Navi-System syndrome

The first time I had a car navigation system I was totally excited. It takes you where you've never been before.

Fact 1: It's amazing to see how people tend to follow the instructions given by a machine. Is it the woman's gentle voice that makes the driver obey the guidance instructions - for the women in the audience, male voices are also availabe for guidance. Is it the colourfull map display or the animated arrow icons that provide the necessary "street credibility" and make you follow the indicated route? Or is it simply becouse you don't know your way around?

Fact 2: When you travel in an area new to you, the quality of the calculated route is difficult to judge. But when traveling in an area you know fairly well, you frequently wonder what logic is behind the routing mechanism. Why is this device seldomly calculating the route you would take blindfolded? The system never tends to choose the natural trail choosen by people who commute every day.

Adding Fact 1 and 2 together, cummulated with the increasing congestion of our roads, results in the estonishing conclusion that these devices always get you where you want to go, but you're rarely the first to arrive.

You'll get where you want to go, but when will you arrive?
What has this to do with a learning organization or even with Quality Management?

Many companies build "navigation systems" for their organization. They provide nice process descriptions, policies, procedures, work instructions, guidelines, piles of document templates... all documented and accessible via sophisticated intranets and controlled by state of the art configuration management tools. Quality Management Systems (ISO 9000 series, CMMi, Six Sigma...), with renowned certification programs, stimulate this to increase the capability maturity of your organization

So when you start "driving" around in a new organization, the guidance is only a few mouse clicks or phone calls away. You'll get where you want to go, but again, when will you arrive?

Refactoring Human Resources:
In these well structured and documented organizations, people tend to switch to automatic pilot and follow the guidlines without questioning. I've seen it happening multiple times, the creativity and agility needed for survival in a CMMi level 1 organization, tends to crumble when this organization climbs the ladder of capability maturity. Off course these organizations grow more mature, but what about the agility and creativity of the average worker in these organizations.
As survival is less of an issue in these mature organizations, this agility and creativity could be used for other means. And that's where most organizations tend to fail: refactoring their human resources.

Although I never worked for a CMMi level 5 company yet (lucky me ;-), but I've seen a few acting in the mean time. I've been everywhere between level 1 and 3 in the past years. People stop thinking and lose their imagination, creativity and agility if they are not lead by managers who are aware of these risks and know how to cope with it.
Having process descriptions, procedure for every single task and a job description for every memeber of your staff is fine, but it is not stimulating people to think out-of-the-box and look at things from a "non-documented" perspective. Worse, in some of these organizations, thinking out of the box became a sin once the "certification" is accomplished.

In navigating through an economical climate that changes continuously with an ever increasing speed and frequency, "getting there" is no longer the main requirement. Changing the focus of managment from a purely "operational" perspective to a "change" perspective is the main challenge now. The average manager is not ready for this.