Critical Mass:
Putting whole-systems thinking into practice
This article is taken from
Training Magazine, September 1995 issue written by Bob Filipczak. The
article sets the context for the importance of large group interventions
or "critical mass" thinking. One of the large group interventions
noted is Open Space Technology.
What if you held a meeting
and everybody came? Some companies are doing precisely that, gathering
large groups of people together to hash out past problems, current realities
or a future vision.
The more people in a meeting,
the less that gets done. That may not be a cardinal rule of business,
but it's close. The idea of pulling together a great big group to accomplish
task wars with that inner voices that tells us smaller is better. Our
'90s team sensibilities insist that groups of more than eight or nine
people are unlikely to do any real work.
Isn't this why the business
giants of yesteryear are downsizing, decentralizing, and trying to find
the energy that smaller, more nimble organizafiotis have harnessed? All
compass needles seem to be pointing us toward smaller companies, smaller
divisions and, especially, smaller work units.
That's why it's hard to explain
a new movement coming out of the world of organizational development (OD),
one in which very large groups is brought together to work on a problem.
These interventions wear many different labels, but one consistent factor
is the size of the groups involved. Typically, participants number between
50 and 150, but there may be as many as 5,000 employees involved.
Because these large-group meetings
go by so many different names, we'll call them "critical mass events."
There are umpteen variations on the theme, but in general, critical mass
events are used to move organizations, often large organizations, in a
new direction quickly. If Rosabeth Moss Kanter's book Teaching Giants
to Dance comes to mind, you're not far off.
No rigid formula determines
the number of participants in these meetings, says Barbara Bunker, a faculty
member of the department of Psychology at the State University of New
York at Buffalo and a student of the current groundswell of large-group
interventions around the country. But she suggests that more than 10 percent
of the people in the organization undergoing the change should be present.
Ideally, most experts agree, everyone in the organization should be in
the room.
If getting that many people
together sounds difficult, try this out: Many of these critical mass events
don't just last hours, they last days. Three days seems to be a common
stint. If your company prefers to keep information confidential, this
is not the kind of gathering you'll want to sponsor. Many of the meetings
include customers, suppliers, and community stakeholders.
Critical mass events aren't
called to decide what kind of paper towels to put in the company rest
rooms or what colour to paint the cafeteria. These meetings are about
change with a capital "C," and organizations currently engaged
in battle with the change monster are beginning to see large-group intervention
as an effective weapon. Companies like U.S. West, Ford, Levi Strauss and
Boeing have used critical mass methods to attack a variety of challenges.
In the case of Ford, the company needed to open a new plant quickly. For
U.S. West, the task was to establish strategic priorities. As for Boeing,
the next time you get aboard a new 777 jetliner, you'll be riding in one
of the outcomes of this large-group strategy.
The technique is most often
used to do things such as change business strategies, develop a mission
or vision about where the company is headed in the next century, or foster
a more participative environment - simple stuff like that. In some cases,
critical mass events are used as ways to kick off other popular initiatives
committing to total quality management, starting self-directed work teams,
or reengineering the Organization.
STS Grows Up
Critical Mass interventions
grew out of the field of organizational development, evolving from OD
practices born in the 1950s. These current iterations started with Fred
Emery, Eric Trist, the Tavistock Institute, and a bunch of coal miners
in England. Trist's discoveries about self-directed work among these coal
miners became the genesis of a theory called socio-technical systems (STS).
As William Passmore, professor
of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland,
explains it, the STS approach to organizational development means analyzing
your company on at least three different levels. First you look at the
outside forces acting on the business - customers, market forces, the
community, competition and change. Then you observe the technical systems
- the process the company uses to make and deliver a product. Finally
you analyze the human side of the business - rewards, motivation, training
systems, and the relationships among people.
Once you've gathered all this
data, explains Passmore, you get what OD people call a "whole systems"
view of the organization.
This whole-systems approach
led to traditional OD "Interventions." For many years, the "right"
way to bring about change in organizations was to assemble a design committee,
a vertical slice of representatives formal areas of the company, that
would collect data about the organizations "whole system." This
design committee would gather the information, analyze it, and recommend
ways the company become more effective. According to the current critical
mass proponents, problems were inherent in this traditional approach:
It tended to be slow, and the design committee became insulated. The data-gathering
and analysis often took the better part of a year to accomplish. During
this period, people on the design committee, though they contacted many
different groups throughout the organization, often were consumed by the
process itself. Then, at the end of the year, with all the recommendations
in hand, the design committee faced the daunting task of selling them
to the rest of the company, Not surprisingly, committee members often
burned out on the whole process long before any of the recommended changes
had a chance to cascade throughout the organization.
