¶ … Peter Senge (the fifth discipline), what must leaders do to create learning organizations, including shared vision and team learning?
Learning organizations are considered as organizations that will dominate the future because of the significance of discovering people's commitment and developing the learning capacity at every organizational level. As a result of their likelihood to dominate the future, leaders must take the necessary steps to create learning organizations. There are five major steps that these leaders should carry out i.e. systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, creating shared vision, and team learning. In systems thinking, the leaders should focus on the entire pattern of change rather than snapshots of distinct parts of the system. This is followed by the discipline of personal mastery through prioritizing things that matter and living in accordance with the highest aspirations. Leaders should help people change their mutual models of the organization, their competitors, and their markets. The creation of a shared vision is through the discipline of translating individual vision into common vision based on a set of principles and guiding practices. Team learning is developed through dialogue that involves learning the process of acknowledging the interaction patterns in teams that weaken learning.
2. How would you get managers to rethink the world view or mental models with which they operate in practice?
The discipline of managing mental models or rethinking the world view with which the organization functions is one of the major aspects of building learning organizations. In order to get managers to rethink the world view or mental models, the major step is to help them understand the flaws with the prevailing mental models. Managers can understand these flaws through provision of critical feedback relationships, which is achieved through systems thinking because most models are systematically flawed.
3. How can information sharing be enhanced across employees, teams, departments, and organizations?
Information sharing can be enhanced across employees, teams, departments, and organizations through creating an environment of openness. Notably, such an environment can be created through integrating the two different aspects of openness i.e. participative and reflective. Participative openness basically involves the liberty to speak one's mind while reflective openness makes individuals to look inward through challenging one's own thinking.
4. What are...
The disconnection is demonstrated through the lack of trust in public institutions and the belief that government is wasting huge amounts of money most of the time. As a result, governments are increasingly depending on non-profit organizations, private contractors, and other non-governmental partners to accomplish their work. In attempts to create government by network that leads to accomplishing results that matter to the public, the specific challenges are disconnection from citizens and struggles with severe management problems.
5. Kettl asserts that the service delivery systems failed in the response to Hurricane Katrina. Describe the key failures in this case.
While the 9/11 attacks is one the major problems that affected the core of the American society, the scale of its destruction cannot be compared to Katrina's devastation level. Moreover, the breadth of the government's response in terms of service delivery systems is worse than that of 9/11 attacks. According to Kettl, service delivery systems failed in response to Hurricane Katrina to an extent that it's regarded as the biggest administrative failure in the history of the United States. One of the key failures in this incident is the abandonment of the most serious obligation to provide for the common failure. Secondly, there was lack of coordinated action in response to the disaster because of non-existent or weak command and control among emergency response agencies and experts.
6. What solutions does Kettl propose to non-routine problems that cross organizational boundaries, i.e., several organizations share responsibility for a piece of the problem and/or response?
Since lack of coordinated action is one of the key failures for service delivery systems in response to Hurricane Katrina, Kettl suggests some solutions for non-routine problems that go beyond organizational boundaries. These solutions originate from the most important lessons for emergency response i.e. The lack of time in building partnerships during a crisis since management is effective on a longstanding foundation. One of the solutions to the non-routine problems that go beyond organizational boundaries is mutual understanding of significant problems requiring solution. The understanding of these problems is accompanied…
