KM Self Study Part III

I began a self-study of my learning organization’s growth and flexibility, in hopes to better understand and articulate challenges we faced in adapting new educational paradigms and standards. These postings cover not only the daily occurrences at my college of education, but also some of the experiences I have had while working at other organizations. If you have questions or thoughts please email me at nsabir@indiana.edu.

Institutes of education managing change and shift: A reflective piece utilizing Daft’s framework (part III)

Bias, mission & goals

I think the “most dangerous” of biases Daft discusses is, seeing what you want to see: Not because you truly want to “see” something, but rather because the information we gather, interpret and present to others is constantly shaped by our epistemological and ontological underpinnings. I’m stealing this story from a workshop I ran while working with Organization D.

So, Organization D’s mission statement is something along the lines of a peaceful world and each department has specific/specialized goals targeted at regions or themes. The organization’s goal doesn’t face conflicting departmental goals so much as the message gets lost in all the moving parts and sometimes there are not clear guidelines. On September 21, Peace Day, K-12 educators tackle teaching complex issues of global conflicts and cultural awareness often using social media and synchronous technologies. A couple of years ago there were not too many model schools for this initiative, and teachers dreamt up great projects for their students to do. One the more common examples was Skyping/email a classroom across the world and then reflecting about the experience. In some cases the lack of organizational support/resources lead to a propagation of negative stereotypes, especially at the k-5 level (“Japanese people know origami.” “Koreans eat dogs and that is gross!” “Baby girls are killed because parents want a son.” and “Peace means you can travel wherever you want.” – Just to name a few that were brought up at this workshop). As teachers began to post their students’ work on online forums the banter began about how irresponsible the teachers and Organization D had been to allow students to internalize stereotypes that could lead to conflict.

I think that sometimes working with an organization’s mission statement can be a game of Telephone particularly when they are broad and allow departments a little too much freedom. While having a broad mission statement can be great because it allows you to cover a lot of ground, different parts need to certain have specific objectives that support the official goal.

In many of teams I have worked on, the problem is rather apparent, there is a ____ need and the difficulties lie in crafting solutions. Often times the problem is over simplified by managers, as they are not the individuals placed in the field and their foundation for identifying and understanding the problem is relayed through secondary channels. Because the services the organizations deliver are so embedded in in-country dynamics that crafting solutions becomes a greater focus. Our organizations proposed solutions and timelines are also heavily impacted by major stakeholders – so it becomes a bit of a juggling act.

In our case, because the focus is shifted towards finding a sustainable and compatible solutions for all parties the identification of the issue at hand tends to get brushed over. In the past I have seen this lead to all sorts of communication-based issues, loss of funding, misusing fiscal and time based resources, and I’ve even see projects fail shortly after the first round of evaluations.

While the analytical and researcher based curriculum team I work with attempts to institute changes leveraging an incremental decision model, where instructional concepts are put through an iterative development process to ensure a best fit, this far from what actually happens. In the past four years each terms begins with the goal of trying to replicate a systematic and incremental decision process yet after a couple of weeks that fades away. Because the curriculum development team has to account for student (user) diversity and variation in needs, and constant flux in environmental factors a garbage can model would be more appropriate. Throw into the mix that we have a 60% instructor turnover, annually, and retaining structure can become problematic. Overarching goals are ill-defined, and problems and solutions are often identified vague and attended to simultaneously leading to additional problems. More often than not our team crafts “solutions” for problems which don’t exist and may not even be an issue, and major problems are sometimes pushed to the side for another term (another batch to deal with). Do I think this is effective? No. However, it is the culture of my organization and my mangers’ preferred style to allow for a more organic approach.

It is far too easy to go along with a group or majority decision. This happens a bit differently in my team. We currently have 1 very hands off manager and 11 instructor-designers, who have equal say in how we facilitate our programme. While there are some team players that naturally take a more leadership role and others who are more outspoken about distinct issues, a groupthink mentality is often applied to major decisions. Now this isn’t because of a lack of expertise or diversity but rather an understanding of “let’s agree to disagree” and if we continue to “disagree” the team isn’t nearly as productive, if at all.

Fin.

KM Self Study Part II

I began a self-study of my learning organization’s growth and flexibility, in hopes to better understand and articulate challenges we faced in adapting new educational paradigms and standards. These postings cover not only the daily occurrences at my college of education, but also some of the experiences I have had while working at other organizations. If you have questions or thoughts please email me at nsabir@indiana.edu.

Institutes of education managing change and shift: A reflective piece utilizing Daft’s framework (part II)

Structure, control & culture

At my current job, we have a fairly decentralized system (for immediate interactions) which leads to a series of issues. In an effort to empower the workers and support their professional development management takes a more horizontal approach. However, we our departments have major communication issues and because some people are so attached to their work/frame of mind this has also lead to discrepancies in polices. Since all parties are not on the same page this imposes stagnant approaches to problems.

In our organization the most frequent trap is, “people don’t have enough time to learn.” Because our organization experiences a disruptive environment that requires constant reevaluation our employees are always having to relearn skills and procedures. For example, just last week a peer created a learning module that involved a specific set of software and today we discovered that our student-consumers don’t have access to it. This required a complete revamp of the module and all our staff had to learn new material and procedures in the span of a couple of days.

