How best would you describe how your organization learns?
Hello everyone, firstly, I am sorry for absent from last session.
Before I came to HKU I had studied in Sydney Institute of Language and Commerce for 4 years, one of the colleges of Shanghai University. It is a relatively independent institute. During the 4 years I had experienced, the organization of the college changed a lot, in order to adapt the external environment changes.
Personal Mastery
My organization has a fuzzy concept about “Personal Mastery”. It cannot clearly identify what it needs or what it does not need. For example, the school leaders put more money on how to attract more students to study here, while spending less money on improving the quality of teaching. And another thing I should mention is that although there are millions of books in our Library, but only few students or teachers willing to read or borrow them, because 70% of these books are out of date. The library is just a furnish and decorate. So to achieve the learning organization, it should observe the objective reality, and make a right judgement about such objective reality.
Mental Models
"Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action." (p. 8)
All the people in the organization willing to put forward their suggests and accept others. They prefer to attempt new change rather than contradict it.
Shared Vision
The leaders of the institute made a 10 years plan which can bring the organization to be the top business college in mainland China. The staffs in the organization willing to see the institute get stronger and they make their efforts to achieve the vision. In the end of 2020 the college want to let the current majors segment into 10 majors, include finance, international finance, business administration, information management, accounting, e-commerce , logistics, human resource, economy and actuarial science.
Systems Thinking
I do not think my organization does well in this part. Teachers are the most precious resources of the school, so the leaders should consider more about the teachers’ feeling and suggestion. But in my organization, the leaders just think in their own, cannot put all the factors into consideration, no systems thinking.
"Systems thinking also needs the disciplines of building shared vision, mental models, team learning, and personal mastery to realize its potential. Building shared vision fosters a commitment to the long term. Mental models focus on the openness needed to unearth shortcomings in our present ways of seeing the world. Team learning develops the skills of groups of people to look for the larger picture beyond individual perspectives. And personal mastery fosters the personal motivation to continually learn how our actions affect our world." (p. 12)
References: Senge, Peter M. (1990), The Fifth Discipline, Doubleday/Currency, ISBN 0385260946
Andy:
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting that you college on one hand want to become on of the top in China but they ignore their greatest resource - the staff. I would imaging that over time the 'Shared Vision' will diminish if staff feel that their voice is ignored or that they are not respected in terms of governance and corporate direction.
The college seems to be doing a lot of things right, including team learning - again pouring resources into developing staff but then ignoring that group will only work for so long.
My company does similar things and staff tension is created by the disconnect between developing us professionally but ignoring us in decision making processes. Did you see that in your organisation?