The drawbacks of the design-committee
intervention started STS people thinking in a new direction: Get the "whole
system" in a room together and do a year's worth of work in an intense,
three-day session. Working with large groups is not a concept that just
recently fell off the truck, says Bob Rehm, a consultant in Boulder, CO,
who has been involved with STS and critical mass events for many years.
Fred Emery was doing large-group work in the late 1960s, says Rehm, using
a technique called a search conference.
An Empowered Database
OK, suspend your disbelief
for a minute. If you sit around thinking about organization wide interventions,
like a lot of OD professionals do, it makes a certain amount of sense
to get a big group involved in a company's change. It's much easier to
talk about whole systems when the whole system, or a significant part
of it, is present.
So, what are the characteristics
of critical mass events? That's a little hard to nail down because the
methods are so diverse, and different interventions fit with different
objectives.
The beauty of a critical mass
event: Every viewpoint and area of expertise, from front-line worker to
supplier to customer to executive to stockholder, is present.
agenda, no limit on participants,
and no real guest list; at the other extreme, a future-search conference
has agendas, exercises, and lots of up-front planning. The conference-model
approach can be used for everything from visioning to designing a new
organization; a work-redesign event might tackle only one aspect of a
production problem. Some methods require table groups-groups of eight
to 10 gathered around a circular table - while others have no tables at
all. Some have limits on how many people can or should participate; other
approaches may involve thousands of people in a single event.
The common denominators among
all of these varieties of critical mass events are participation, information-sharing,
finding common ground, developing action plans, and implementing change
quickly.
Participation is key because
it can change the dynamic of a whole organization. For years, companies
have tried to empower workers with varying degrees of success. Critical
mass events also attempt to get employees involved and empowered, but
only as a side effect. The real objective is to change the organization
for the better; getting everyone involved is a means to that end.
And that makes sense. If the
decision to change a company is a mandate from the top, it usually generates
resistance, cynicism or apathy among employees. If, however, front-line
workers labor alongside executives and managers to build the new organization,
buy-in are a likely byproduct. In critical mass events that rely on table
groups, the tables tend to be mix-and-match collections. One group might
consist of two managers from different divisions, an executive from a
third division, and five employees from various areas.
For example, Mobil Oil's Gulf
of Mexico operation recently held a large-group event in New Orleans that
involved more than 400 employees. The objective was to discuss how to
turn Mobil into a high-performance organization. At this meeting, roustabouts
who work on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico sat in table groups with executives
and managers. This was probably the first time these disparate individuals
have been in the same room, much less discussed business concerns, says
Marleah Rogers, employee-relations leader with Mobil's Gulf of Mexico
operation in New Orleans. "We like to get [input from the] roustabouts
on up because this is about all of us creating our future together,"
she says.
According to Robert Jacobs,
a partner with Five Oceans Consulting in Arm Arbor, MI, and author of
the book Real Time Strategic Change, another important part of the critical
mass equation is a common database of information. During these large-group
meetings, you don't have to go outside the room to get the information
you need to make a decision. Every viewpoint and area of expertise, from
front-line worker to supplier to customer to executive to stockholder,
is present. Sometimes if it's impossible to get representatives of all
the groups in the room, people role-play stakeholders. Bill Fitzgerald,
vice president of organizational development and human resources for Comstock
Michigan Fruit, a Rochester, NY, division of Curtis Bums Foods, tells
of a meeting in which one individual played the role of a company bond-holder
(the company had recently sold bonds to help finance an acquisition).
The faux bondholder got up and said, "I'm 32. 1 drives a Porsche.
I have three goals right now - to make money, to make money, and to make
money. I don't care about your jobs. I don't care about your families.
I care about my 12 1/2 percent and you owe that to me twice a year on
this date." That, says Fitzgerald, brought home the reality of the
situation to the people in the room in a way that just explains it couldn't.
It's not just information from
the outside that is shared in a critical mass event. Because such a mixed
bag of functions and levels are represented in table groups, some surprising
conversations occur among people who never had reason to talk before.
