Order

BACK COVER

Every workday, individuals and organizations accumulate hard-earned experience as they introduce organizational learning in a multitude of settings. Making It Happen is a collection of vital accounts by these pioneers—real people who are wrestling with the unvarnished circumstances of real organizations.

Get the view from inside as Shell Oil, Ford, Chrysler, and Philips Display Components work to launch large-scale change. Learn from an over-the-shoulder look at how Arthur Andersen, the U.S. Navy, and Kellogg, Brown, & Root meet a range of business challenges by using organizational learning tools. See how EDS, along with educational and nonprofit organizations, transform their workplace cultures through a focus on developing people.

Though the situations and approaches are myriad, the contributors share a passion to help their organizations become more effective and humane workplaces. Making It Happen reveals the extraordinary depth and power of organizational learning tools and methods through inspiring eyewitness accounts of transformation efforts.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Power of Story

Part 1 Launching Large-Scale Change

1. Organizational Learning at Philips Display Components by Iva M. Wilson
2. Transformational Change at Shell Oil by Philip Carroll
3. Facing the Competition: An Organization Mobilizes for Large-Scale Change by Nagah Ramadan and Patrick Parker-Roach
4. The Organizational Learning Goal at Ford's EFHD by David Berdish
5. ABC: Initiating Large-Scale Change at Chrysler by Dave Meador

Part 2 Addressing Critical Business Challenges

6. Manufacturing Reengineering at Ford: A Flexible Strategy for Introducing Organizational Learning by Ann-Marie Krul and Don Mroz
7. Team Learning at Kellogg Brown & Root: A New Process for Debriefing Projects by Rebecca Johansson and Robert Spear
8. Organizational Learning at Arthur Andersen: A Path for Improving Client Satisfaction by James Rieley and Juan Garcia
9. Redesigning Work Processes to Improve Customer Service by Terry Cochran
10. Systems Thinking: A Tool for Organizational Diagnosis in Healthcare by Diane L. Kelly
11. Simulating a Classroom for Increased Student Achievement by Jorge O. Nelson
12. A Systems View of Communicating Change: The Navy Acquisition Reform Team by Alex Bennet

Part 3 Transforming People and Culture

13. Using Organizational Learning Tools to Build Community by James B. Rieley
14. Individual and Team Empowerment: Human Dynamics at Digital by Chris Strutt
15. Connecting the Heart and Mind at EDS by Francine Zucker
16. Toward a New Culture: The Power of Aligning with Deep Purpose by Sharon Lehrer

EXCERPTS

Dialogue Circles

Strategic dialogue became one of the most useful tools for team learning and effective problem-solving at EFHD. In part, this was because it provided an opportunity to think about issues and problems on a different level. As teams practiced dialogue, they created an infrastructure for more open, honest communication.

Teams throughout the division used dialogue on an ongoing basis, and the practice became global. When the Division Operating Committee members visited overseas plants, they sat in a circle and talked for a day. No books. No reviews. No measurements. Just an open conversation about the issues facing the plant and how they might do things differently. When you have a plant located in a place like Belfast, Northern Ireland, there's a lot going on besides producing parts. We believed the dialogue approach provided a broader perspective on the issues and helped us tackle them more effectively.

In the weekly dialogue, the Division Operating Committee's one ground rule was that committee members didn't necessarily have to tackle specific problems, nor were they required to come out of the sessions with solutions. But they very often would talk about specific issues and come to a much better understanding of the problems, which led to more effective solutions.

The fact that there were no "hard" measurements in a dialogue session does not mean that this process lacked hard results. Peter Senge once said, "You're not a learning organization because you know how to dialogue. You're a learning organization when you know how to turn dialogue into decision." In our dialogues, there was no such thing as taking notes or trying to transcribe the conversation. But, if we did hit an "aha," we stopped, had the team leader write down the insight or action item, and assigned it to someone. Attaching accountability and responsibility to our processes played a key role in all of our learning organization work.

One of the best examples of the "hard" results that can come from this process emerged from a dialogue among members of the product launch success team. At one point in the dialogue an engineering manager asked, "Why is it that the machines always seem to work fine on Saturday?" The assumption behind the statement was that union workers were pleased when machines broke down Monday through Friday, because they could get two hours' overtime to fix them. If a machine broke down on Friday, that was even better, because the workers got all day Saturday to fix it. However, by 3:30 on Saturday afternoon they wanted to go home and spend the weekend with their families, so the machines didn't break down.

A UAW representative immediately took offense to the remark, "I'm sick of you guys implying that the UAW sabotages the machines. It's my opinion the machines don't work at EFHD because you have young engineers buying these machines, and all they do is buy crap."

At that point, someone from purchasing joined in. "You know, I buy the same darn machines for seven other divisions at Ford, and they seem to work fine everywhere else. I think you guys have trouble with equipment because you have terrible Total Productive Maintenance procedures."

This was not a pleasant exchange, but the surfacing of mental models and assumptions helped pave the way for honest communication and a more effective approach to the problems that were raised. In order to address the issue of machine breakdowns, the group developed an equipment specifications manual that covered all aspects of testing and installing new machinery. This manual proved so effective that it served as the prototype for the whole company. When they looked into the supplier/purchasing issue further, the team discovered that some suppliers were, in fact, taking advantage of EFHD's young engineers. They were selling us six or seven spare parts for machines when only one would break down in an entire lifetime. The team subsequently developed a consignment policy that required suppliers to keep the spare parts in their inventory. That step alone saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory costs.