If you have enjoyed the posts on Gram Consulting, you’ll find more of the same at the new blog.  I’ve moved all the posts and comments from Gram Consulting to the new blog and have borrowed my business tag line from the gram consulting logo for the new name: Performance by Design

Performance X Design will appeal to learning professionals, performance consultants, e-learning developers, organizational development and HR professionals with a keen interest in improving real performance through their efforts.  Like Gram Consulting, posts will span these disciplines with a common thread how they can be used to create more effective organizations.

• Designing learning and knowledge systems
• Designing performance
• Designing effective organizations

I hope you can take a couple of minutes now and subscribe to the new site.

Click here to visit Performance X Design

Click here to subscribe to Performance X Design in your reader (RSS feed)

Click here to have  Performance X Design posts delivered to you via e-mail

I’m still working on correcting some broken links as I find them, but the site functions and ready for your comments.

I look forward to keeping the conversation going!

Cheers,

Tom

8. Organizational Learning Practices

Organizational Learning (OL) means different things to different people.  These days, it is often used as a catch-all label for traditional (formal) training which it most certainly is not.  OL is broader than that label implies.  It is usually focused on individual and team transformation through participating in tangible activities that change the way people conduct their work.   It builds new capacities in individuals and teams that collectively begin to shape the culture and performance of an organization.

Peter Senge in his groundbreaking book The Fifth Discipline defined his view of what those new capacities should be and in doing so launched the Organizational Learning movement.   The Fifth Discipline contains a collection of practices from system dynamics, organizational development and psychology that Senge organized into a cohesive whole structured around “five disciplines of organization learning”.

OL practices have grown and evolved beyond Senge’s framework but his still remains the most cohesive.  This post lists his five “disciplines” along with some guidelines for the learning professional to help their clients achieve them.  It’s important to remember that each of the five disciplines listed are considered a “lifelong body of study and practice” so none are meant to produce immediate impact,  but rather continuously move towards understanding and behaviour change that collectively shapes the organization.   Also, the sample exercises I list below are not self explanatory.  They are mostly drawn from “The Fifth Discipline FieldBook”, a great source for activities that ground the often esoteric ideas in the Fifth Discipline.  See that source for further details.

Personal Mastery

Personal Mastery, the first of the five disciplines is effectively the skills of personal effectiveness–defining and accomplishing personal vision.

Learning professionals and facilitators can guide individuals through the process of identifying and clarifying a personal vision, realistically assessing it against the current state, and help individuals to understand and manage the creative tension between the two.  The goal is to help people make better choices, and to achieve more of the results that they have chosen.

Sample exercises:

• Drawing Forth Personal Vision: An exercise to surface, define and clarify individual purpose and goals.

• Cycling Back: Current Reality and Revisions: An exercise to continuously define, monitor and act on barriers to achieving the vision.

Mental Models

Mental Models are ingrained assumptions and ways of thinking held by individuals and organizations.  Adjusting mental models can lead to breakthroughs in personal and organizational performance.  Learning professionals can help their clients improve how they govern their actions and decisions through the skills of reflection and inquiry and develop an heightened awareness of the attitudes and perceptions that influence thought and interaction.

Sample exercises:

• The Left Hand Column: An exercise developed by Chris Argyris in which individuals record “what they were thinking” vs. “what was said” during important conversations.  Analysis of the result helps to surface and confront existing attitudes and assumptions (mental models).

• The Wheel of Multiple Perspectives: Rotating roles to widen a team’s perspective and see issues from as many vantage points as possible.

Shared Vision

This is the practice of collective vision and mutual purpose vs. the individual vision of personal mastery. Management and professional networks can be guided through activities to create a common vision of the future they wish to create and the methods and means they that will most effectively get them there. In doing so meaning is created and relationships strengthened.

Sample exercises:

• What Do We Want to Create?: Guide your team through a series of structured questions that bring pertinent issues to the forefront and results results phrases, ideas and governing ideas around which a vision can be built.

• Backing Into a Vision: A great exercise for surfacing common goals without taking on a full fledged visioning process.

Team Learning

The skilled practice of group interaction and collaboration.  Through techniques like dialogue and skillful discussion, teams modify their problem solving, collaboration and interaction to produce results that are greater than the sum of individual members.  Team Learning is not team building although a more cohesive team is usually a result.  Instead as a facilitator you want to focus on improved dialogue and team discussion skills.

Sample exercises:

• Fishbowl: To get immediate feedback on communication styles. Half the team discusses and issue while the other half watches and provides constructive feedback.

• Undiscussables: A card game in which people can anonymously raise questions that never get raised.

Systems Thinking

System Thinking is “the fifth discipline” and it is my personal favorite.  Over the years I have found many ways to use systems thinking to help clients and understand my own work practices.   The systems perspective is a powerful conceptual framework that allows teams to understand deep inter-dependencies and forces that shape the consequences of actions. Tools and techniques such as systems archetypes, feedback loops, and various types of learning simulations help people see how to change systems more effectively.

