those cross-functional lines, becomes a perilous or nonexistent exercise.
7.0 The myth of the management team: The collection of experienced managers who represent the organization's different functions and areas of expertise most often fail to sort out the complex cross-functional issues that are critical to the organization.
These learning disabilities continue today, along with their consequences. The five disciplines of the learning organization can, act as an antidote to these learning disabilities.
The laws of the fifth discipline
1.0 Today's problems come from yesterday's solutions: Solutions that merely shift problems from one part of a system to another often go undetected.
2.0 The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back: When our initial efforts to produce lasting improvements fail, we push harder and thereby glorify the suffering that ensues and blindfold ourselves to how we are contributing to the obstacles ourselves.
3.0 Behavior grows better before it grows worse: In complex situations there are always many ways to make things look better in the short run. Only eventually does the compensating feedback come back to haunt you. A typical solution feels wonderful, when it first cures the symptoms. But in two or three or four years the problem returns with bigger and complex magnitude.
4.0 The easy way out usually leads back in.
5.0 The cure can be worse than the disease.
6.0 Faster is slower. Virtually all-natural systems, from ecosystems to animals to organizations, have intrinsically optimal rates of growth. The optimal rate is far less than the fastest possible growth.
7.0 Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space: By effect we mean the symptoms that indicate that there are problems. By cause we mean the interaction of the underlying system that is most responsible for generating the symptoms. For eg. If there is a problem on the manufacturing line, we look for the cause in the manufacturing. If salespeople can't meet targets, we think we need new sales incentives or promotions.
8.0 Small changes can produce big results- but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.
9.0 You can have your cake and eat it too, but not at once: For eg. Quality and cost at the initial phase do not go hand in hand but if a systems perspective is taken over a time frame real leverage is seen and both can improve over time.
10.0 Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants: Living systems have integrity. Their character depends on the whole. The same is true for organizations; to understand the most challenging managerial issues requires seeing the whole system that generates the issues.
11.0 There is no blame: Systems thinking show us that there is no outside; that you and the cause of your problems are part of a single system. The cure lies in the relationship with that " enemy" within the system.
A shift of mind
Seeing the whole new world
System thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots. System thinking is needed more than ever because we are becoming overwhelmed by complexity.
Sophisticated tools of forecasting and business analysis, as well as elegant strategic plans, usually fail to produce dramatic breakthroughs in managing a business. They are all designed to handle the sort of complexity in which there are many variables: detailed complexity. But there is another type of complexity: dynamic complexity, situations were cause and effect are subtle, and where the effects over time of interventions are not obvious. Conventional forecasting, planning, and analysis methods are not equipped to deal with dynamic complexity.
When the same action has dramatically different effects in the short run and the long run, there is a dynamic complexity. When the action has one set of consequences locally and a very different set of consequences in another part of the system, there is a dynamic complexity. When obvious interventions produce nonobvious consequences, there is dynamic complexity.
The real leverage in most management situation lies in understanding dynamic complexity not detailed complexity. Balancing market growth and capacity expansion is a dynamic problem. Developing a profitable mix of piece, product or service, quality, design, and availability that make a strong market position is a dynamic problem. Improving quality, lowering total costs, and satisfying customers in a sustainable manner is a dynamic problem.
Unfortunately, most systems analyses focus on detail complexity not dynamic complexity. Simulations with thousands of variables and complex arrays of details can actually distract us from seeing patterns and major interrelationships.
The essence of the discipline of systems thinking lies in a shift of mind:
· Seeing interrelationships rather than linear cause-effect chains, and
· Seeing processes of change rather snapshots
The practice of systems thinking starts with understanding a simple concept called feedback that shows how actions can reinforce or counteract / balance each other. It builds to learning to recognize types of structures that recur again and again. System thinking describes interrelationships and patterns of change, which ultimately simplifies life by helping us, see the deeper patterns lying behind the events and the details.
There are two types of feedback processes: reinforcing and balancing. Reinforcing or amplifying feedback processes are the engines of growth. Whenever you are in a situation where things are growing, you can be sure that reinforcing feedback is at work.
Balancing or stabilizing feedback operates whenever there is a goal-oriented behavior. If the goal is to be not moving, then balancing feedback will act in such a way you do not move ahead. The goal can be explicit targets as when a firm seeks a desired market share, or as implicit such as a bad habit.
