Play experience

Question I.

Learning from mistakes is one principle for learning leadership. To make this possible, an atmosphere is needed were people feel save to make mistakes. When the organizational culture is based on distrust, how can you create a climate where learning from mistakes is still possible?

Question II.

In organizations with an open culture and a learning climate many people may experiment and learn from these experiments. What can you do to take care for adoption and diffusion of positive experiments when to many people are experimenting?

Question III.

The idea behind experiential learning is that the heart of all learning lies in the way we process experience and, in particular, our critical reflection of experience. Hence, experiential learning can be seen as a cycle that begins with experience, continues with reflection and later leads to action. This experimental learning can be applied in certain industries.

1. However, what happens when it comes to extremely fast-paced industries?  Changes in this type of businesses happen so fast that it is hard to reflect on them.
2. Even if they had sufficient amount of resources to devote to this critical reflection, would it be useful anyway?
3. By the time these companies are able to apply the takeaways from the reflection, the context could have changed so drastically that the learnings have become outdated. How to overcome this dilemma?

Question IV.

Going through the approaches on how to successfully change organizational culture raises the question whether there is one perfect type of organizational culture that does not need to be changed in the first place. Taking Apple as an example, the company has not changed its culture and still remains one of the most successful companies globally. At the same time, the company was facing crisis situation and felt pressure from the environment but instead of putting effort into changing its characteristics, Apple remained stable, strengthened its organizational culture and now belongs to one of the most valuable brands. Thus, given the example of Apple, the question remains whether these efforts of change can be avoided overall by defining a culture that can be considered stable over time.

1. What is your idea about cultures that stay stable over time?
2. How is it still possible to foster a culture of innovation and learning?
3. What does this tension between stability and adaptability mean for the behavior of middle management in relation to professionals?

Question V.

A large variety of experiences throughout the change process, both good and bad, can be valuable for the organization and should hence be shared within it. Especially the sharing of negative experience is highly interesting, as this could be very challenging.

1. How should negative experiences be handled to make them productive?
2. Should the negative experience be addressed in a generic or specific form?
3. Should one explicitly mention the problem as well as the responsible person in public?
4. How do you support a person and make him or her learn from his or her mistakes without hurting him or her and without destroying the team spirit?
5. Do you expect different national cultural values when you cope with negative experiences?

Question VI.

This chapter mention two concepts as elements of the undercurrent when it comes to obstacles for organizational changes: Political power play and individual uncertainty.

1. How are these two elements related?
2. Is it possible to reduce or diminish these two barriers at the same time when there is an organizational change?
3. How would you handle these two elements in the undercurrent?

Question VII.

We can think of change as having two sides: a technical side and a social side. The technical part is related to the visible activities in the surface level in the process of change. The social part is more related to the feelings and emotions in the undercurrent of change. Change agents must not only design a well-rounded change strategy but also ensure that the feeling of the players is also engaged in the process.

1. How can change agents assess whether people are resisting change due to perceiving the strategy as unwise or due to individual uncertainty?
2. How can change agents prevent the emergence of new barriers during the implementation process as it takes time to put the change successfully into practice?

Question VIII.

Within a change many tensions can occur, the overcoming of which is fundamental for the very change to be implemented effectively. Among the many, one possible problem that can be encountered are the barriers created by the own culture of an organization. While cultural values and norms give stability to an organization, they also can shed the threat of hampering change and innovation, because of their very characteristic of stability and the solidity of their roots within a company. Moreover, often managers are among those that act the most as defenders of the prevailing culture, thus possibly obstructing change.

1. Which could be the best patterns of intervention to elaborate on a company’s culture, moving it towards change and improvement, while at the same time respecting its own traditional values?
2. In case of the need of a drastic change intervention (i.e. required for short-time achievements), how much can the process actually have an impact on the embedded culture of an organization?

Question IX.

This chapter describes that management identifies barriers to change as a direct result of unclear strategy, inflexible structure and fixed culture or the companies power relations and people’s insecurities. Thus, underestimating the importance of their approach to change to the actual outcome.

1. What are useful play formats to prevent that players in change focus too much on strategy, structure and culture?
2. What can you do to consider the change approach continuously, and your own role in it?

Question X.

Top management often make own interpretations of reality and see urgency as a driver for change and expect management and employees to buy into the idea and get on board of the change wagon. They often disregard the importance of employee collaboration and buy-in as well as the emotional journey or undercurrent. Disregarding this can result in employee resistance to change.

1. How can we use collaboration, emotional intelligence and creative activities to solve logical puzzles of viable strategies?
2. How willing are middle and lower management to take time and participate in creative approaches while top management puts pressure to perform?
3. Will this approach using creative approaches be equally accepted in companies with different cultures?
4. To what degree does the credibility of the change agent affect the result of this approach?
5. What are the effects of gender, age and experience in the willingness to use creative techniques and approaches?

Question XI.

Nowadays, most organizations operate internationally. This leads to a diverse workforce combined of people with different cultural backgrounds. The different values of the respective cultures can cause tensions. However, tensions do not necessarily have to be negative. Instead, they could be used as source for ideas and innovation.

1. How should organizations address those differences in values? Should they try to reduce tensions or rather provoke them in order to capture their innovative potential?
2. How can players in change awaken employees’ curiosity to work with different cultures at work?

Question XII.

In terms of learning process, feedback is essential. Constructive feedback should target both strengths and weaknesses: it is important to improve our weaknesses but it is also essential to excel even more at our strengths as these will be the skills that will help a leader go further. However, some cultures tend to focus more on negative points and not celebrate strengths and successes as much as other culture, while other cultures emphasize positive points of people.

1. Should a firm distance itself from its national culture to put achievements before failures?
2. Should firms also try to find success in the failures in order to be prepared for the future and build on their history through interactive learning? How?

Question XIII.

Reflect on your own learning experiences during your life career.

1. What were the most positive learning experiences and how did you learn from them?
2. What were the most negative learning experiences and how did you learn from them?
3. Which people helped you in your learning processes and what does this tell you about learning relationships?

Question XIV.

Look at the change dilemmas described in the chapter about player groups and make a well-considered choice how to cope with these dilemmas related to a change process in an organization you are known with.

Question XV.

Read the practical example in the final paragraph of the chapter about player groups and write a reflection how you think this organization has coped with the change dilemmas.