Facilitating Learning and Improvement
May 22, 2004
A paper by this author titled “Increasing Organizational Capacity for Learning & Improvement” focused on organizational defenses and was shared with a number of colleagues and customers. The work of Chris Argyris in his Harvard Business Review article from 1991, “Teaching Smart People How To Learn” and his 1990 work “Overcoming Organizational Defenses - Facilitating Organizational Learning” was a foundation for interventions and consulting through dialogue.
This paper is a supplement and follow up to the earlier work and focuses on how to facilitate dialogue and learning in meetings and workshops. This is useful in routine staff meeting, complex problem-solving meetings or workshops to develop new processes, products, services or technology as solutions to organizational needs. We start with dialogue to clarify our purpose with three basic questions:
What are we trying to accomplish?
How will we know that a change is an improvement?
What changes can we make that will result in improvement?
These questions come primarily from the work of the Associates of Process Improvement (API), a collection of quality experts, thinkers and practitioners of profound knowledge, as defined by W Edwards Deming. They call these three questions the “Model For Improvement”, when used in conjunction with the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle of learning and improvement, described by W. Edwards Deming. In practice, there are numerous synergies between the work and philosophies of Deming, Argyris, Russell Ackoff, API and others. The work of the Achieve Global organization and the fundamentals they teach through the Zenger-Miller facilitation methods are a way to extend these ideas of learning and improvement methods by skilled philosophy, practices and methods of facilitating meetings and workshops.