There's often quite a bit of laughter when front-line people report to
the group what's actually going on with customers or on the shop floor,
Passmore says. He's even seen a case in which managers and executives
tried to convince front-line workers that they weren't actually seeing
what they were seeing. There was a real sense, says Passmore, that "that
can't possibly be happening here."
"And the scales fell
from their eyes..."
Once this information exchange
and participation gets started, a miracle happens. No, not really. But
certain energy is generated, although everyone who led or participated
in these meetings has a difficult time describing it.
Consultant Jacobs calls it
alignment, the point at which people begin to see how the organization
fits together as a whole system. In his book Discovering Common Ground,
Marvin Weisbord describes this alignment as - you guessed it - common
ground.
Sandra Janoff, co-director
of SearchNet, a non-profit group dedicated to furthering future-search
methods, and partner in Future Search Associates, a consulting firm in
Philadelphia, works closely with Weisbord on future-search conferences.
These events are designed to help organizations collaborate at all levels
to find an ideal future and then aim for that future. Janoff says she
and Weisbord try to develop "a group that's able to hold on to its
differences, work in spite of differences, and choose to go forward on
similarities. "That's the key shift that happens in our work."
The energy, as Janoff describes
it, becomes transformative when the group decides to work beyond intractable
issues toward a more ideal common future. Janoff says she's never facilitated
a future-search conference in which the group failed to find this common
ground. In one case, she and Weisbord were working with a group composed
of managers, union members, union negotiators, internal customers, shop
stewards and upper managers. The tension in the room was palpable. But
after the group established what it couldn't talk about, Janoff says,
it went forward and found some common ground.
Kathleen Dannemiller, president
emeritus of Dannemiller Tyson Associates, a large-scale meeting consulting
firm in Ann Arbor, MI, describes this alignment as "one brain, one
heart" But, she adds, it's avery complex union of brain and heart
that encompasses a wide array of individuals who have joined together
for a common purpose.
That's all well and good, but
what's to stop a critical mass event from turning into a warm, fuzzy,
brainstorming session - one of those affairs where everyone leaves feeling
as if they've just had a big oriental dinner, filled up temporarily but
hungry again in two hours?
One of the most significant
aspects of these large-group interventions is the final action plans built
into all of the models. Action planning means that Participants do more
than just talk about change: ' They must commit to the change in concrete
and practical ways.
Birgitt Williams is the executive
director of Wesley Urban Ministries, a large social service organization
in Hamilton, Ontario. She facilitates Open-Space meetings both for Wesley
and as a consultant to private companies. She recently held an open-space
meeting on the issue of creating a community health center. Participants
included government ministers and the marginalized people who would be
served by the center. W.Vesiev already had the $750,000 grant to build
the facility: it remained to work out the specifics.
When it came to action planning,
the homeless people in the meeting "were willing to take responsibility
for this health center, against what everyone has told me," says
Bolton. The Marginalized people on the steering committee, for example,
will elect the board of governors for the health centers and gets the
paperwork together so the center can be incorporated. As customers of
the health center, the homeless determined that the standard package of
medical care was inappropriate. Instead, explains Bolton, they decided
the center should stress psychological care, emotional counseling, dentistry
and foot care. At the end of three days, the group had appointed 21 people
to a steering committee that would determine what kind of services the
health center would provide.
If the event is just about
brainstorming, the change process comes to a grinding halt, warns Bolton.
"But when you have to ask yourself if you'll put your name on the
bottom line and take responsibility," she says, the large-group meeting
becomes meaningful.
Action planning is the beginning
of real change in the organization, says author Jacobs. When people commit
to new ways of working, they are already starting to work in a different
way. For example, barriers that are broken down between departments at
the event often stays down when people get back to work. Consequently,
he argues, transferring what happened in the event back to the job is
not so big a leap because a significant proportion of the organization
has already touched, seen and participated in a new way of working. That
makes transfer and buy-in all the easier.
The action planning that occurs
in large-group meetings is not your typical end-of-the-training-session
variety: Everyone who can make a decision is in the room; no one needs
to wait for a decision "from above" to implement a plan. Moreover,
if someone tries to stall the process by pleading that more information
is needed, it is quite likely the holder of that information is also present.
That's why it's important to get as many stakeholders as possible to attend
the event.
