Institutional Learning and Change Initiative

Frederick the Great apparently believed that the common soldier should be conditioned to fear his officers more than the dangers of the battlefield. His view was that a soldier will only face and overcome difficult situations through fear and blind obedience. The traditional “command and control” view of management is not dissimilar. The challenges faced by modern managers and their organizations are often equated, metaphorically, with those of the battlefield with its strategies for survival, inspired leadership, wins and defeats.

It is not so long ago that the “command and control” view of organizational management was held up as exemplary. The scientific approach to management promoted by Taylor (1947) was held to be model until relatively recently and still appeals to many who enter management from the more “rational” sciences. The approach appealed precisely because it is apparently so rational involving as it does a detailed analysis of work; the scientific selection, training, and development of employees; the adoption of work principles; and the division of responsibility among managers in areas defined by function. It is not hard to find agricultural research organizations today – in the 21st Century -- governed by some of these principles!

However, the weaknesses of the command and control approach have been recognized. It does not meet most professional and support staff members need for job satisfaction, its success depends heavily upon micromanagement, and micromanagement disempowers employees and constrains their initiative. It ignores the fact that employees individually and collectively possess important information about their work and how that is facilitated or constrained within the organization. It overlooks that the exploitation of this knowledge is essential if appropriate strategies are to be developed over the longer term and sound operational decisions are to be made on a daily basis. Organizations are not what they used to be!

Command and control and so-called scientific approaches to management ignore current reality -- that healthy organizations must have an in-built ability to learn at the individual and team levels and at the level of the organization as a whole if they are to compete successfully and meet expectations whether these be the expectations of shareholders, donors or beneficiaries. Success does not simply mean greater efficiency. Efficiency must be matched by relevance and effectiveness – the ability of agricultural research organizations to address the complex developmental challenges faced by communities, countries and regions and the ability of these organizations to address them in ways that resolve development challenges.

Part 2 of this Sourcebook is a testimony to how far views of management and organizational improvement have come in their search for practical tools and approaches that promote and develop learning and change in daily work.

Each of the digests in this part of the Sourcebook presents a tool or an approach by which the authors have successfully fostered ILAC in real life situations and organizations. In addition to explaining the approach that has been used by the authors, the digests point out some of the real-world issues that can arise in their application and indicate how they have been dealt with in practice.

The approaches recognize that while it is easy enough to change the formal structure of an organization, it is more difficult to alter the mental set of the people within it, the relationships between them, to redefine how they conceive the organization, and to induce and engender new behaviours that benefit the organization in a systemic way. While none of these approaches in itself is earth-shattering, each has the capability to provide new information that managers and employees can use to redefine and conceptualize shared beliefs and to act in new ways that help to more effectively realize organizational strategy and goals.

These tools for institutional learning and change are about replacing dysfunctional command and control approaches to management with those that engender learning and innovation in their scientists and employees (Taylor and Thackwray, 1999). Organizations that have developed an intrinsic drive to improve their performance in the service of research for development have adopted strategies for learning and change as part of their culture. They improve public management and help rebuild public confidence in institutions that undertake research for development on behalf of governments and the international community (Mayne and Zapico-Goñi, 1997).

References

Taylor, F.W. (1947). Scientific Management. New York, Harper.
Taylor, P. and Thackwray, B. (1999). Investors in People Explained, 3rd Edition. London, Kogan Page.
Mayne, J. and Zapico-Goñi, E. (Eds) (1997). Monitoring Performance in the Public Sector: Future Directions from International Experience. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers.