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In our consulting practice
assisting organizations to plan and implement Change , we often
encounter organizations with 'fragmentation" problem. They
continually fragment problems into pieces; yet the challenges
they face are almost always systemic.
According to Senge & Deming, this fact may have its roots in
early childhood. Since our first school days, we learn to break
the world apart and disconnect ourselves from it. We memorize
isolated facts, read static accounts of history, study abstract
theories, and acquire ideas unrelated to our life experience and
personal aspirations. Economics is separate from mathematics,
which is separate from biology, which has no connection with
history. We eventually become convinced that knowledge is
accumulated bits of information and that learning has little to
do with our capacity for effective action, our sense of self,
and how we exist in our world.
Like people, organizations can get sick and die. They also need
to be cured and healed. Yet, like physicians who focus only on
their specialty, most executives fragment complex situations
into symptoms, treat the symptoms, and rarely inquire into the
deeper causes. Consequently, management experts have very little
ability to influence organizational health. All too often, their
solutions contribute to a vicious pattern of "programs of the
month" that fail and get replaced by the next program of the
month.
Fragmentation results in "walls" that separate different
functions into independent and often warring fiefdoms, making
the company increasingly ungovernable. It often create dominance
of "special interest groups" and political lobbies.
Many companies are trying to "change" or "reengineer" themselves
away from stovepipe structures and toward horizontal business
processes that cut across traditional functions and power
hierarchies. While potentially significant, such changes often
prove difficult to implement and those that are implemented only
"reap the low-hanging fruit."
The walls that exist in the physical world are reflections of
people's mental walls. The separation between the different
functions is not just geographic, it lives in the way we think.
Redesigns that "throw down the walls" between different
functions may have little enduring effect unless they also
change the mental models that created the walls in the first
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