Wisdom Is in the System

by Tom Heuerman, Ph.D. with Diane Olson, Ph.D.

The vice president of Human Resources:
Can people at the bottom of the organization learn?

Historically the newspaper circulation supervisors managed their territories in competition with one another for rewards and resources. After the movement to self management we asked for volunteers to experiment with a different way to organize their work. Team 7 came forward. They offered to develop a plan to eliminate their separate districts. (see Pamphlet 30 and the manuscript Learning to Lead for details of the change effort.)

A couple of weeks later the team leader came to me with a plan she and the team had devised to eliminate district boundaries and to establish one large area for the team to manage. I rejected the plan and sent team 7 back to try again. Their plan did not fit my concept of how the work should be organized.

A few weeks passed, and I asked the department manager the status of team 7’s plan. He said it was fine. I told him to be sure the team and team leader followed my instructions. He said he would. I did not know that the department manager had met with the team and had heard their presentation on how they wanted to do the redesign. Their plan was different from what I had directed, and the department manager felt afraid to tell me. I had my own history of shooting the messenger. A couple of months passed.

I again asked the department manager what team 7 was doing. He told me the truth. I got angry. I yelled at him, the team leader, and our consultant. I told him to get a meeting scheduled with team 7. I would be the bad guy and tell them they could not do the redesign the way they wanted.

All team leaders were invited to the meeting. The union leadership came. We listened to team seven for one and a half hours. They had a mission/vision statement; they explained their redesign and how it would work. The team had figured out how they would handle workload issues. They talked about how the redesign would affect the people who worked for them and how issues would be resolved. Team 7 talked about their weekly team meeting and how they managed conflict.

A team member courageously told a story of how the team had been upset with him and had confronted him. The team members went to the team leader and sought advice on how to confront their peer. The team leader volunteered to talk to the man for them. They said no, they wanted to handle the situation. They just wanted the team leader’s advice on how to handle the confrontation. The man spoke of what he learned from this experience.

People asked many questions, and the team had a good answer for each. Their pride in their work was evident in their voices. Their vision gave them courage, and their commitment was powerful. We were moved by what we saw and heard.

I learned that day of the vast wisdom in the organization waiting to emerge. I left the meeting a little humbler and a little wiser thanks to team 7. A few months later I did better with the ROCS: regional office coordinators. The ROCS were secretaries to the field teams: fifteen women in part time positions with little prior newspaper experience.

We created role groups around specific areas of work when we went to self managed teams. We hoped these groups would be the structure we could use to institutionalize learning around selected topics, develop strategies, and create action plans. For example, we had a group for employee safety, one for employee satisfaction, one for customer satisfaction, and one for the administration of team budgets. Each team member was a member of a role group.

We challenged the groups to establish a learning objective in their subject area and to then do something of substance using what they learned. Each role group gave a presentation to management each six months to share their experience and accomplishments.

The ROCS made up a role group. They worked on systems development and office procedures. I attended their first presentation. They were enthusiastic and wanted to know what they could do to continue to learn and how they could increase their involvement. I encouraged them to read Peter Senge’s book, THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE. I offered to provide a consultant to help as they tried to apply the concepts of the disciplines, especially systems thinking and personal mastery.

Six months later the ROCS invited me to their next presentation. I noticed the decorations when I walked into the conference room. The walls and ceiling had stars pasted on them--references to the future and to visions.

The part time employees had scripted their presentation around vision, systems thinking, personal mastery, and how to create your own future. They transformed the concepts into reality. They described their goal setting process, how they divided up the work, and the problems they solved. They described the redesign of work processes they managed, and the savings they achieved (without the help of consultants). They were alive, energized, and enthusiastic. They had taken responsibility for their own learning.

The thirty executives in the room were speechless when the presentation ended. I chuckled as a twenty-something woman asked the corporate CEO to describe his vision for the enterprise. He fumbled for an answer and got angry at the young woman who asked the question. The ROCS presentation was a moment of what could be as new capabilities emerged from this group.

The mechanistic worldview and traditional managerial thought teach that some (those at the “top” of the organization) can see the entire system, that people (like consultants) can be independent and objective, and that one person (the heroic leader) can control the organization. Learning is done by those at the top of the enterprise or is imported from outside the organization. The failure to challenge these historical assumptions explains much of the disappointment of organizational change efforts of the past decade.

Enlightened leaders understand that they cannot see the entire system. They realize that no external objectivity exists independent of the observer. Leaders accept they cannot know everything, cannot control, and cannot predict accurately. They understand that their perception is created primarily by their history and that they create the reality they see by what they choose to focus on and the lens they look through (for example: mechanical or organic). To compensate for the difficulties of perception, leaders strive to create conditions that bring about diverse and authentic participation from which emerges the wisdom in the system.

Genuine participation builds commitment and a sense of ownership and brings forth the insight, experience, and capability in the system. Participation frees what colleague Richard Knowles calls discretionary energy: the amount of energy available to people beyond the amount needed to keep their job. When people find meaning in their work, energy is released, and the employee will give the organization more of the energy available to them than normal.

Flexibility, diversity, partnership, and interdependence are necessary for sustainability. The leader’s role is to create conditions for these dynamics to emerge in the organization rather than to impose their own beliefs on how the work should be done. The vice president of Human Resources would be amazed at the depth of the wisdom in the system and at how much we can learn from people different from ourselves if only we would see one another as fellow human beings rather than boxes on the organizational chart.

About the Author:

See Dr. Heuerman's author page in Selfhelp Magazine here [1].