Even board members should be
included in a critical mass event. One source, who prefers anonymity,
relates an incident that demonstrates why: At one organization, the board
of directors was not as involved as it should have been, either in designing
or participating in the large-group meeting. At the end of the event,
after the action plans had been agreed to and the group had just given
the executives a standing ovation, one of the board members stood to announce
that "the iron boot of the board will be on the neck of the executives
to make sure they carry this through."
So the group had one brain,
one heart and one iron boot. The incident showed the manager who shared
this story that the board really didn't get it. The director's threat
didn't destroy the community spirit that had been built, but it certainly
shattered the mood.
How much structure is enough?
While critical mass events
have a basic philosophy in common, the various methods look dramatically
different. The most obvious differences lies in the structure. Open-space
meetings, for example, have very little structure, while Danne Miller's
large-scale interactive process involves a lot of up-front work, including
lists of who should attend, specific issues that will be dealt with, and
a detailed agenda.
Regardless of the critical
mass method to be employed, many consultants begin by choosing a task
force of cross-functional employees to plan the event-just as they would
for a traditional OD effort. Instead of spending a year gathering information,
these planning committees simply plan the event, making sure the right
people will attend and setting up the agenda and activities. Often another
team handles logistics, seeing to it that handouts, pens, flip charts,
sound systems, microphones and meal orders are in place. This team's job
is to ensure that the meeting remains distraction-free. Comstock's Fitzgerald
contends that the logistics team is the backbone of the event; without
good logistics, the meeting can easily get bogged down.
The planning committee should
be a microcosm of the group that will attend the event, says Dannemiller.
Dannemiller asserts that once she has a microcosm of any large group,
she can plan a critical mass event that will work for the whole group,
no matter how large. When Ford Motor Co. was planning to open its Mustang
plant in 1993, it held a critical mass event for a group of 2,400 people
in four separate ballrooms. Each ballroom had two facilitators, but it
all occurred simultaneously, with Dannemiller coordinates the whole thing.
Still more structured is the
conference model, created by Dick Axelrod, a partner in the Axelrod Group
Inc., a consulting firm in Wilmette, IL. This conference model, a comprehensive
large-scale intervention, consists of four separate events, which last
from two to three days with a month between each event. The first conference
is a vision quest, which focuses on creating an organization's direction
for the future. Next is the customer/supplier conference, which examines
the outside forces that will shape the direction of the company. The third
conference is a technical meeting, which concentrates on the processes
used to create the company's products or services. The final meeting is
the design conference, in which the new organization is designed and action
plans are developed. Each conference has a detailed agenda, group exercises,
scheduled presentations, and discussion time for table groups. In some
cases, there is a fifth implementation conference.
Even in a very structured event,
however, there has to be some freedom to change direction. "We never
have a completely open slate," says Axelrod, "[but] the outcome
really has to be in question."
On the opposite end of the
structure spectrum is the open-space meeting, invented by Harrison Owen,
president of H. H. Owen and Co., a consulting company in Potomac, MD.
Open-space meetings have no up-front planning, no agenda, no tables, and
only a few rules.
It is Owen's contention that
organizations tend to be too structured and people try to control things
too much. So his open-space events take the opposite tack: The large group
is assembled in a room with a bunch of flip charts. Anyone who wants to
talk about any aspect of the company can sponsor a discussion by writing
the subject on a flip chart and gathering others who want to talk about
it. Owen's meetings are governed by two sets of guidelines: the law of
two feet and the four principles of open-space meetings.
The law of two feet simply
states that anyone who is bored, not learning or not contributing to a
particular discussion is honor-bound to use her two feet to walk out of
the meeting or discussion. This law is designed to stress the voluntary
nature of the event.
Owen's four principles are
more Zen-like, but equally straightforward:
- Whoever comes is the right
person.
- Whatever happens is the
only thing that could have.
- Whenever it starts is the
right time.
- When it's over, it's over.
Owen's primary caveat to anyone
who wants to hold an open-space meeting - "It won't work if anyone
thinks they are going to control the outcome."
The Open-Space model taps into
the informal ways in which companies really operate, he says. "If
we actually did business the way we say we do business." he contends,
"we'd be out of business." Instead, Open Space recognizes that
the employees who do the work often get the job done by circumventing
the structure instead of following the formal dictates of management.
