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Over the years we have more than successfully facilitated groups of managers
toward a higher level of shared thinking and planning, yet over and
over again these benefits fail to spread to neighboring groups within
the organization. There
would be a discommunication between the benefited group and the groups
that could potentially benefit. Wherever
organizational learning would begin to take place, the rest of the
organization would be unable to register it. That
our advanced techniques of visual facilitation actually work and get
stupendous results for a given group, (which participants would freely
acknowledge and shower praise upon us) would more often than not leave
the facilitated group stranded in
an organizational black hole of accelerated learning, thus making the
benefit more of an organizational anomaly than a promising advent. It has become virtually predictable that
any time a group of managers working together on a shared problem set
are able to achieve an unusually potent solution, the
approach will be kept isolated as something alien and unnecessary to
the overall organization.
In addition to the deadly atmosphere
of organization discommunication, there is
another killer of organization learning. Whenever
a team of managers have a real breakthrough in shared thinking and
planning, they cannot sustain it because the team breaks up through
key players being reassigned to other areas of the organization. The frequent reassignment of managers
within the organization means that learning groups cannot sustain their
learning. Like a house of cards, valuable shared
insights and initiatives of a group collapse back to a baseline of
crude, meaningless and unproductive busyness. We
call this constant breakdown of group learning the problem of organizational
drift.
We are now looking at two main
kinds of organizational learning disability. One
is spatial in that an accelerated group cannot spread techniques
of group learning to surrounding groups; the other is temporal in that the accelerated
group is all too frequently dismembered, thus dissipating group learning.
Learning events in organizations are kept isolated and then broken
down by normal processes of discommunication and
excessive reassignment. In
such a situation, increasing the natural superiority of the methodology
of visual facilitation of managerial group thinking and learning cannot
get the job done for overall organization learning. Organizations
as they are constructed today are incapable of recognizing or sustaining
group learning events. This
is itself a calamity for the future viability of the organization. That
managers are kept busy performing many strategically irrelevant or
uncoordinated tasks will keep the organization on a blind path toward
increasing incompetence and eventual failure. Unable
to learn and update the overall system, the organization conserves entropy. People are less and less able to consciously
cooperate and coordinate across organizational boundaries and cannot
sustain obviously necessary improvements and initiatives. The system becomes a
Tower
of
Babel
presided over by a fragmented
set of stakeholders. It
becomes politically incorrect to speak of things like strategic planning, the
future or organization learning. Everybody
is informed that necessary learning or improvement projects are “too
expensive”. The company or institution is thus
forced to sell its future to a corrupt, incompetent and stupid immediacy that thoughtlessly
lurches from crisis to crisis.
It will not be easy for any modern
organization to get real learning, viability and a good future for
its stakeholders and participants. Senior
managers, having spent a lifetime of personal investment in a wrong,
useless system, do not take well to the idea that they are conserving
error and shared blindness at the top. Without
support from the top, intelligent and harmonious middle managers cannot
create and sustain organizational improvements because the senior managers
cannot comprehend the emergent patterns and do not want to spend money
on the future viability of the company or institution. If
learning does not take place on the upper management level, middle
management will not be allowed to invest in it. Excessive
hierarchy from the top will thus continue to isolate management groups
from one another and keep breaking-up promising teams by reassigning
key players.
What does all this mean? It means that stakeholder groups in and
around upper management themselves need visual facilitation. But they who need it the most are the
least willing to face their learning disabilities and correct them. Those who most need real consultants will not
hire them, but they will often utilize established big consultancies
that do not themselves understand the techniques of group learning
through visual facilitation. The conservation of error is therefore
reinforced by most consultancies because that is the only game in town.
Can some senior managers learn? This is the biggest and most haunting
question for all major companies and nation-state institutions and
governments. The future
of just our economic system alone will be decided by how this question
is answered.
The prognosis is not good. The
senior manager brain is necessarily the most rigid because of aging. The
senior brain cannot get a necessary paradigm shift as easily as a fresher
and more flexible younger brain. The
senior brain has the power, the authority, and makes the big decisions
that affect the most people, but is the least capable of learning and
improving the quality of decision-making. A
group of leading senior brains will thus remain mutually locked into
a deficient pattern of thinking (if it can be called “thinking” at
all) that will itself isolate and disempower any
senior brain that might resurrect learning or creative intelligence
in itself. It is thus clear that organization learning
disabilities cannot be corrected or reversed merely by the sudden enlightenment
of this or that isolated individual no matter how highly placed that
individual may be.
