U8D1-28 - Needs-Based Action Learning and Change Management Planning - Please follow all instructions as written to complete this homework. See Details Below.

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The Enterprise as a Learning System

introduCtion

this paper was written in the last months of the inter- University Programme of the fondation industrie-Universitie of Belgium (in 1969). It had been discovered during the course of this momentous experiment how the presence of a visiting manager within an enterprise whose management had become convinced of the need for a lot of those employed there to learn, particularly when supported by a band of allies, could in fact engender an enlightenment previously unsuspected.

Our key assumption was that the presence within each enterprise of an outsider undisguised, simply behaving as the intelligent learner about some problem they had never before encountered, soon set off a secondary, but nevertheless powerful, campaign of learning among the staff on the spot and with whom they regularly discussed their lines of enquiry.

Revans, Reg, and Reg Revans. ABC of Action Learning, Routledge, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=730762. Created from capella on 2018-06-02 12:27:56.

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Since the visitor was not only trying to understand their own approach to conditions of ignorance, risk and confusion, but was also the agent of the home management equally concerned to make sense of what appeared to them an intractable difficulty, a very simple question arose:

Was the secondary (autonomous) learning process engendered merely because the majority of staff had become aware that the problem existed, and that it was seen by their top management to be serious?

or, was the visitor more than an agent, in the sense that without them there could not possibly have started any autonomous curiosity among the home staff at all?

if there is, in most organizations staffed with normally intelligent persons, a latent desire to behave sensibly in front of colleagues (as the visiting fellows of the programme seemed to have discovered) could this desire not be identified and turned to constructive use without needing to go through the elaborate ceremonies of exchanging senior managers?

If the enterprise was, in fact, already a potential learning system, could its capacity for self-development be exploited autonomously by the top management taking the lead? Why, except when the learning of the senior managers was the cardinal objective, do more than get the local staffs and their existing people running their own enquiries?

Alas, the suggestion was grossly premature. it was rejected even by those who had had the courage to open their secrets to the exchanges of the inter-University Programme. not until the Japanese menace of the late 1970s introduced the Q-circle to europe, could the issue once more be raised.

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the enterPrise as a system of systems

Many persons concerned with the business enterprise, whether as a director, employee or adviser, will have their own professional reasons for perceiving it as some manner of system.

for example, the controller, who needs to ensure that its total revenue exceeds, one year with another, its total expenditure, without the specific costs of such-and-such a department necessarily being met by its own specific income; the manufacturing superintendent, who will expect some overall balance between its flow of goods and materials, not being embarrassed at one moment by a chronic shortage of stock to meet the orders, nor at another by a sharp reminder that too much capital is tied up in a superabundance of raw materials; the personnel director, who hopes that, five years hence, the enterprise will still be able to rely upon eighty per cent of the staff now serving it, each and every one richer by five intervening years of precious experience.

All these senior people, to ensure continuity and balanced effectiveness, need to think in terms of inputs, flows and outputs. none must envisage the enterprise as a series of isolated and independent jerks of activity, springing at random into local effect and unrelated to any larger and continuous totality.

Such systemic approaches would be readily claimed by most departmental heads. To ensure such organic thinking, there exists a vast range of professional teaching and qualification, embracing such arts as budgetary control and standard costing, production scheduling and inventory control, manpower planning and staff development, and an inexhaustible army

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of managerial techniques marching in acronymic procession across the prospectuses of business schools – Pert, CPA, DCf, tWi, MBo, oD, or, X or Y, and a score of others.

the individuaL and the task

Such unifying ideas arouse little contention. they have indeed entered deeply into the planning both of the working organizations themselves and the many education programmes enticing managers to think of their firms or departments as ‘systems’ with many interacting parts. It would hardly be rash to suggest that one-third of all published management literature is concerned with such issues of functional organization, nor that an even larger proportion of time is devoted to them on management courses.

But, there is now evidence that, however useful, however valid, may be this functional approach, the concept of the enterprise as a system has quite other but no less significant interpretations. The tasks that every person carries out in the course of their daily employment, whether at first sight concerned with purchasing, design, manufacture, marketing, transport, accountancy, personnel development or wages payment, contain another systemic element, the potential power of which is only of late becoming recognized. As the Chief Executive of one of Britain’s largest firms recently remarked:

Our main concern is no longer to ensure that we find, train and keep the biggest share of Britain’s leading chemists, nor is it solely to concentrate on the maximum return on our investment. These are necessary ends, but of themselves are insufficient. Our

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need in the 1970s is to see ourselves as a developing system of two hundred thousand individuals.

a digression on management teChniques

We see there is little new in this expression of need. Almost the same sentiment was declared by robert owen a century and a half ago. Similar things are said in europe and by Chairman Mao. But we do not here interpret the enterprise as a human system in the light of this nor that political doctrine.

nor are we suggesting the need for some super-system, stored in a giant computer, to which the controls of orders, purchases, production, quality, cost and so forth, alike report. for in whatever political system, whether in the countries of the oeCD, in eastern europe or in the third World, we now observe some impatience with – indeed a revolt against – the systematizing experts who, during the past century, have over regulated the tasks of people at all levels.

Industrial engineering, work study, incentive payment schemes, task specialization, timetabling and scheduling and, above all, the machine pacing of human work, are now held up as a caricature of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, and all carry within them the seeds of their own destruction in proportion to the authority of the experts who exploit them. the latest casualty amongst these managerial bailiffs is, it seems, productivity bargaining. this rigmarole of wage assessment, exalted three years ago into the very diadem of behavioural science, was recently appraised by some jaundiced personnel expert as a dead duck.