Still, Owen says, Open-Space
meetings are not as chaotic as the press has portrayed them. A structure
emerges as the meeting progresses: but rather than being imposed by those
at the top of the organization, it comes from all the participants at
the event. "When the space is safe and the direction is clear and
the people are present, structure happens," says Owen.
Form follows Function
Just as the structures of critical
mass events vary so do the objectives they are designed to accomplish.
Axelrod's conference model. for example, is used to redesign every aspect
of a company's operations. A future-search conference helps an organization's
stakeholders create a shared future vision and strategic-action plans.
Consultant Rehm uses participative work redesign, another method developed
by Fred Emery, to help companies rebuild the processes that are either
interfering with their success or hampering future effectiveness. Dannemiller
uses her Methods to help execute popular business solutions like total
quality management and reengineering. Owen says that Open-Space meetings
can do all of the above and more.
Professor Bunker and her compatriot,
Billie Alban, president of Alban and Williams Ltd., a consulting firm
in Brookfield, CT, have become proselytizers of large-group interventions.
They travel the world explaining these techniques and which methods are
most effective for the objectives the organizer has in mind.
Sometimes "none of the
above" is the answer. Take, for example, the California government
agency that decided to do a future-search conference to convince its suppliers
to adopt ISO 9000 standards. The future-search method was not appropriate
for the organizations objectives: the method is a way collaborate about
the future of an organization, not to sell suppliers an idea. To their
credit, explains Alban, the consultants involved said so.
If you're considering a large-group
intervention, pick your company's most important objectives as the focus,
stress Alban and Bunker. The meetings are expensive to run. And keep in
mind that if your corporate culture isn't participative, and likely never
will be, a critical mass event will probably backfire. "Think about
what the power structure of the organization is, and how much power management
is genuinely willing to give away," says Bunker.
Leaders
It takes a special kind of
facilitator to handle a group of 50 to 500 people. Most of the consultants
and practitioners we spoke to stressed that the danger lies in over-facilitating,
interfering with the small table groups when they don't really need help
or direction. On the other hand, when 150 people start to head in a direction
that won't yield positive results, it takes a strong facilitator to intercept
them. At one of their workshops, Alban and Bunker asked their professional
colleagues what characteristics were needed to say "no" to a
group of 600 People. "They described it as chutzpah," says Bunker.
"Or, in one case, one of our groups said, 'You've got to have ovaries.'"
Other necessary qualities for
large-group facilitators include a good sense of humor, stage presence.
comfort in the face of conflict, and an ability to interact with an audience.
Janoff would add another skill: The facilitator must be able to manage
the anxiety of a group faced with so much information. "We pay attention
when groups are getting into fights rather than dealing with the task,
when groups are doing anything but facing the issue," she says.
Owen sees his role as a facilitator
of Open-Space meetings in more ethereal terms. In one case, he was doing
a meeting with Sugar workers in Latin America who, in previous weeks,
had held the plant manager and shop steward at machete point. "My
job under those circumstances is to kind of hold the space, and everybody
else's job is to get the job done,' says Owen. If he does it right, he
explains, no one remembers who facilitated the meeting. In the case of
the sugar workers, he says, all he did that was observable was sit beneath
a tree and tip his sombrero from time to time.
Both Owen and Bolton say they
prepare for an Open-Space meeting by meditating.
Courage and Commitment
While critical mass events
have been around for 20 years, we are only now seeing significant number
of companies and communities using them. We are still learning how they
work. A lot of questions still remain to be answered. For example, how
do create a the environment for participants, but still use the anxious
energy of the group to keep people from sitting on their hands? How do
you balance the structure and chaos of the event so you get results without
forcing your solutions down the throats of the participants? And once
you get everyone in the room participating and taking responsibility,
how do you deal with issues of workplace democracy and authority?
We do know that the decision
to use a large-scale intervention requires a certain kind of leadership.
"It is a very courageous thing for the leaders to do," Mobil's
Rogers says. "You either do this really well and commit to radically
changing your own behavior or you do damage to your organization. You'd
better be committed going into it. There are no two ways about that."
Yet more and more leaders seem
willing to make that commitment. Why? Perhaps because if critical mass
interventions work their magic, say proponents, organizations see results
immediately, not a year down the road. Rogers sums it up: "You are
making decisions right there in the room. You're changing behaviors right
there in the room. You're using your processes right there in the room.
