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BACK COVER

Do your organizational decisions rarely lead to the expected results? Are workers not "getting" the feedback they receive? Are your best practices barely practiced? Where can you start to make a difference in your workplace?

The challenges of building the new workplace are many. But by taking a systemic approach, we can often understand the obstacles we encounter, strengthen our learning, and then devise new ways to move ahead.

Compiled from articles appearing in recent volumes of THE SYSTEMS THINKER Newsletter, Organizational Learning at Work presents the insights of the field's most respected thinkers. Each chapter in Part One tackles a common obstacle to organizational learning, including "superstitious learning," misconceptions of the "causes" of success, and damaging organizational addictions. Part Two takes a further step to support continuous learning by introducing innovations in key processes such as decision-making, strategic conversation, and transfer of best practices.

Organizational Learning at Work will help you learn from the challenges of the new workplace and discover how to put learning innovations into practice.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Embracing the Challenge of Learning in the Workplace

Part 1 Overcoming Obstacles to Organizational Learning

1. What Is Your Organization's Core Theory of Success? by Daniel H. Kim
2. The Structure of Paradox: Managing Interdependent Opposites by Philip Ramsey
3. Breaking the Cycle of Organizational Addiction by Dennis Meadows
4. Overcoming Organizational Anxiety by Janet M. Gould Wilkinson, John J. Voyer, and David N. Ford
5. Superstitious Learning by John Sterman

Part 2 Exploring Innovative Concepts in Learning

6. Decision-Making: The Empowerment Challenge by Daniel H. Kim
7. Moving from Blame to Accountability by Marilyn Paul
8. Partnership Coaching by Diane Cory and Rebecca Bradley
9. Conversation as a Core Business Process by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs
10. Creating Business Results Through Team Learning by Joel Yanowitz, Steven Ober, and David Kantor
11. Putting Best Practices into Practice by Charles Parry, Marilyn Darling, and Stever Robbins

EXCERPTS

The drive toward improvement has become a way of life in corporations today. Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering, and other improvement techniques have proven to be powerful tools for enhancing the effectiveness of many organizations. However, designing, executing, and improving improvement programs is not easy. For every successful effort, there are many more failures. While suggesting new and valuable opportunities for change, process improvement techniques still fall prey to the barriers that limit other organizational change efforts.

To explore why improvement efforts so often fail to produce lasting results, my colleague Nelson Repenning and I, along with other members of the MIT System Dynamics Group, have studied a variety of improvement initiatives in large organizations. We have worked in close partnership with the managers from these firms and gratefully acknowledge their help. And what we've found is that many improvement efforts falter because managers mistakenly attribute the source of problems to the people in the system, not to the processes. Over time, managers receive feedback that seems to confirm their initial beliefs. We refer to this process as "superstitious learning," because people develop strong, but false and often harmful, beliefs.

For example, the electronics division of a major global manufacturing firm carried out two initiatives that led to markedly different results. In the first, management was able to break free from the cycle of superstitious learning to achieve significant, long-term results. In the second, superstitious learning became increasingly entrenched, and the program fell far short of its potential. These examples can serve as lessons for all organizations as we strive for lasting improvement.

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A key concern in any process is the adequacy of net throughput—that is, the number of usable widgets, whether circuit boards or engineering drawings, that are produced by the process relative to the rate required (see "The Stocks and Flows of Defects and Process Problems" on p. 54). In general, when faced with a shortage of usable widgets, workers and managers have only two options: work harder or work smarter. Working harder involves expanding capacity, utilizing existing capacity more intensely, or reworking defective output. Each of these options boosts throughput, but only at significant recurring cost. The fundamental insight of the quality movement is that it is more effective to work smarter by eliminating the process problems that generate defects. Eliminating process problems, however, requires managers to train workers in improvement techniques and to provide them with time off from their normal duties. Most important, managers must give workers the freedom to experiment with new solutions and new ideas, knowing that many of these won't work (see "Work Harder or Work Smarter?" on p .55).

What Prevents Us from Working Smarter?

Clearly, the high leverage point for improvement is reducing process problems by working smarter—not working harder to compensate for low productivity. Eliminating process problems decreases the generation of new defects once and for all and frees up resources for investment in learning, creating a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.

But even when we understand the leverage in working smarter, we seldom do it. There are several reasons. First, defects are easier to see and more tangible than process problems. In a manufacturing setting, for example, the defective products sit in full view on the factory floor. In contrast, process problems are often invisible. They exist in relationships, interactions, and activities.

Second, process improvement takes time, whereas defects are usually easily identified and can be quickly repaired or remade. Process improvement is also less certain than fixing defects. It requires a degree of faith. A competence in improvement has to be "grown" organically through improvisation and experimentation, but many people are averse to uncertainty and ambiguity. As a result, we are tempted to work around the process problems and just fix the defects.

Finally, our companies are conditioned to reward the heroes who put out the fires, not the folks who keep a crisis from occurring in the first place. As one interviewee in our study said, "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened."