Re-reading the Fifth Discipline

I ordered Gary Hamel's new book, The Future of Management, to read over Christmas but before it arrived I decided to re-read the classic The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge (1990). If you too need to refresh your memory, the five disciplines are the following:
1. Building shared visions to foster commitment to the long term;
2. mental models that focus on the openness needed to unearth shortcomings in our present ways of seeing the world;
3. team learning that develops the skills of groups to look for the larger picture;
4. personal mastery fosters the personal motivation to continually learn how our actions affect our world;
5. and the fifth discipline is systems thinking, closely linked to a learning organisation.
I wonder how many learning organisations there are out there...too few...
To me it is obvious that organisations dealing with knowledge on high-level should develop as learning organisations. And yet, many managers seem to run them as factories.

Def: Systems thinking is a methodology evolving from the application of system dynamics; a strategic simulation tool aimed at mapping and modelling the global interaction of processes, information feedback and policy across organisational sectors. It is being used widely in health and social care to design sustainable patient outcomes and to assist the attainment of performance targets for all service agencies along whole patient pathways. It can help to test new policies and to eliminate those which might have unintended consequences for the system as a whole. It also creates learning and communication for new-world ideas and insights.

Systems thinking teaches that there are two types of complexity: the detailed complexity and the dynamic complexity. The Fifth discipline primarily deals with the latter, the dynamic one.

Making Change

While working I took a class in change management during spring. Haven't had time to dedicate on the blog, but starting from the end: Aspects that we considered to be utterly important in an organisational change are communication, having a vision, setting well defined goals aligned with this vision, goals that can be achieved also in short term in order to keep motivation and pace in the change work. In a modern, knowledge-based organisation it is vital to establish a learning organisation. Change is dynamic, it's not about deciding on a 5-yearplan and send it to empolyees to fulfil it. Therefore, I drew a model that serves as a map during change, something to gather around in the organisation and also should be used for follow-ups and a double loup learning.




The green squares are supposed to be filled in with whatever the co-workers decide on. After some time, at the end of the year, the grey area is filled in with achievements. A gap-analysis provides input for the next year's green squares - after other relevant business intelligence has been considered.

More channel strategies....

I arranged a seminar on multi channel strategies the other day and the more I prepared it, the more I wanted to include...it such a vast area. We could easily have used a full day and have work shops with more specific dicussions. Sture Hägglund, professor of Computer Science, gave broad introduction. After a break we got some more specific examples from Maria Inghamn, the Swedish Road Administration. Their sms-services have been more widely used, and differently, than anyone had expected.

Process analysis

Ok, when I don't read or write on Swedish literature I work with business development and the past weeks we have conducted work shops of process analysis. The method is based on RUP and we look at "who is doing what with what" today and tomorrow. It is a simple way to get a pretty good picture of how work is done currently and what improvements could be made. At a 3rd occasion we count on the financial effects. Coming week I wil be leading one of these workshops on the "tomorrow"-situation and I am really looking forward to it. We have already had a first work shop and got a lot of information. The organisation has been doing their home work already last year but it's different when someone comes from the outside looking in.