So people who are part of that experience will never be the same. And
that's fundamental change."
We could lump large-scale interventions
under one big category and just leave it at that. But if you're contemplating
a critical mass event for your organization, you might find it helpful
to know the labels and the players involved. Here are the primary practitioners
of the most popular variations on the theme: Future-Search Conferences
The goal in these meetings are to help the organization find an ideal
future and aim for it. The event is typically scheduled for 16 hours over
three days. The ideal size is 64 people (eight tables with eight participants
at each). Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, partners in the consulting
firm Future Search Associates in Philadelphia, are the recognized experts
in this method. It closely resembles the search conference invented by
Eric Trist and Fred Emery. Emery's wife, Merrelyn Emery, who is on the
faculty of the Australian National University in Canberra, developed the
methodology over the last 30 years and runs search conferences all over
the world.
Conference Model. This comprehensive
system involves up to four separate two- or three-day events. It is used
to accomplish a top-to-bottom redesign of an organization and includes
a customer/supplier conference, a vision conference (sometimes using future-search
methodology), a technical conference, and a design conference. Dick Axelrod,
a partner in the Axelrod Group Inc., a consulting firm in Wilmette, IL,
created this system. The method can be reconfigured to fit the needs of
an organization, he says, so you don't necessarily have to go through
the 'whole treatment'.
Large-Scale Interactive Process.
Kathleen Dannemiller, president emeritus of Dannemiller Tyson Associates,
a consulting firm in Ann Arbor, MI, uses this method to implement organization-wide
changes. This intervention, like many others, involves mix-and-match table
groups of eight to 10 people and usually lasts three days. Dannemiller
recommends using it with groups of up to 600 participants, although she
has used it with much larger groups.
Real-Time Strategic Change.
This approach grew out of Dannemiller's work in large-group interventions
and is likewise used to implement organization-wide change. It was developed
by Robert "Jake" Jacobs, a partner with Five Oceans Consulting
in Ann Arbor, MI, and author of the book Real Time Strategic Change, who
worked with Dannemiller's firm for many years. The event follows a similar
trajectory as the Dannemiller intervention, but Jacob stresses that this
is an approach to work, rather than just an event. The event, he says,
is just the beginning of a process that changes the way an organization
works.
Participative Work Redesign.
Another innovation from Fred Emery, this one emphasizes a democratic approach
to job design. The people who do the work are in the best position to
determine how it should be done, explains Robert Rehm, a consultant in
Boulder, CO, who works with Fred and Merrelyn Emery. This too involves
table groups of eight to 10, a three-day event, and is suitable for groups
of 30 to 40 participants, rather than hundreds. It often follows a search
conference; the vision for the future of the organization is established
before this event occurs.
Open-Space Meetings. This is
the least structured event. Its creator, Harrison Owen, president of H.
H. Owen and Co., a consulting company in Potomac, MD, calls it a technique
for holding better meetings, not just large-group events. The group gathers,
a blank page on the wall constitutes the agenda, and participants are
encouraged to sponsor their own discussions by writing the title of their
"session" on one of the many flip charts in the room. People
then gravitate to the topic of their choice. The strengths of this method
lie in the safety and openness of the space created for the discussion,
says its creator. The bane of Open Space: someone who tries to control
the meeting or take it to a predetermined outcome. - B.F.
The Triple 7
One of the most remarkable
examples of large-group intervention is embodied in Boeing's newest airliner,
the 777.
Most applications of the critical
mass idea are events - meetings that kick-start significant changes in
an organization. Boeing, however, applied these same methods to a way
of working: Large groups used the techniques learned in the initial events
as a way to manage meetings. Some of the meetings involved 500 to 5,000
participants. The effort lasted four years and was the single largest
product-development project in the United States in this decade, says
Don Krebs, director of organization development for Boeing Commercial
at its headquarters in Seattle.
Krebs, the primary consultant
on the project adapted for Boeing's needs what he had learned about large-scale
meetings from Kathleen Dannemiller, president emeritus of Dannemiller
Tyson Associates, an Ann Arbor, MI, consulting firm. He had significant
support from Phil Condit who was in charge of the Triple-7 project until
he was promoted to his current position as president of Boeing. "I'm
delighted with what was accomplished," says Condit. "It was
very definitely a learning experience. We were learning as we went"
He adds candidly that he and Krebs invented much of the process they used
on the fly (no pun=20 tended).
