Looking at the whole picture in performance improvement programmes

ISSN： 1360-0613

Source： Total Quality Management, Vol.12, Iss.6, 2001-09, pp. : 687-700

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Abstract

A rapidly changing landscape of business competition has produced heated discussions about the effectiveness of popular management approaches to address today's organizational challenges. Companies that embarked on implementing one or more of these (total quality management, process re-engineering, time-based management and learning organizations) have reported limited or no success. One of the key reasons has been a deficiency in these approaches to address an organization as a complex living entity. Managers need a holistic view of their organization. This means a fuller understanding of both the visible parts, which involve processes for materials or information flows, and for the less visible ones, which involve human interactions and conversations needed to achieve effective co-ordination. Humans or animals co-ordinate their actions with relative ease. By comparison an organization's sense of co-ordination is often awkward or spasmodic. It is almost like comparing the movements of a ballet dancer with those of a robot. A much needed holistic view must integrate the interactions of the 'hard' and the 'soft' processes. The study of conversations-for-action as the means to achieve better co-ordination takes into account the human emotions expressed in language data and complements conventional approaches for improving well-defined processes evaluated only with numerical data.