Many feedback processes contain delays, interruptions in the flow of influence which make the consequences of actions occur gradually.
Reinforcing feedback: if you are in a reinforcing feedback system, you may be blind to how small actions can grow into larger consequences - for better or for worse.
For eg. If I see a person as having high potential, I give him special attention to develop that potential. When he flowers, I feel that my original assessment was correct and I help still further. Conversely, those I regard as having lower potential languish in disregard and inattention, perform in a disinterested manner, and further justify, in my mind, the lack of attention I give them.
In reinforcing processes such as the Pygmalion effect, a small change builds on itself. Whatever movement occurs is amplified, producing more movement in the same direction. A small action snowballs, with more and more and still more of the same, resembling compounding interest.
Balancing feedback: In a balancing system, you are in a system that is seeking stability. If you like the system's goal, you will be happy. If not then you will find all your efforts to change matters frustrated - so you either change the goal or weaken its influence. Nature loves a balance - but many times, human decision-makers act contrary to these balances, and pays the price.
Delays: systems seem to have minds of their own. Nowhere is this more evident than in delays - interruptions between your actions and their consequences. Delays can make you badly overshoot your mark. They can have a positive effect if you recognize them and work with them.
Delays between actions and consequences are everywhere in human systems. We invest now to reap a benefit in the distant future, we hire a person today but it may be months before he or she is fully productive; but delays are often unappreciated and lead to instability.
Virtually all feedback processes have some form of delay. But often the delays are either unrecognized or not well understood. This can result in overshoot going further than needed to achieve a desired result.
Natures Template
One of the most important, and potentially most empowering, insights to come from the young field of systems thinking is that certain patterns of structure recur again and again. These are systems archetypes or generic structures, which embody the key to learning to see structures in our personal and organizational lives.
The purpose of systems archetypes is to recondition our perceptions, so as to be more able to see structures at play, and to see the leverage in those structures. Once a systems archetype is identified, it will always suggest areas of high- and low-leverage change.
Archetype 1: Limits to growth
Definition: A reinforcing process is set in motion to produce a desired result. It creates a spiral of success but also creates inadvertent secondary effects, manifested in a balancing process, which eventually slow down the success.
Management Principle: Do not push growth; remove the factors limiting growth.
Where it is found: Organizations grow for a while, but then stop growing. Working groups or individuals improve themselves for a period of time, but then stop getting better.
Structure: In the case of limits to growth, there is a reinforcing process of growth or improvement that operates on its own for a period of time. Then it runs up against a balancing process, which operates to limit the growth. When that happens, the rate of improvement slows down, or even comes to a standstill.
Understanding and using the structure, an example: When a professional organization, such as a consultancy firm, grows very rapidly when it is small, provides outstanding promotion opportunities. Morale grows and talented junior members are highly motivated, expecting to become partners within ten years. But as the firm gets larger, its growth slows. Perhaps it starts to saturate its market niche. Or it might reach a size where the founding partners are no longer interested in sustaining rapid growth. However the growth rate slows, this means less promotion opportunities, more in-fighting among junior members, and an overall decline in morale.
How to achieve leverage: in these cases, leverage lies in the balancing loop - not the reinforcing loop. To change the behavior of the system, you must identify and change the limiting factor. This may require actions you may not yet have considered choices you never noticed, or difficult changes in rewards and norms. For eg. Maintaining morale and productivity as a professional firm matures requires a different set of norms and rewards that salute work well done, not a person's place in the hierarchy. It may also require distributing challenging work assignments equitably and not to partners only.
Quality circles have succeeded wherever broader changes in managerial-employee relationships have developed. In particular, successes have involved genuine efforts to distribute control, thereby dealing with the union and management concerns over loss of control.
But there is another lesson from the limits to growth structure as well. There will always be more limiting processes. When one source of limitation is removed or made weaker, growth returns until a new source of limitation is encountered.
Archetype 2: Shifting the burden
Definition: An underlying problem generates symptoms that demand attention. But the underlying problem is difficult for people to address. So we shift the burden of their problem to other solutions - well-intentioned, easy fixes which seem extremely efficient. Unfortunately they leave the underlying problem unaltered. The problem grows worse, unnoticed because the symptoms apparently clear up, and the system loses whatever abilities it had to solve the underlying problem.
Management principle: Symptomatic solutions address only the symptoms of a problem, not the fundamental causes. In the long term, the problem resurfaces and there is increased pressure for symptomatic responses.
