Week Five - Tony

Activity: Review group workplace case: compare similarities and differences and develop a table evidencing this.

My responses:

Looking at my responses in the radar graph below illustrates the chasm between my perceived effectiveness of my department compared to my school in the Learning Organisation Survey.  Generally speaking, I am above the median in responses for departmental level analysis and below the median for responses related to school level analysis. If you were to average the responses they would be more closely aligned to the median score. This throws up some interesting questions about the entire data set from the website. This is most likely down to three factors: Communication, Proximity, Context.

Responses with Median shown

Communication: At department level my lines of communication are more frequent and informal than at school level. The upshot of this is that I am able to realign my understanding of changes and ideas in a more ad hoc and continuous manner. We are able to be more open and honest as a result. Informal communication allows us to 'test' new ideas without having to commit. It gives us the ability to rephrase and preshape ideas and understandings in a more fluid manner. The nature of the manager/subordinate relationship is also different as we are much slower in terms of rank in the organisation and thus have greater shared responsibilities and goals. As I move further up the management chain I find that alignment diverges and in some areas because of a lack of understanding of issues faced on both sides. I also know that this is not unique to my school!

Proximity: Because I do work so closely with my department and see what they're doing in a continuous manner I am better able to understand the issues that they are going through and the rationale behind changes that they may suggest. I am also better placed to understand what areas of development are required in the department. At the whole school level this is far more difficult for me, as I don't have that kind of close working relationship with other departments. As a result is entirely possible that my perception of whole school in issues is skewed by the time spent within my own department.

Context: I think this is final factor may be the main reason why there is such a chasm between my perceptions at departmental and whole school level. Context is key. As a result some of the changes and needs of the whole school are lost on me as they are not within the realm of my understanding for my department. I find it hard to contextualise why we have to do some things or the rationale that underpins some of the decisions that are made. The shared understandings I have with departmental colleagues are different to those I would have with other members of the school community.

One of the limitations of this tool is the perceptions it reports on. Note I use the word perception. This tool does not collect hard facts, it collects feelings about those facts. The authors recognise this as well. While I can see why this would seem a good approach, I think my own experiences of filling in the survey based on level of organisation illustrates how flawed this model may be as a single mechanism to implement action. If I was to recommend using this tool, I would certainly ensure that respondents filled it in conscious of the organisational level they were analysing.

This survey's place in the broader scheme of Organisational Learning:
Also, this tool does not offer suggestions on how to remedy poor results. For that I would need to turn to another of the models we've looked at in the course.  Fullan's (2001) notion of Coherence Building and Knowledge Creation and Sharing would be important to identify and mitigate the gaps between organisational levels. Newhouse et al's (2002) grid would also allow me to plot the different stages of change management and possibly identify with more precision the reasons for the disparity in numbers in the survey. For example it may be that the low figure for Psychological Safety may result for an issues of not sharing the school's vision or it may stem form a lack of collegiality - two very different issues that would require two very different approaches to remedy.

Comparison with members of my group:

Chris' responses (below) seem to follow a similar broad pattern to my own. Although the magnitude is different, there appears to be some correlation between perceived positive opinion at differing organisational levels. Most notable is the one area where the larger organisational unit is perceived to be better than the subset in the area of information collection.

For illustrative purposes I've create a radar plot of all groups members and added it below.

Looking at our responses collated, it is clear that we have a diversity of ideas about our organisations. This survey seems to be an example of Senge's notion of Mental Models as it focuses on developing awareness of attitudes and perceptions. 

Raw scores from the survey:

Tony - Department Level

 

Tony - Whole School

 

  

Sources:

Fullan, M. (2009). Motion Leadership: The Skinny on Becoming Change Savvy. SAGE Publications.