Training for Change
In today’s business world, if there is one constant, it is change. For today’s companies to succeed in this environment, their people need to learn new things all of the time. Their sense of meaning and motivation should constantly stimulate and deepen (Fullar, 2008). The best way for companies to deal with change, is to train their employees for this inevitability. It is no accident that most organizations learn poorly. The way they are designed and managed, the way people’s jobs are defined, and, most importantly, the way we have all been taught to think and interact create fundamental learning disabilities(Senge,1990, p.18). A perfect example comes from a Detroit automaker; they were unable to understand why the Japanese were able to achieve extraordinary precision and reliability at a lower cost in the assembly process. They stripped down the import only to find the same standard bolt, used three times on the engine block. Each time it mounted a different type of component. On the American car, the same assembly required three different bolts, which required three different wrenches and three different inventories of bolts, making the process much slower and more costly to assemble. Why did the Americans use three separate bolts? Because the design organization in Detroit had three groups of engineers, each responsible for their own component. The Japanese had one designer responsible for the entire engine mounting, and probably much more. The irony is that each of the three groups of American engineers considered their work successful because their bolt and assembly worked just fine (Senge, 1990, p.19).
When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact (Senge, 1990, p.19). Most foreign companies have caught on to training for change. They have focused their training efforts on leading change in the workplace. They will...