No Organisation or Person Should Be ‘Above’ the Need to Learn

No Organisation or Person Should Be ‘Above’ the Need to Learn

As we look forward, it should be evident how important it is to have a fact‐based learning frame of mind if we are going to address future challenges. Thus, all of us need to accept (i) we may have only a partial perspective on significant issues and (ii) we may have a bias around who we think needs to act, which may act as a barrier to improving things. Mannie Sher (Principal Consultant, the Tavistock Institute) explains:

‘When working with an organisation where things haven't gone to plan, remember there is a context in which blockages have arisen. Organisations don't operate in a vacuum. They are subject to rules and regulations created by others and regulated by others as well as their internal policies and procedures. So, regulators, and other bodies, may be an important part of the context in which problems arise.

However, it can be tempting for regulators, politicians or others to want to stay above the fray. Consequently, they may want to stay outside any review evaluating past performance. They are consciously or unconsciously avoiding responsibility for what happened. They sometimes have projected into them the role of persecutor, as in the recent case involving OFSTED and a school head, Ruth Perry, who is believed to have taken her own life after an adverse OFSTED review.21

Here a specific shortcoming in record keeping was rated as highly significant, thus “wiping out” many good aspects of the way the school was run. As a result, the school was given an unsatisfactory overall rating which created a dynamic that was experienced as an unfair judgement. In this situation, people have claimed that the regulator was responsible for what happened by virtue of distilling a complex organisational process into a single rating, and therefore OFSTED should be reformed or disbanded.22

Understandably, people are concerned when things don't go well, but we need to be mindful of a blame mindset in all the parties involved. Otherwise, we will never resolve the challenging problems of society. You need a mindset that is open to the possibility that while each stakeholder, including the school board of governors, the government, which sets the OFSTED terms of reference, etc., may hold a valuable perspective on potential solutions, and equally, each may also be part of the problem.

In my experience, it's getting all the parts (or representatives) of an extended system into the same room at the same time, to review, evaluate and debate as equals, that offers us the greatest hope of solving perennial problems.’

If we follow this line of argument, it means that some of the organisations that exist to help the world solve its problems (e.g. the United Nations, World Economic Forum, Non‐Governmental Organisations, regulators and even charities, etc.) need to consider the way their own roles and objectives, etc., may need to be ‘in’ the scope of any diagnosis of the perennial problems we face.