Is a learning organization possible? Yes, of course, but only if enough people
at the top of the organization wake up to all this and find a way to
invest in the long-range future and creativity of the organization. So far, this does not seem possible. Would we be able to say, for instance,
that IBM selling its PC business to
China
was a good, clear, creative
and intelligent decision by the top heads of their company that will
lead to the long-range viability of IBM? Or
was it the inevitable result of group brainlock trying
to cope with misunderstood contemporary pressures? I
would put my money on the theory of senior brain rigidity. Their solution was a huge cop-out that
will not solve IBM’s or
America
’s problems. And I predict it will not be the last example
of senior management cognitive failure, just as it is not the only possible
example. What went wrong
at Enron? What has always
been wrong at British Telecom? Where
indeed can we find a company or institution these days that is not
suffering from organizational drift and discommunication? Non-viability of the organization is the
rule. Look at the Oil Majors
of
America
,
Britain
and
Europe
. In the light of the failed war for
Iraq
oil, what is the future upstream
scenario? How will the
Oil Majors fare in the light of Chinese deals with
Iran
and
Venezuela
? Everybody knows that Saudi reserves are
actually drying-up quite fast, that the farce cannot be maintained
much longer. Western Oil
Majors are in an unprecedented crisis. The
options of alternative energy versus war with
China
require better thinking and
decision-making than senior brains in the Oil Majors and their nation-state
political associates are coming up with. It
is all part of an immense pattern of organizational incompetence and
failure to learn on all levels.
As we look farther out on the
space-time graph, as we look at the situations organizations are imbedded
in, we see that senior global decision-makers on the highest levels
of business and government are demonstrating massive collective brain
rigidity. Destructive and degenerative decisions
are being constantly made that do not give us viable institutions or
institutional processes. Smaller
companies and local regional agencies do not stand a chance in such
a geopolitical environment. Also,
management life in the multinational companies is becoming increasingly
bureaucratic and debilitating as creative intelligence is slowly squeezed
to death by top-heavy hierarchical military-like systems of organizational
governance. This is why we see in
Britain
, for instance, so many managers
simply quitting and taking up careers in plumbing. Blue collar work is saner and healthier
than white collar work. It
is harder on the body, but easier on the mind. And
all of this pertains to a massive organizational problem. Does management work have to generate
increasing human stress and burn-out?
Are there any senior managers
left who are willing to understand system thinking and organizational
viability? Do you see how our question about senior
brain learning disability shifts as we look at larger scales of
the problem? On a global
scale of management, the issues become tektological,
which means that the degree of organization, the degree of entropy or negentropy, becomes the crucial issue. Since the global situation is feudal,
composed of warring factions pushing and pulling, wrenching and
tugging at one another, it is under-organized, fragmented and disharmonious. Unproductive conflict predominates. World problems cannot be solved because
key players are uselessly feeding and growing the problems. The world is not a learning organization. Therefore any learning
organization will tend to be “politically incorrect”. Dare we say this? Dare you look at it? Hence, due to global political insanity,
any organization or institution on Earth tends to be pressured
from above into organizational drift and discommunication,
which means that effective group learning processes will
tend to be blocked-off or rendered inoperable wherever they tend
to start-up.
Now, if you have come this far,
I will let you in on an important secret. It
is this: learning has to be smuggled into the organization. It cannot come in blatantly in its own
real terms. Try to understand
the implications of this. Organizations
as we find them today are anti-learning systems. Organically
in terms of neurobiology, any learning event that takes
place in an organization will trigger the immune system of the anti-learning
organization. A pusslike
sac will isolate the learning group as a kind of infection that threatens the anti-learning
system. Budgets will be
cut for such programs and they will not be allowed to spread and “catch-on”. The learning group will even be rapidly
scattered or dispersed more quickly than it normally would be. Organization discommunication and
drift are thus deliberately stepped-up against any learning situation that
has been too overtly happy and enthusiastic about itself. Learning groups in organizations will
encounter genuine anti-learning conspiracies. Learning
groups must learn organizational smuggling. They must not use the “L” word
(Learning)
or the “F” word (Future) or even the “S-T” words (Strategic Thinking). For instance, let us say, that a group
of managers bring in some really good cognitive facilitators. If asked why they have hired these facilitator
consultants, they must under no circumstances whatsoever say, “We
want to cause organizational learning through super-enhanced strategic
thinking for the sake of the future.” This kind of language will automatically
trigger the immune response. Instead
they must say something like, “We are seeking some new ways to
cut costs and eliminate waste and we have hired a couple of experts
temporarily who know how to do this.” Learning must be disguised
as cost-cutting or the like. We
have to understand what we are dealing with. Learning and viability can only come into
the organization by stealth. Look, for
instance, what happened to
Chile
when Stafford Beer was brought
in and the socialist government of
Chile
was making socialism work as
a national learning and viability project. This alerted the over-arching anti-learning
control system of
America
and Kissinger. The C.I.A. immune system was sent in to
help the Far Right. Pinochet
took over in a military coup and 300,000 people with learning or creativity
tendencies were tortured, raped and murdered.