Structure: the shifting of burden is composed of two balancing processes. Both are trying to adjust or correct the same problem systom. The symptomatic intervention or the quick fix solves the problem symptom quickly, but only temporarily. The fundamental response to the problem works far more effectively and needs a longer time.
The core disciplines: building the learning organization
Personal Mastery
Organization learn only through individuals who learn. Individual learning does not guarantee organizational learning. But without it no organizational learning occurs. The active force is people. People have their own will, their own mind, and their own way of thinking. If the employees themselves are not sufficiently motivated to challenge the goals of growth and technological development there will simply be no growth, no gain in productivity, and no technological development.
Personal mastery goes beyond competence and skills, though it is grounded in competence and skills. It goes beyond spiritual unfolding or opening, although it requires spiritual growth. It means approaching one's life as a creative work. When personal mastery becomes a discipline it embodies two underlying movements. The first is continually clarifying what is important to us. The second is continually learning how to see current reality more clearly.
The juxtaposition of vision (what we want) and a clear picture of current reality (where we are relative to what we want) generate what we call creative tension. This is a force to bring them together, caused by the natural tendency of tension to seek resolution. The essence of personal mastery is learning how to generate and sustain creative tension in our lives.
There is some fear that personal mastery will threaten the established order of a well-managed company. So to empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive. If people do not share a common vision, and do not share common "mental models" about the business reality within which they operate, empowering people will only increase organizational stress and the burden of management to maintain coherence and direction.
The way to begin developing a sense of personal mastery is to approach it as a discipline, as a series of practices and principles.
The ability to focus on ultimate intrinsic desires, not only on secondary goals, is a cornerstone of personal mastery. Real vision cannot be understood in isolation from the idea of purpose. By purpose, it means an individual's sense of why he is? But vision is different from purpose. Purpose is familiar to a direction, a general heading. Vision is a specific destination, a picture of a desired future. Purpose is abstract. Vision is concrete. Personal mastery is a process of continually focusing and reinforcing on what one truly wants, on one's visions.
People often have great difficulty talking about their visions, even when the visions are clear. This is because we are acutely aware of the gaps between our vision and reality. These gaps can make a vision seem unrealistic or fanciful. They can discourage us and make us feel hopeless. But the gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there is no gap, there would be no need for any action to move toward the vision. The gap is the source of creative energy. We call this gap creative tension. The principle of creative tension is the central principle of personal mastery, integrating all elements of the discipline.
Mastery of creativity tension leads to a fundamental shift in our whole posture toward reality. Current reality becomes the ally not the enemy. An accurate, insightful view of current reality is as important as a clear vision.
Most of us hold one of two contradictory beliefs that limit our ability to create what we really want. The more common is belief in our powerlessness - our inability to bring into being all the things we really care about. The other belief centers on worthiness - that we do not deserve to have what we truly desire. Robert Fritz , who has worked with literally ten of thousands of people to develop their creative capabilities, claims that he has met only a handful of individuals who do not seem to have one or the other of these underlying beliefs. But if we accept it as a working premise, it illuminates systematic forces that can work powerfully against creating what we really want. Fritz calls the system involving both the tension pulling us toward our goal and the tension anchoring us to our underlying belief as "structural conflict" because it is a structure of conflicting forces: pulling us simultaneously toward and away from what we want. If structural conflict arises from deep underlying beliefs, then it can be changed only by changing the beliefs. Most of us gradually change beliefs as we accumulate new experiences and develop personal mastery.
Commitment to the truth also helps to overcome the structural conflict. It relentlessly root out the ways we limit or deceive ourselves from seeing what is, and to continually challenge our theories of why things are the way they are. It means continually broadening our awareness, just as the great athlete with extraordinary peripheral vision keeps trying to see more of the playing field. It also means continually deepening our understanding of the structures underlying current events.
What our organization can do to foster personal mastery?
Leaders in organization can work relentlessly to foster a climate in which the principles of personal mastery are practiced in daily life. That means building an organization where it is safe for people for create visions, where inquiry and commitment to the truth are the norm, and challenge the status quo is expected - especially when people seek to avoid the current reality.
