Dealing with Conflict

Bob Tales...

The Destination is a Way of Being

Many of the Workshops and Courses OLC provides include activities that help participants understand the skills, knowledge and way of being that is necessary to be successful in today’s dynamic and changing work environment.

Those involved in continuous process improvement have viewed process improvement as a never-ending way of life, i.e., in a changing environment you always need to be improving processes.

Our culture tends to be goal-oriented, i.e., set the target and achieve it. And thus, people involved in change want to get a clear, shared vision of the “what” they need and then work towards achieving it. Thus, a learning organization is viewed as a destination which people need to achieve. What is difficult to grasp is that the destination is not a plateau of new management capability, skills and knowledge which work in the changed business and industrial environment, but rather, the destination is a way of being. It is a way of being that requires certain capabilities and these capabilities allow the organization to recognize and understand what needs changing when change is needed and how to go about making changes in an effective manner.

In our organizational capabilities model, we identified five areas of human skills and five areas of work processes that are important to becoming a total quality learning organization. It is important to see these as skills and capabilities provide the organization an opportunity to achieve a way of living or being and associated culture that allows the organization to effectively change with circumstances. Thus, developing an effective change implementation system really involves developing the skills, capabilities and culture consistent with a way of seeing (systems thinking) and being (organizational learning) which enable the organization to make optimum use of its resources in serving its customers’ needs.

I suggest it is extremely important that those who embark on the journey of change view their destination as a way of being, view their destination as being the development of the skills and capabilities needed for the organization to be fully alive within its environment and to respond in a timely manner with knowledge, skill and wisdom to the challenges and opportunities along the way.