Senge’s view of systems is more about surfacing predictable patterns and outcomes of human behaviour and decisions as contrasted with the (equally powerful) view of organizations as systems that process inputs to valued customer outputs.   Senges “systems archetypes” help teams understand their problems in system dynamics terms and “see” the underlying patterns that are causing their problems.

Sample Activities:

Shifting the Burden Archetype: click to view

• Organization and Process Mapping: Documenting and analyzing an organization as a system to identify disconnects and problems and to re-design for improved effectiveness

• Problems as System Archetypes: Help clients examine problem situation in terms of typical combinations of feedback (reinforcing and balancing).

• Breaking Through Organizational Gridlock: A seven step systems exercise based on Senge’s “shifting the burden” archetype

Organizational Learning Technology

Some learning technology solutions have emerged that support the Organizational Learning methods described above.  The most interesting are the use of the system archetypes to develop management simulations.

• Decision Support Systems based on system archetypes

• Generic management learning simulators to help managers understand the underlying system archetypes.  For example the beer game is a role-play supply chain simulation that lets learners experience typical supply chain problems based on systems theory principles.

• Software to support system modeling of organizational behaviour and dynamics.  For example STELLA, iThink and Powersim

• See this example for how simulations based on organizational system dynamics can be used for management training

There is room for much more work in the use of system modeling for training and learning purposes.

Summary

Organization Learning (like organizational development) has been considered a sister profession to Learning and Performance.   I’ve seen some situations where the units compete and as a result sub-optimize their services to the organization.  As Learning and Performance begins to adopt more informal and non-formal learning solutions there is much to learn from organizational learning and development and the potential for overlap increases.   I think it makes sense to consider a combined business unit that provides service in the full range performance improvement solutions.

Learn more:

Society for Organizational Learning

Peter Senge and the Learning Organization

Learning for a Change: Fast Company Magazine interview with Peter Senge

The Learning Organization

Peter Senge will be a Keynote presenter at the Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) annual conference this year in October (in Toronto).  See here for conference details

Posts in the “10 Strategies for Integrating Learning and Work” series:

Part 1:

• Strategy 1:  Understand the job
• Strategy 2:  Link Learning to business process
• Strategy 3:  Build a performance support system

Part 2:

• Strategy 4:  Build a community of practice
• Strategy 5:  Use social media to facilitate informal learning

Part 3:

• Strategy 6:  Implement a continuous improvement framework
• Strategy 7:  Use action learning

Part 4:

• Strategy 8:  Use Organizational Learning practices

Part 5:

• Strategy 9:  Design jobs for natural learning
• Strategy 10:  Bring the job to the learning

..we advocated for merging knowledge management with some other function – most likely the human resources/organizational learning/talent management constellation. We felt that knowledge management groups don’t often have the critical mass to stand alone, and knowledge and learning are very similar concepts anyway.

He continues:

... if you’re going to be merging things, you might as well go a bit further… if you want to align knowledge and learning with work, you need to know something about business processes and how to improve them. And if you’re going to align processes with the content needed to perform them effectively, you need to know something about the technology that would deliver the content in accordance with job tasks.

In the end, he suggests a merged unit with a Chief Performance Officer at the helm.

Many organizations have separate departments in these (and other) disciplines, all sharing the mission of impacting organizational performance.

• Learning and Development
• Organizational Development
• Process Improvement (Quality)
• Human Resources/Talent management
• Knowledge Management

Sometimes there are sub-departments within these (for example a performance technology group within Learning and Development).

I’ve had the chance to work with many of these groups and use their methods to improve performance (sometimes on the same performance issue!).  While the approaches of each group are very effective in the right situation, each group tends to see their solutions as “best” or are blindly unaware of the methods developed in sister disciplines.  This competitive and silo thinking rarely results in optimal solutions and can confuse line managers with the array of “performance improvement” solutions to their issues.

Even though learning professionals are trained to analyze performance issues to identify “learning or “non-learning” solutions,  the “non-learning” catch-all is usually the less comfortable road than the learning solution.  Likewise, for a time, everything in the organizational development arsenal seemed to involve team building, and for the Quality department every process required “re-engineering” without regard to the people working in those processes.  In recent years, most performance improvement groups have learned that their solutions are much richer and more effective when enhanced by the perspective of others.

Bringing these organizations all under one roof could accelerate this cross fertilization of ideas, result in innovative new approaches and reduce the redundancy and confusion that exists for line managers. A reasonably neutral label for this organization might be “Organization Effectivness”.  Performance Improvement, Performance Effectiveness, Performance Development are also candidates I’ve heard tossed around.  Of course, the label is less important than how the organization is designed and the services it provides.

