Comments on: Learn to organise, organise to learn

By: Mike Chitty

Mike Chitty — Thu, 06 May 2010 10:34:34 +0000

Real parallels with the tensions between ‘management’ and ‘leadership’ and between ‘operations’ and ‘strategy’.

In my experience the key barrier to managing these tensions profitably is finding people (not always the boss) who feel comfortable making the transition to spend significant amounts of time and effort working on leadership/strategy/learning which means spending less time on management/operations/organisation. The key to this is often effective delegation and, perhaps even trickier, effective integration between operational development and strategic development. In my book this is integration IS the role of management.

In SMEs of course the challenge of reconciling the tensions often falls on a small number of shoulders – and often blind spots develop because the often deferred value created by working on strategy/leadership/learning is ignored because of the apparently more immediate value created by management/operations/leadership.

And in times of recession shifting the balance can become even more difficult until it is obvious that the incremental gains available through management/operations/organisation are no longer sufficient. And then, often, it is too late.

By: Stephen Gibbs

Stephen Gibbs — Thu, 06 May 2010 08:45:20 +0000

“The problems of being too organised are tackled by more space for learning as disturbance.”

To be organised, I read, in this context, ‘is the absence of uncertainty and insecurity’ not ‘just well organised’. “Bad” Modernity (the bit it shouldn’t have spawned) has imbued ‘management practice’ with a strange notion that ‘to be have a spirit of enquiry’ = ‘weakness in the individual’. In a sense, hide your spirit of enquiry and you hide your weaknessness… voila! Discreet souls = discreet organisations maybe?

By: Brian Wadsworth

Brian Wadsworth — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:49:48 +0000

MMmmm … very interesting Jeff and good food for thought! Challenging status quo is, I believe, now a pre-requisite for survival and sustianability; particularly if we want our manufacturing base to do just that …. survive and grow.
This means that traditional business practice is no longer good enough, we have to be ingenious in how we commercialise our creativity and innovation in every aspect of our enterprise. This means change and change means leadership …. enlightened leadership with the courage to grasp the opportunities presented by such change; for it is the world thats changing not just ‘us’. Those who successfully embrace this change will be our new champions and this is much easier at SME level than it is for larger enterprises who lack the flexibility to be so pro-active or even responsive. I refuse to subscribe to the ‘city’ rhetoric that manufacturing/engineering is not profitably sustainable in the UK. As such, I’ve been evangelising this challenge to ‘status quo’ for quite a while and its great to see/hear/read such a blog! Take a look at my website and blogs/papers thereon for similar views.

By: Colin Dawson

Colin Dawson — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:01:14 +0000

I always enjoy reflecting on Jeff’s reasoning because it often leads me in to new ways of thinking. The idea of “learning” got me thinking. We often understand the “learning” process as the journey by those who “do not know” into existing knowledge banks which then improves their own store of knowledge. But what about the literally unknown? Half a millenium ago men built on their knowledge of making and sailing ships, but the real learning process began surely when they sailed across the ocean beyond their resources to return safely and then discovered new (to them) lands? Imagine the courage it must have taken for a captain (Columbus?) to look at his depleted stores and know he could not return home so he had to go on? The fear of starvation, shipwreck or worse must have been a factor, but they went on, beyond the norm, beyond safety, beyond the mundane. Can we do the same in our learning journey? Don’t be restrained by convention and what is generally accepted as the “norm” and let us journey into real new worlds!

By: David Taylor

David Taylor — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 09:53:15 +0000

Great concept Jeff – “learning as disturbance”. As you point out, organisations and businesses don’t tend to be comfortable with disturbance yet this is a basic driver for learning. We change in response to our changing life conditions – when current behaviours don’t help any more, we tend to change. Except that we also, either individually or collectively, don’t like to change and often tend to stick within our comfort zones.

Overcoming this tension is what helps individuals and businesses be successful and continue to grow and develop even in challenging times such as those we are experiencing now.

That is also why creating coaching cultures or personally having a coach is essential to creating learning and growth. A coach will create the disturbance whilst at the same time helping you manage it effectively!!