Condit had been the chief designer
on Boeing's 757 project and he wanted to try something new with the Triple-7
project, explains Krebs. 'He wanted to get everybody on board, get them
involved in the process throughout the design-and-build cycle, get feedback
on how we were doing, and build a different kind of community."
A tall order? Yes, but one
that meshed with the strengths of critical mass events. The method was
well-suited to Boeing's needs because many of the Triple-7 working groups
were large. A gathering of just the top managers in a team called the
Oxbow Group, for example, included some 80 people.
The Oxbow Group met about every
six weeks. Managers and directors from engineering, manufacturing, finance,
personnel and tooling gathered to solve problems and talk out issues.
Condit set the stage for every meeting by delivering a 20-minute "View
From the Bridge" presentation, an overview of the progress of the
project that included an update on competitors, customer orders, and significant
outside events that might have an impact on Boeing's work.
Table groups then discussed
the new information and asked clarifying questions of Condit. The first
hour of the five-hour meeting was reserved for this information exchange,
with a break built into the agenda so that participants could have informal
discussions before they reassembled into the larger group. The rest of
the meeting homed in on one or two issues, and possible solutions to the
problem that had surfaced were batted among the table groups and the large
group.
One stubborn question that
came up during three different meetings was how to best organize the Design-Build
Teams (DBTs). There were 220 of these DBTs, with 20 to 60 people on each
team. The Oxbow Group wrestled with the question of who would lead these
teams: Someone from manufacturing or someone from engineering? The group
eventually arrived at the only solution that made sense, says Krebs: The
teams would have co-leaders, one from each discipline. And, because everyone
who needed to agree to this solution was in the room, the Oxbow Group
could make the decision at the meeting.
After a year of these meetings,
says Krebs, he and the group decided that formal action planning at the
end of each meeting, a veritable staple of critical mass events, wasn't
necessary. Me combination of Boeing's can-do culture and the five-year
deadline on the Triple 7 made action planning superfluous. Once a decision
was made in the meeting, says Krebs, "these guys knew how to take
the ideas and put them in place." Getting a bunch of manufacturing
and engineering professionals to act on a decision has never been a problem
at Boeing, he says.
An indication of how critical
mass events can speed up a process: When the whole Boeing organization
went through a quality-improvement program, Triple-7 employees completed
the program in just two days of meetings. Every other group at Boeing
required four days.
Large-group work wasn't the
only innovation that brought the 777 to fruition. Condit also used concurrent
engineering principles, which call for a mix of everyone who will be involved
with a product to have a hand in the design right up front. For the first
time at Boeing, all the design work was done on 3-D mock-ups using computer-aided
design (CAD) software; no paper drawings were produced.
Every group that joined the
project attended a large-scale meeting, an orientation to this new way
of working. Each session was led by a vice president of the company, which
was also a change from the norm. In the past, says Krebs, people could
work for Boeing for 20 or 30 years without ever talking to a vice president
After successfully using critical
mass methods to design and build the Triple 7 Condit says he would like
to see the rest of Boeing begin to apply them as well. He wants to keep
improving the process and use it to break down more functional barriers,
share more information, and get customers more involved in product development
- B.F.
For Further Reading
Discovering Common Ground,
by Marvin Weisbord and 35 international co-authors, Berrett-Kohler Publishers,
San Francisco, 1992.
Real Time Strategic Change,
by Robert Jacobs, Berrett-Kohler Publishers, San Francisco, 1994.
The Journal of Applied Behavioral
Science, Special Issue, December 1992, Volume 28, No. 4, Sage Periodicals
Press, Newbury Park, C.A, (805) 499-0721, Ext. 211.
Large Group Interventions for
Organizational Change: Concepts, Methods and Cases, compiled and edited
by Tom Chase. "Readings" from a March 1995 Meeting in Dallas
sponsored by the OD Network. Contact: Tom Chase, OD Network, Northwood,
NH, (603) 942-8189.
Tales from Open Space, edited
by Harrison Owen, Abbott Publishing, Potomac, MD, 1995.
Future Search, by Marvin Weisbord
and Sandra Janoff, Berrett-Kohler Publishers, San Francisco, 1995.
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