I think the most difficult step I have seen organizations encounter is the first step, setting up procedures and guidelines. My experiences have shown me that a lack of clear vision often makes the initial process difficult. I have seen firms have a vague vision of execution, access to resources, and reflection but in the process of establishing these steps the organization distinguishes their current direction from their ideal process. That said, I believe that the research findings lack one step, reevaluation of the model or steps. Somewhere along the process there should be a place for leadership to pause and assess if their current process is allowing employees to learn in the most effective and efficient means possible, and if the scaffolding holds up to desired outcomes.

I believe that organizations’ design and structure should be drive by their goals, needs and access to resources, rather than what is considered “best practice.” The text talks about how vertical structures are more efficient and horizontal structures encourage more personnel growth so I think that leveraging both aspects would be a good approach. Our process aligns more with virtual network grouping’s model. While this approach enables flexible and is responsive to changes in the environments, it can be difficult to coordinate and communicate with all member of the organization. The only times I have seen this grouping truly be effective/efficient is when someone very motivated, organized, and patient took the role of integrator.

For day-to-day operations the college of education functions as a pooled Interdependence system; however in the large scale it serves as a reciprocal interdependent system. All of the departmental outputs and procedures feed into one another at the end of the terms however weekly operations allow individual offices and departments to function as separate entities with standardized procedures. This multifaceted approach requires our organization to function with a very high level of communication and collaboration. More often we feel like a cross departmental team working as a single entity rather than separate offices. The logistics trains are not felt by most of the employees but rather the supervisors take on the initiatives to collaborate all of the reciprocated activities.

I think that organizational decisions should be driven by needs, and not what the managers see working at another organization and hope to replicate in their own. Before an organization (re)creates a hybrid structure leadership should consider the weakness that need to be addressed.

I used to freelance for a Country B’s pharmaceutical company, Company A, working with both the local branch and the overseas offices. In Country B the organization is very centralized and represents a typical functional grouping model, however the counterpart organization in State Z is completely different. Because the US branch is considerably smaller it outsources most of its marketing and large-scale production, and much of the staff work across several departments. As citizens of Country B liaisons come to State Z for a year or two many of them actually struggle with adapting to “lack of structure” and several have even opted to return to the Country B’s company because the hybrid model in the US organization was uncomfortable for them. I think it is interesting how an environmental culture impacts an organization’s culture so heavily.

The term effectiveness and measuring an organization’s effectiveness does seems to get a bit ambiguous without a bounded case paired alongside. The goal based approach focuses more on the holistic meeting of an overarching organizational goal while the internal process approaches focuses more on internal workings, such as positive work environment and organizational morale, and not on the organization’s output. One of the great features about using a resource-based approach is that it includes the initial bargaining mix and can include the environment-organization factors.

At my current position several leadership department and offices have a very centralized command structure, which is bounded by accreditation, fiscal and international policy constraints. This bureaucratic system constrained employees to follow set protocols and stifled creativity. Several supervisors and office directors have shifted organizations’ directions by changing their leadership style to account for employee empowerment by moving from a bureaucratic to clan style of leadership and management. This transformation has been a slow progress with slight changes over several years and plenty of employee turnover. This shift allowed employees to further bring their expertise into the design of services.

To be continued…

KM Self Study Part I

I began a self-study of my learning organization’s growth and flexibility, in hopes to better understand and articulate challenges we faced in adapting new educational paradigms and standards. These postings cover not only the daily occurrences at my college of education, but also some of the experiences I have had while working at other organizations. If you have questions or thoughts please email me at nsabir@indiana.edu.

Institutes of education managing change and shift: A reflective piece utilizing Daft’s framework (part I)

Bureaucracy, leadership, & delegation

Well, I think that overly bureaucratic organizations waste resources energy and are slightly inefficient, I don’t believe they are formed with ill intent but a rather formed over time to fulfill various needs as they arose. Perhaps my views are tainted while working in institutes of higher education for the past five years. In some of the more complex organizations I have seen an over emphasis on functional goals rather than an organization’s mission. As a complexity of each department grows, the accountability in day-to-day demands also increases. Additionally, I think the fear of immediate loss, whether it be a material resource or personal, outweighs a motivation for long-term gain.

While working on a research project abroad I experienced this form of bureaucratic structure personally. Because the staff was so focused on not losing critical resources and not wasting time they lost sight of the larger picture: evaluating the state of vocational education in a fragile society. To revamp the focus, one of the team’s project manager (re)evaluated the goals to move from a rule and procedure base to a larger picture. I believe the goal was to have employees move for a narrowminded focus, centered on day-to-day activities, to one that better incorporated the organizations mission.

While working for my department, a college of education, our group currently faces two main issues: leadership and delegation. When a group of instructional designers was constructed there was one supervisor. However the supervisor was more of a coordinator and less of a leader. To remedy this issue the group decided each individual would take on different leadership based roles. However it does quickly became an issue as boundaries and positions were not clearly defined. Our designers began to overstep each other in a deconstructive manner as the each tried to push their own agenda. (Again there was no ill intent – We all genuinely believed what we were doing was in the best interest of our students.) And, soon the issue went from a lack of leadership to too many cooks in the kitchen. To better establish boundaries as a cohort the instructional designers divided up responsibilities, tasks and timelines. Currently this is where our organization stands; it is trying to manage leadership, employee empowerment, co-design and co-learning, and task delegation. Looking back at four years of organizational restructuring, I think had we set aside specific boundaries and structures, the overpowering leadership and lack of delegation would not be as much of an issue as it stands today.

To be continued…