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the enterPrise as a Learning system

We observe that all expert systems here referred to must now be imposed upon the enterprise from above or from outside. But action learning must seek the means of improvement from within, indeed from the common task.

An essential quality of human behaviour is that, although in some degree innate or inherited, it is in great part learned. Present conduct is largely our visible response to past experience newly interpreted. It follows first, that the daily round offers constant learning opportunities and, second, that these opportunities should be of great interest to managers. When moreover, we discover that the quality of such learning is largely determined by the morale of the organization that offers it, the interest becomes profound.

indeed we may now assert that the observable differences between organizations otherwise comparable in technical, financial or environmental character, are determined by whether or not their members are likely to develop in and from the course of their daily employment.

one enterprise can, in short, behave as a learning system, constantly and fruitfully working out autonomous solutions to its own problems; its neighbour, built to the same technical specifications, engaged in the same tasks and reporting to the same higher authority, may be an organizational sore, running with irresoluble conflict and unendurable frustration. (Many years after the note was first drafted in 1951 (‘Group Factors in Mining Accidents’ Chapter 6 in The Origins and Growth of Action Learning) we may now see that the great differences in accident and strike rates between geologically identical adjacent collieries, are the differences between managed

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systems that either learn or do not learn from their daily crises).

it is thus to the enterprise as a learning system that we need to attend. We must understand how it is that one management continuously act to encourage such an elevation of the spirit, while their colleagues across the way live under constant threat from their own subordinates.

the quaLities of autonomous Learning systems

our research evidence to suggest whether or not its management policies are like to develop an enterprise as an autonomous learning system may still be incomplete. But the conditions for success seem to include the following:

1. that its chief executive places high among their own responsibilities that of developing the enterprise as a learning system.

this they will achieve through their personal relations with their immediate staff, since the conduct of one level of a system towards any level below it is powerfully influenced by the perception that the higher level has of its treatment from above.

In the consortium of hospitals described in ‘Action Learning takes a Health Cure’ (Chapter 25 in The Origins and Growth of Action Learning), the correlation between systematic development (attitudinal change, learning) and interest of top management was +0.91. in the secondary modern schools of Lancashire the correlation between

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the estimates made by the children of their teachers’ skills, on the one hand, and their assessment of them as approachable human beings, on the other, was +0.87.

Both of these add a veneer of quantitative cunning to the immemorial verse: ‘As the judge of the people is, so are his officers; and what manner of man the ruler of a city is himself, so are all they that inhabit therein.’ (Ecclesiasticus Chapter 10 v2)

2. the coalition of power that runs the enterprise has clear ideas about delegation, with the maximum authority for staff to act within the field of its own known policies that become known by interrogation from below.

Systems of delegation, in other words, are constantly worked out as part of the contract between the person, the task and their superior. The success of delegation depends significantly upon the quality of data/information made available. in one experimental enterprise the correlation among fifty graduate senior managers between the perceived quality of their information system, on the one hand, and their own personal satisfactions as departmental managers, on the other, was +0.78.

3. in consequence, codes of practice, standard rules and procedures, works orders and other such regulations are to be seen as norms around which variations are deliberately encouraged as learning opportunities.

these will therefore contribute to the improvement of the data/information flow and may even bring into a common learning experience different members of an organization who, under codes rigorously observed, might rarely, if ever, meet.

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4. Any reference of what appears an intractable problem to a superior level should be accompanied both by an explanation of why it cannot be treated where it seems to have arisen and a proposal to change the system so that similar problems arising in future could be suitably contained and treated.

5. Persons at all levels should be encouraged, with their immediate colleagues to make regular proposals for the study and reorganization of their own systems of work.

Such proposals should generate discussion between vertical levels and horizontal departments of how the work is currently managed, and of how its outcome is determined, such as the content, order and distribution of individual tasks, the use and maintenance of equipment and supplies, and the flow of information essential to performing the tasks. Above all, in any suggestions about the reorganization of the work, first attention should be given to its group or autonomous aspects. (See ‘Worker participation as Action Learning’ and ‘Project “Management Efficiency”’ Chapters 41 and 27 in The Origins and Growth of Action Learning.)

autonomous Learning not manageriaL abdiCation

A management that interprets the employment of its staff as a continuous opportunity for their self-development, does not, by setting aside the mythologies of ‘scientific management’ about commanding, coordinating and controlling, thereby resign to the understrappers all responsibility for running the enterprise. It merely acknowledges that the enterprise is the setting in which the staff spend most of their active lives, and

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that the total contract between it and its employees is wider than an agreement about who is to be paid for doing what.

the wider bargain, even if not explicit, has deep implications for personal development and personal autonomy. outstanding persons should be encouraged to develop themselves to the limits of their capacities and ought not to be restricted entirely by ingenious mechanistic programmes devised by quick-witted experts trained not to ask questions outside their own fields.

indeed, the present relation between those who perform and those who plan calls often to be stood upon its head – it is for the individual worker, as a member of a wealth creating group, to suggest their optimum conditions of work and to set their personal standards of achievement; and for the expert to solve (with the help of the group) whatever problems the worker may introduce.

Such new approaches to work organization will offer managements their own opportunities to learn; they are certainly no invitation to staff to take over and run the whole show. Some senior managers may, of course, offer to take over, or even to buy out from the main shareholders, their section of the total enterprise; this will be a measure of the present need of the enterprise to learn.

the most precious asset of any organization is the one most readily overlooked: its capacity to build upon its lived experience, to learn from its challenges and to turn in a better performance by inviting all and sundry to work out for themselves what that performance ought to be.

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