Richard
Welcome! It's great to see the growing diversity of roles people in this
group are playing and thus the growing diversity of arenas in which these
ideas are catching on.
> shared vision, so that component is not new. My studies in Philosophy make
> the mental modeling easy to follow.
Good!
You wrote
> * There is a major educational/cultural gap between myself and my
> people: I'm ABD in my doctoral work and most of them are HS grads
> at best
and
> * I have great difficulty getting people to respond to what I say,
> whether in my preaching, teaching, or board presentations. For the
> most part they just stare at me. My conclusion is that I'm failing
> to communicate. Their explanation is that they're just not very
> responsive people.
and
> I'm trying to study the situation more. Right now I've failed in my last
> two major attempts to even discuss our shared vision in Board meetings.
> I'm going back to one on one discussions with influential people in the
> congregation. If any of y'all have any ideas for me, I'd love to hear
> them.
That sounds a bit familiar. If you'll bear with me, I'll try to explain
briefly what I did and what I went through. It worked for us; you'll have
to judge whether it will work for you.
I became the manager of a group of people doing printed circuit layout
(designing the circuit boards like you see inside your PC, etc.) a few
years ago. At the time, I knew next to nothing about the technology
involved in their jobs. When I joined the group, I observed an
interesting dynamic in the weekly staff meetings I held. One person would
raise an issue that needed solving and look at me as if to challenge me to
fix the problem. No one else would contribute to that issue. Then
another person would do the same thing. Then another would follow. By
the end of a meeting, I would have heard 3 to 5 various serious problems
that needed attention, and I had no idea what to do to fix them.
I read a lot, and I had stumbled onto the Fifth Discipline. The section
on mental models put me onto Argyris' action science, and I read a lot on
that.
Furthermore, I stumbled across some work by a Swiss Jesuit priest (Rupert
Lay) who was working on the idea of conflict and anger. His contribution
seemed to be to get people in the workplace acknowledge that conflict
exists and that some people may not even like each other. He claimed that
openly acknowledging that may free people to deal with the issues they
were being paid to address rather than occupying them with the process of
hiding their animosities.
Finally, I stumbled across another mailing list, arlist, which deals with
the related aspect of 'action research'. They even had a free on-line
course available.
We had lots of discussions inside the group about who we were and what my
fledgling vision of the group was. To cut through all of that, we ended
up with a radically different organization. It turned into a
self-directed work team, in which they themselves would bring up issues
and then resolve them without my direct participation. I became a
basketball coach, sitting on the sidelines observing the proceedings and
intervening as soon as I saw something that I perceived they were ignoring
and that they might benefit from addressing.
One key aspect of this was that they felt increasingly able to point out
the same sort of things to me that I would point out to them. That is,
the hierarchy was largely gone. We really did get most of the way to my
role being different than their's rather than my position being more
important than their's. For two examples, they understood that it was
important to question my reasoning or understanding when they identified
it as questionable rather than waiting to a private time when they could
protect my ego. That led to faster correction to poor decisions. As I
insisted that they play a major role in project checkpoints in front of
Division management, they insisted that I _not_ do the lead-off or closing
part in such a presentation, as that would imply that our project was
mine, and they didn't see that as an honest portrayal of reality.
This is poorly worded, I fear, and I need to get on with other things.
The essence was that the responsibility for the group's success moved from
me to _them_. My role moved from being responsible for their success to
being responsible for scanning the world outside the immediate work arena
for issues and trends and shifts which they needed to address, to
formulate trial strategies and visions which they would work over, to
provide a reflection to them of the behaviors I was seeing in the group,
and to make training (either in classes or through my direct and immediate
consultation) available to them on skills they needed to complete their
work.
This was not easy work. Indeed, it was some of the hardest I've done. It
was also some of the most rewarding. One of the keys for my success was
reading a number of Argyris's books and trying to internalize the
reasoning behind the transcriptions of his interventions. The idea was
not to overwhelm them with the theory behind what I was doing but to be
authentic about who I was, who I was becoming, and what I saw in us and in
our behavior. (And be sure to note Argyris's exhortations to ethics in
such interventions --- that was hard, too. He insists that, if one is
committed to creating a more open and less coercive environment, that one
shouldn't use secretive and coercive means to get there. When I figured
that one out in practice, I knew I was making progress.)
Good luck,
Bill
-- Bill Harris Hewlett-Packard Co. R&D Engineering Processes Lake Stevens Division domain: billh@lsid.hp.com M/S 330 phone: (425) 335-2200 8600 Soper Hill Road fax: (425) 335-2828 Everett, WA 98205-1298Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>