Strength-Based Organizational Change

The ASQ Charlotte Section Annual Conference 2013 will focus on Leadership Development with three different tracks. After enjoying a keynote, attendees will have the opportunity to choose from Problem Solving Leadership, Strength-Based Organizational Change and The Cultural Shift in Healthcare.

The conference is held at UNC Charlotte Center City, 320 East 9th Street, Charlotte, NC 28202. It is one day event on April 16thv with registration beginning at 7:30 AM and the conference from 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM. Additional information and registration can be obtained at http://www.asqcharlotte.org/ASQ/. You are welcomed to register at the door, but each tract is limited to 40 participants. Please check availability.

Strength-Based Organizational Change will be led by Bob Petruska and Joe Dager along with a host of facilitators in the multiple breakout sessions offered. This participant orientated journey starts in the morning with positive change for individuals and teams advancing to organizations and results in the afternoon. Each 90-minute session will include multiple breakout sessions on such topics as Personal Kanban, Intellectual Judo and 3D organizational.

Overview of the Strength-Based Organizational Change
A Positive Framework for Sustainability

We all want our organizations to improve, so what makes change so difficult for us humans? When most people think of change, they think of something that directly affects them, or something that affects those around them. In both cases change is perceived as a negative! It turns out that change itself is seldom addressed from a positive or strength based approach.

Join us for a fun day of facilitated action learning with exciting breakout sessions! Develop a positive skills framework through active participation in rich and interactive festivities that we have planned for you. Our morning theme will address change through the growth of soft skills for both individuals and teams. Then after a refreshing lunch, participants will have the opportunity to learn and apply new skills on how to influence organizational development for positive, sustainable results.

These interactive hands-on sessions are uniquely constructed to allow you to harness the knowledge of your peers while focusing on developing your own strengths. Our day of learning together follows a unique path that we think you will find refreshing and thoroughly enjoy:

1. A brief introduction of the topic and activities by one of our presenters.
2. Participants can choose to join a breakout group to get a deeper dive in an area of interest. Breakouts will have a facilitator to convene your action learning session along with an instructional placemat as a guideline.
3. Each breakout team will have time to learn from each-other in a focused conversation, and finally present an overview of their session high points in a report-out. This will allow everyone in the room to get an exposure to additional insights!
4. A roundtable discussion with key takeaways and next steps will help to unlock the wisdom that was previously under the surface.

About the presenters:

• Robert (Bob) Petruska brings 20 years of experience improving performance in a variety of fields including aerospace, automotive, food, healthcare, office, and services. Author of Gemba Walks for Service Excellence: The Step-by-Step Guide for Identifying Service Delighters and an ASQ Certified Six Sigma Black Belt and Certified Quality Engineer.
• Joe Dager specializes in bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and marketing arena. Joe is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and has participated with companies involved in retail, manufacturing, software and professional services along their Quality Journey.

About ASQ Charlotte Section: The American Society for Quality (ASQ) Charlotte Section’s mission is to create experiential quality development and learning opportunities that add value to our Members, the Business Community, and the Greater Charlotte Community.  Our Section members, networking groups, and multiple community partners, participate in numerous mediums:

• LinkedIn Jobs (available to everyone)
• Section Website and Newsletter Advertising
• Section Meeting Events
• Education Courses
• Community Outreach Projects
• UNCC ASQ Student Section
• Annual Local Conference

About ASQ: The American Society for Quality (ASQ) is the world’s leading authority on quality. With more than 85,000 individuals and organizational members, this professional association advances learning, quality improvement, and knowledge exchange to improve business results, and to create better workplaces and communities worldwide.

Outcome Based Mapping in Sales and Marketing

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of The New Economics, second edition by W. Edwards Deming:

A system cannot understand itself. The transformation requires a view from outside. The aim of this chapter is to provide an outside view-a lens-that I call a system of profound knowledge. It provides a map of theory by which to understand the organizations that we work in.

The first step is transformation of the individual. This transformation is discontinuous. It comes from understanding of the system of profound knowledge. The individual, transformed, will perceive new meaning to his life, to events, to numbers, to interactions between people.

Once the individual understands the system of profound knowledge, he will apply its principles in every kind of relationship with other people. He will have a basis for judgment of his own decisions and for transformation of the organizations that he belongs to. The individual, once transformed, will:

• Set an example
• Be a good listener, but will not compromise
• Continually teach other people
• Help people to pull away from their current practice and beliefs and move into the new philosophy without a feeling of guilt about the past

As I re-read this excerpt, I could not help thinking about my discussion, A New Approach to Lean – Robert Fritz, with Robert and my thoughts on how the typical organization chart and how we must change to more of a Venn diagram type of structure to meet the ever-changing world.  More of that in the blog post, The New Org Chart for Customer Engagement. Dr. Deming’s statement, “The transformation requires a view from outside and The first step is transformation of the individual.,” are so true. 

Taking this a step further, I think of how in sales and marketing that we must also understand the customer’s organization. The influencing of our customer requires a change for our customer’s organization. How many of us spent time identifying influencers and critics within the customer’s organization? It sounds like a very daunting task but most of us realize that it is becoming a collaborative decision process in most organizations. The day of the single decision maker is becoming rare. However, according to Dr. Deming, we have an advantage; “The transformation requires a view from outside.”

How do we leverage that advantage? Can we have control of the transformation? First, we must understand it is not the decision process that we must understand, rather the individuals involved. I have recently become quite intrigued by Outcome Mapping. Excerpt from the book, Systems Concepts in Action:

Outcome Mapping is a method from the evaluation field that explores the way in which interventions contribute to a result and in particular the way in which changes in behavior of certain stakeholders contribute to a result. It addresses the following questions:

• How does our intervention contribute to an ultimate goal?
• Whose behavior can we influence in terms of that contribution?
• What is a realistic strategy to achieve that behavior change?
• How do these behavior changes affect our role, and which changes do we have to make to be an effective partner?

This approach is very similar to Verna Allee, co-founder and CEO of Value Networks LLC approach to Value Network Mapping. You can read more about it in this blog post, Is Relationship Mapping the new Critical Path? and a Dr. Deming discussion, Sub-optimizing your Social Collaboration.

The advantage to the Outcome Based Mapping approach is that it uniquely identifies, what they term as boundary partners.  Boundary partners are described as "those individuals, groups, or organizations with whom the program interacts directly and with whom the program can anticipate opportunities for influence." This approach is very aligned with my efforts on how to discover and influence the participants in our customer’s networks and organization. Have you experienced Outcome Based Mapping?

You can look forward to more discussion on Outcome Based Mapping, Boundary Partners and of course, Dr. Deming.