Institutionalizing Practice

INSTITUTIONALIZING PRACTICE

Obviously, introductory training, no matter how broadly available, needs to be followed by the opportunity to practice regularly and build skills. I have seen many ways to institutionalize reflection and surfacing mental models through “infrastructures” that make these part of regular management practice. (Chapter 14, “Strategies,” gives an extended description of learning infrastructures)

Shell’s approach was to institutionalize working with mental models through its planning process. De Geus, as coordinator of Group Planning, and his colleagues sought to rethink the role of planning in large institutions. It is less important, they concluded, to produce perfect plans than to use planning to force managers to think about their assumptions and thereby accelerate learning as a whole. Long-term success, according to De Geus, depends on, “the process whereby management teams change their shared mental models of their company, their markets, and their competitors. For this reason we think of planning as learning and of corporate planning as institutional learning.”

Hanover instituted “internal boards of directors” to bring senior management and local management together regularly to challenge and expand the thinking behind business unit decision making. The aim was to create a management structure that would foster open examination of key assumptions about important business issues at the business unit level, and also foster more interaction among senior managers who comprised the boards around these issues.

Harley-Davidson likewise made changes in management structures, but they implemented a radically different top management structure—in part to make working with mental models part of managerial work. Around the same time that many Harley managers were learning the basics of organizational learning through introductory SoL (Society for Organizational Learning) workshops, they created their “circle organization,” re-conceiving traditional top management roles in terms of three overlapping circles of activity: “create demand,” “produce product,” and “provide support.” These circles intentionally blurred the traditional top management hierarchy, and led to many “bosses” becoming “circle coaches.”

“One of the most exciting innovations of our new structure was ‘the circle coach’,” says Rich Teerlink, former CEO. The circle coach was typically someone who would otherwise have been a VP of a fragmented function, like product development or manufacturing. In their concept of the job, the Harley managers envisioned the circle coach as someone who would “possess acute communication, listening, and influencing skills, and would be highly regarded by all the circle members and by the motor company president.” “We didn’t put it in writing at the time because we didn’t want it to sound jargonny,” says Teerlink, “but we had in mind that the circle coach would facilitate getting people’s different mental models into the open, and indeed it has been very effective in doing so.”