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Real-World Stories Illustrate Organizational Learning in Action

Managing the Rapids: Stories from the Forefront of the Learning Organization presents 13 compelling accounts from corporate innovators. These individuals and their teams used systems thinking and the disciplines of the learning organization to develop effective strategies for managing in today's turbulent business environment.

Journey inside leading-edge organizations and hear the stories of these pioneers—explore their successes and failures, discover the strategies, techniques, and tools that they used to enable change, and learn how to apply systems thinking in your own organization.

The organizations highlighted in the anthology include:
§ Ford Motor Company
§ Digital Equipment Corporation
§ EDS
§ Georgia Power Company
§ The Hanover Insurance Companies
§ Armco Worldwide Grinding Systems
§ Alliance Home Care Management
§ Biach Industries
§ San Jose Medical Center
§ Orange Grove Middle School

Whether you are interested in large-scale change, scenario planning, or simply exploring underlying assumptions, the stories in this anthology can help you navigate the rapids of an ever-changing business world.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Surfacing Mental Models and Shifting Assumptions
1. Learning to Learn: A New Look at Product Development
FORD MOTOR COMPANY
by Nick Zeniuk
2. Connecting Learning with Earning
ARMCO WORLDWIDE GRINDING SYSTEMS
by B.C. Huselton
3. Moving Quality Beyond the "Comfort Zone"
THE HANOVER INSURANCE COMPANIES
by Robert S. Bergin

Creating Large-Scale Change
4. A Journey Through Organizational Change
DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION
by Chris Strutt
5. A Call to Action: Designing the Future at Ford
FORD MOTOR COMPANY
by Vic Leo
6. Organizational Learning and Leadership Development at EDS
by Renece Moorefield and Marcia Losada
7. The Evolution of a Shared Vision
ORANGE GROVE MIDDLE SCHOOL
by Mary Scheetz and Tracy Benson
8. Transforming a Command-and-Control Culture
BIACH INDUSTRIES
by William L. Biach and Mike Nash

Scenario Planning and Policy Testing
9. Systems Thinking and Strategic Planning
ALLIANCE HOME CARE MANAGEMENT, INC.
by Steven DeMello
10. Rethinking Workforce Planning
DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION
by Naila Seif
11. Thinking Systemically About Strategy
"COPEX"
by Jennifer Kemeny
12. Systems Thinking Applied to the Electric Utility Industry
GEORGIA POWER COMPANY
by Bill Roth
13. Managing Hospital Emergency Capacity
SAN JOSE MEDICAL CENTER
by Bette Gardner

EXCERPTS

San Jose Medical Center was particularly concerned with the growing problem of paramedic diversions, since it has a history of commitment to emergency medical service. SJMC operates the busiest of three designated trauma centers in the county, and its location near the center of the population and several freeways makes it a leading hospital for paramedic patients. But as the number of diverted patients from other zones had grown, SJMC's capacity to treat patients from its own market was greatly reduced.

In addition, a community incurs significant costs when its emergency service system has such frequent closures. When paramedic diversion rates increase, in addition to costs increasing, service quality suffers because of the longer time delays as paramedics "circle" around looking for an open hospital. Not only is treatment delayed, but the paramedics are distracted from their patient care duties while they spend time on the radio trying to find an open hospital.

Since already overloaded hospitals are more likely to accept patients whose conditions are less severe, medical conditions are more likely to be misrepresented in the field. And, as the paramedics' frustration mounts, the number of patients brought in with no prior alert—and therefore no hospital preparation—increases. These unexpected arrivals only add to the overload and lengthen the already long wait.

To address these issues, our team of department directors and executives at SJMC applied a systems thinking approach to better understand and address the growing unavailability of Medical Center capacity for emergency patients.

The key questions we addressed were:

§ Where are the highest leverage points for improving our capacity to serve emergency patients?
§ What will it take (resources, structural changes) to implement those strategies?
§ How much of the gap between current diversion rates (35 percent) and our short-term goal (12 percent) can be reduced by internal interventions?

To address the problem of capacity constraints and paramedic diversions, the SJMC project team began by gathering subjective data. Our goal was to collect team members' "conventional wisdom" (mental models) about the emergency care system—its problems, the causes, and possible solutions. We then identified the measurable outcomes SJMC wanted to attain, compared our actual performance with the desired performance, and calculated the gap we needed to close. To develop a preliminary understanding of the potential leverage points within the system, we developed a conceptual model that described how the system worked in terms of typical operational situations.