Such organization climate will strengthen personal mastery in two ways. First, it will continually reinforce the idea that personal growth is truly valued in the organization. Second, to the extent that individuals respond to what is offered, it will provide an "on the job training" that is vital to developing personal mastery. As with any discipline, developing personal mastery must become a continual ongoing process. There is nothing more important to an individual committed to his or her own growth than a supportive environment. An organization committed to personal mastery can provide that environment by continually encouraging personal vision, commitment to the truth, and a willingness to face honestly the gaps between the two.
Some of the practices most conducive to develop one's own personal mastery are - developing a more systematic worldview, learning how to reflect on tacit assumptions, expressing one's vision and listening to other's visions, and joint inquiry into different people's views of current reality. These need to be embedded in the disciplines for building learning organizations. So in many ways, the most positive actions that an organization can take to foster personnal mastery involve working to develop all five learning disciplines in concert.
The core leadership strategy is simple: be a model. Commit ting yourself to your own personal mastery will always open people's minds somewhat, and encourage others in their quest for personal mastery.
Mental Models
Developing an organization's capacity to work with mental models involves both learning new skills and implementing institutional innovations that bring these skills into regular practice. Approaches to mental models are different but their work required the same critical tasks. First, they had to bring key assumptions about important business issues to the surface. This goal is vital to any company, because the crucial mental models in any organization are those shared by key decision makers. Those models, if unexamined, limit an organization's range of actions to what is familiar and comfortable. Second, the two companies had to develop the face - to - face learning skills. This was of special concern because organizations wanted managers throughout the company to be skillful with mental models.
Both sides of the discipline - business skills and interpersonal issues - are crucial. On the one hand, managers are inherently pragmatic. They are most motivated to learn what they need to learn in their business context. Training them in mental modeling or balancing inquiry and advocacy, with no connection to pressing business issues, will often be rejected. It may lead to people having academic skills they do not use. On the other hand, without the interpersonal skills, learning is still fundamentally adaptive, not generative. Generative learning requires managers with reflection and inquiry skills, not just consultants and planners. Only then will people at all levels surface and challenge their mental models before external circumstances compel rethinking.
System thinking is equally important to working with mental models effectively. Contemporary research shows that most of our mental models are systematically flawed. They miss critical feedback relationships, misjudge time delays, and often focus on variables that are visible or salient not necessarily high leverage. Most players either don't see or don't take into account in their decision making the critical reinforcing feedbacks that develop when they panic.
The payoff from integrating system systems thinking and mental models will be not only improving our mental models but altering our ways of thinking: shifting from mental models dominated by events to mental models that recognize long-term patterns of change and the underlying structures producing those patterns.
Shared Vision
Shared vision is not an idea. It is rather a force of impressive power. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further, it is compelling enough to acquire the support of others. People begin to see as if it exists. Shared vision is vital for an organization because it provides the focus and energy for learning. While adaptive learning is possible without vision, generative learning occurs only when people are striving to accomplish something that matters deeply in them.
Organizations intent on building shared visions continually encourage members to develop their personal visions. If people do not have their own vision then they sign up someone's else. The result is compliance and never commitment. On the other hand, people with a strong sense of personal direction can join together to create a powerful synergy toward what I or we truly want.
Personal mastery is the bedrock for developing shared visions. This means not only personal vision, but also commitment to the truth and creative tension. Shared vision can create levels of creative tension that go far beyond individuals' comfort levels. Those who will contribute the most toward realizing a lofty vision will be those who can hold this creative tension remain clear on the vision and continue to inquire into current reality. They will be the ones who believe deeply in their ability to create their future, because that is what they experience personally.
Building shared vision is actually only one piece of a larger activity, developing an enterprise's vision, purpose or mission and core values.
This answers three critical questions: "What?" / "Why?" / "How?".
· Vision is the "What?" - the picture of the future we seek to create.
· Purpose or mission is the "Why?" - the organization's answer to the question, "Why do we exist?"
· Core values answer the question "How do we want to act, consistent with our mission, along the path toward achieving our vision? They describes how the company wants life to be on a day-to-day basis, while pursuing the vision.
Building shared vision without system thinking is a shortcoming. Vision shows what we want to create. System thinking reveals how we have created what we currently have. The problem lies not in shared visions themselves, so long as they are developed carefully. The problem lies in our reactive orientation toward current reality. Vision becomes a living force only when people truly believe that they can shape up their future. Today most managers do not experience that they contribute in creating the current reality. So they do not see how they can contribute toward changing the reality. But as people in an organization begin to learn how existing policies and actions are creating their current reality, a new and more fertile soil for vision develops.
TEAM LEARNING
Within organizations, team learning has three critical dimensions. First, there is the need to think insightfully about complex issues. Here teams must learn how to tap potential. Second, there is the need for innovative and coordinated action. Outstanding teams in sports or great jazz or in an organization develop the same sort of relationship - operational trust. Here each team member remains conscious of other team members and can be counted on to act in ways that complement each other's actions. Third, there is the role of the team members on other teams. Learning team continually fosters other learning tams through inculcating the practices and skills of team learning more broadly. Though it involves individual skills and areas of understanding, team learning is a collective discipline. The discipline of team learning involves mastering the practices of dialogue and discussion. In dialogue there is the free and creative exploration of complex and subtle issues, a deep listening to one another and suspending of one's own views. By contrast, in discussion different views are presented and defended and there is a search for the best view to support decisions that must be made at the time. Dialogue and discussion are potentially complementary, but most teams lack the ability to distinguish between the two and to move consciously between them.
Team learning also involves learning how to deal creatively with the powerful forces opposing productive dialogue and discussion in working teams. Contrary to popular myth, great teams are not characterized by an absence of conflict. On the contrary one of the reliable indicators of a team that is continually learning is the visible conflict of ideas. In great teams conflict becomes productive. There may be conflict around the vision. In fact the essence of visioning process lies in the gradual emergence of a shared vision from different personal visions. Even if people have common vision they have different ideas of implementing. The free flow of conflicting ideas is critical for creative thinking. On the other hand in an ineffective team either there is no conflict or the members are highly polarised.
How can the internal politics and game playing that dominate traditional organizations be transcended?
Challenging the grip of internal politics and game playing starts with building shared vision. Without a genuine sense of common vision and values there is nothing to motivate people beyond self-interest. But we can start building an organizational climate dominated by merit rather than politics - where doing what is right predominates over who wants what done. But a nonpolitical climate also demands openness - both the norms of speaking openly and honestly about important issues and capacity continually to challenge one's own thinking. The first might be called participative openness, the second reflective openness. Without openness it is generally impossible to break down the game playing that is deeply embedded in most organizations. Together vision and openness are the antidotes to internal politics and game playing.
When organization foster shared visions, they draw forth this broader commitment and concern. Building shared vision leads people to acknowledge their own larger dreams and to hear each other's dreams. When managed with sensitivity and persistence, building shared vision begins to establish a sense of trust that comes naturally with self-disclosure and honestly sharing our highest aspirations. It can be started with people sitting in small groups and asking them to talk about them. When people begin to state and hear each other's visions, the foundation of the political environment begins to crumble - the belief that all we care about is self-interest. Organizations that fail to foster genuinely shared visions or that foist unilateral visions on their members and pretend that they are shared, fail to tap their broader commitment.
How can an organization distribute business responsibility widely ans still retain coordination and control?
Learning organization will increasingly be localised organization extending maximum degree of authority and power as far from the corporate centre. This means localness i.e. moving decisions down the organizational hierarchy and designing organization business units where employees confront the full range of issues and dilemmas intrinsic in growing and sustaining their business enterprise. This unleashes employee's commitment and freedom to act, to try out their own ideas and be responsible for producing results. This is very vital where things change rapidly. Local actors often have more current information on customer preferences, competitor actions, and market trends. So they are in a better position to manage the continuous adaptation that change demands.
But the bigger challenge is how to synergise between business units and collaborate efforts towards common corporate wide objectives.
Learning organizations invest in improving the quality of thinking, the capacity for reflection and team learning, and the ability to develop shared visions and shared understandings of complex business issues. It is these capabilities that will allow learning organizations to be both more locally controlled and more well coordinated than their hierarchical organizations.
The shift to localised organization gave birth a new role for the corporate managers. They will now be stewards for the organization, guiding ideas and evolving visions, missions and core values. They need to be researchers and designers also. As researcher they need to understand the organization as a system and the internal and external forces that drives change.
Corporate managers still will be involved in many important decisions, often in conjunction with other corporate and local managers. Designing the organization's learning processes is a unique role, which cannot be delegated. It cannot be done by the local managers because the local managers are too involved running their businesses and have much less breadth in their perspective to see the major and long term issues and forces that will shape how the business evolves.