Designing the Organization Effectiveness Function

There are potential models for designing such an organization.   For example, an article (Redesigning the HR organization) by organizational design specialist Amy Kates describes a matrix organization structure that could support the complexity of a merged performance improvement unit.   Her award winning model targets HR but I see many useful features for supporting an even broader organization.  The model includes:

Customer Relationship Managers

• front end customer facing team)

Centres of Excellence

• back end expert teams or networks that cross performance improvement disciplines

Solutions Teams

• Multidisciplinary teams that are configured to mirror the complexity of the work rather than the business hierarchy

Here is Amy Kates HR orientated Model from her article:

Here is the model re-illustrated from the broader Organizational Effectiveness view:

Organizational Effectiveness as Internal Management Consulting

Another possible organizational model is the professional services firm or management consulting company.   It would be possible to organize the unit as an internal consultancy of sorts modeled on the multidisciplinary focus of many of the large consulting companies.  Toyota for example has modeled their internal learning and lean process improvement services using a management consulting model.  This article (Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System) describes how Toyota’s Operations Management Consulting Division (OMCD) provides learning and lean process improvement services inside and outside the organization through a management consulting model.

Benefits and Risks

Creating and managing and organizational effectiveness department is not without risks.  The centralization required could result in bureaucratization (although the solution teams and dedicated business partners of the matrix model guards against that),  bringing together professional groups that have operated independently for many years could result in internal conflict and of course deciding who’s in and whose out could be interesting.  But the potential benefits make the idea worth exploring.  Among the benefits I would include:

• Performance improvement solution innovations
• Resource efficiencies
• Improved service and single point of contact to line management
• Cross-fertilization of approaches and methods
• More strategic performance improvement efforts
• Avoid political dominance of single groups
• Professionalization of performance improvement services
• More innovative uses of technology for performance improvement.

Performance feedback is frequent, specific and objective information to individuals (or teams) regarding how well they are performing against job requirements/standards. A performance feedback system is a process for consistently and visually providing performance feedback to employees.

Here are the broad steps of what needs to be done to implement a performance feedback system. This is followed by two approaches on how to implement them

1. Identify the key job or role outputs.

Outputs (results, accomplishments) are the valued outcomes of our thinking and behaviour at work. (documents, decisions, designs, materials etc). They are the starting point for any effective performance feedback system. Identity outputs at the process, department, job or team level depending on the scope of your project. Most jobs will have 5-8 key outputs.

2. List the critical requirements for each output

Business processes transform job outputs into valued products or services. Therefore receivers or users of those outputs, are your best source to define what makes them useful or valuable. These “critical requirements” can usually be categorized into one of three types:

• Quality (accuracy, ease of use, novelty, reliability etc)
• Quantity (frequency, volume, rate, timeliness)
• Cost (labour, materials, overhead)

Any output can be measured on all three variables, but it is only what is most important to the user/customer that should be measured. To determine importance ask:

• Does actual performance typically vary on this measure?
• If performance varies on this measure does it matter?
• If it does vary is it large enough to require action?

Often higher level measures (unit, department, process) can help define what measures are important.

3. Define how each requirement will be measured

There are really only two ways to measurement critical requirements. Counting and Judging. Counting is easiest and most appropriate when requirements like volume, frequency and rate and accuracy (errors) matter most. It is common in manufacturing environments.

The output of knowledge and service oriented work will usually require measures of judgment as well. Judgment is essentially opinion or evaluation by comparing to a standard–ranking or rating an output based on perception or pre-established criteria like rating scales.

4. Define the target/goal for each measure

Without a goal or target performance the feedback will have no meaning and the visual display will have much less impact. Goals can be derived from a number of sources including the following:

• Top performers: What levels of performance are achieved by top performers in the group?
• Customer or user requirements: What level of performance does the user or customer (internal or external) of the output require?
• Benchmark studies: What are best practices in the industry for similar jobs/roles?

5. Create a visual display of performance against the target over time.

Graphs are the best way to present performance feedback because they can communicate trends, provide an at-a-glace snapshot and can be maintained by the employees whose performance is being graphed. While there are many chart types to choose from the best and simplest are line graphs that chart performance over time (time series, run charts and control charts)

Encourage self monitored performance. When feedback is given to people individually or in small groups they can measure their own performance and enable feedback to be immediate.

Do not display individual performance graphs publicly. Individual graphs should be kept privately. Team graphs can and should be displayed publicly.

Some performance management software systems have charting capabilities but are often not useful for results driven performance feedback because they measure employee behaviour rather than job output or results. Charting software from process and quality improvement organizations will be more appropriate here.

Implementation options

The steps listed above can be implemented though group managers or directly with performance teams. In both cases a performance consultant will facilitate the process.

Manager implementation: The consultant works directly with a unit manager to complete the steps described. Outputs, requirements, measures and feedback display methods are determined by the consultant with input collected from the unit manager. The manager then rolls the program out with appropriate communications and support. Employees may or may be consulted through the process

Team implementation: The consultant works with the employee team, using facilitated education and design sessions to generate employee defined outputs, requirements, measures and feedback display methods. Employees own the results of the effort and are more inclined to support the implementation.