A Business Bestiary: "Sheep Dip"

by Michael Finley

Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

If you ever lived in the country, you know what sheep dip is. Once a year, you immerse your terrified flock in a solution of poisons and medicines to kill off the worst parasites and infections.

It's a grisly, traumatic, process, that leaves both dipper and dippee dripping, disgusted and demoralized. Worst of all, its salutary effects are fleeting.

Dipping sheep is pretty much how most organizations train workers, says learning guru Charlotte Roberts. A periodic bath of tried-and-true, externally purchased information, administered with little true concern for the employee, or even for the organization.

"Charlotte of Charlotte," as the North Carolinian calls herself, a member of Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline Fieldbook creative team, demonstrates the pitfalls of change initiatives, and where and how organizations sell themselves short -- providing a shallow tub of sheep dip when a deeper kind of learning is needed.

The deeper kind of learning, which Roberts calls diffusion, is more like preventive veterinary medicine -- exposing workers to ideas and letting them create the best pathways to success. Roberts suggests asking the following five questions as you search out these pathways:

1. What do we want to create for ourselves and our stakeholders? Learning necessarily engages the imagination. Now is the time to let ambition flow and dream grand dreams.

2. Who or what are we becoming? Time and tide take organizations away from their identity. That's how one-time innovators shrink and become mere commodities.

3. What do our customers envision for themselves? Bear in mind that the reason your organization exists is to further their success. Quality happens, Roberts says, when you have enhanced your customer's success.

4. What about our character must we conserve? Beware of green-grass thinking, in which you start your organization over from scratch. Decide now what attributes are so central to your identity now that they will be the foundations of the re-envisioned organization.

5. What wants to happen? Neat question. Don't envision uphill scenarios that rage against existing trends. Envision those that want to come true, that have a seeming inevitability about them. Then go with that flow!

Roberts likes the idea of leadership being organic and arising from the community. Leadership, she concluded, resides not in the individual, or in the position, but is shared and distributed, arising from the capacity of a community to shape its future, to sustain processes of change, and to focus on the future of the enterprise.

Training versus learning? Know the difference, and when each is appropriate. Robert's kind of learning isn’t about how to take out the trash, but how to create a future for our organizations that really works.

It requires that we all be leaders, not sheep.