Chile
will never again be a learning nation.
Chile
is a perfect example of what
happens when an enthusiastic learning group naively draws the attention
of the larger organization of which they are a part.
The smuggling of Learning and
Viability is what Stafford Beer in his Viable System Model calls the
informal network of competence that exists in the organization in spite
of the overall command and control from above. Truly
intelligent and competent individuals have a tendency to recognize
each other and get things done in spite of formal management structures,
not because of. This
is a natural fact on any scale of organization. And
it is this natural network of creative intelligence that is the proper
client of group learning techniques. Anyone
concerned about organizational learning will have to understand this. As
long as there is naïve belief in the validity of the formal management
structure of the organization management chart, the immune system will
be triggered automatically. Smuggling learning requires a penetrating
systemic insight as to how and where real competence is managing
to survive and operate in the organization in spite of the anti-learning
policies that govern the situation from above and pervasively.
We can now take one more little
step in our thinking. You
need to see that if facilitated learning starts happening to the hidden
network of competence, that network then becomes a very special kind
of Community
of Practice, which has to do with Strategic Management from within middle
management. It is a soft Community
of Practice. Such a network
within the organization, once enhanced by accelerated group learning
techniques, will then be able to gently help upper senior management
through various inevitable crises. They
will learn how to help frozen senior brains through to slightly better
decisions in spite of the stupidity, blindness and incompetence of
those senior brains. It is like the function of the old court
jester in helping the King to fumble through.
Cognitively, the techniques of better thinking,
planning and decision-making are there. Psychologically, getting it all working
for the organization’s real good is an extremely delicate and
difficult operation. It
is like having to shoot a sick bear with a tranquilizer dart first
so the vet can make a diagnosis and treat the bear. The
organization does not know its own good. Like the bear, the organization will treat
the learning situation
as a combat situation. The
higher up in the organization we go, the more the truly intelligent
and competent facilitator consultant is treated as an undesirable intruder
or at best, as a temporary curiosity item that is not to be taken seriously. This is a fact I can personally confirm
from my own experiences in the field of consulting senior managers
in multinational companies. Genuine
strategic thinking competence is generally incomprehensible to senior
managers. The court jester has to be very patient
and cautious with the King. The
court jester may be line, staff or an outside consultant, but the fundamental
need for stealth and disguise will be there. The
organization learning problem is universal.
If you go on the Web, you can
verify that our consultancy leads the world in categories
like strategic thinking and scenario thinking, yet we are less
and less contacted by senior managers of the top boards of large companies. Why
do you suppose there is this increasing reluctance of senior brains
to seek out enhancements of their strategic thinking and planning? As
I have said, the problem is neurobiological. It
is about the mental rigidity that comes with age. They do not believe they need to improve
their decision-making. In
fact, the quality of senior decision-making is decreasing at an accelerated rate. Many
of us in the facilitative consulting field have been observing this. The
world of management has become increasingly brutal, thoughtless, rushed
and stressed-out. Commensurate
with this, we notice that consultants are burning out in greater
numbers and a faster rate than ever before. Anti-learning and short-termism are
getting stronger and more all-devouring than ever before.
Cognitive facilitation methods
have never been better. More and more consultants and consultancies
are taking them up. But
the organizations that need them brought in are less able to comprehend
the need for such things than they used to be. All
of this signals a crisis of strategic business and institutional competence
in
America
,
Britain
and
Europe
. So we all better put on our thinking hats
of various colors and develop some new leverage on the degenerating
system.
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