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Johnsonville navCenter
COMMONS MY JOURNEY |
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Johnsonville navCenter
COMMONS Program Statement |
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Johnsonville navCenter
COMMONS FEEDBACK |
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COMMONS REFERENCES |
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Johnson navCenter
AS IS Drawings and Photos |
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Johnsonville navCenter
COMMONS Schematic Sketches |
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COMMONS Phases & Schedule |
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C O M M O N S |
| This Page will contain the Program Statement of the project. All the Vantage points from Philosophy to Task will be covered. The Program Statement will unfold in relation to, and in support of, the following statement: |
We at Johnsonville have a moral responsibility to become the Best Company in the World.
We will accomplish this as each one of us becomes better than anyone else at defining, and then serving, the best interests of those who have a stake in our success.
We will succeed by setting near-term objectives and long-term goals that will require personal growth and superlative performance by each of us. We will change any objectives or goals that no longer require personal growth and superlative performance to ones that do.
As an individual, I understand The Johnsonville Way is about my performance and my accountability to the team. My commitment to stretch, grow and excel is an unending one.
This is the Johnsonville Way and I am committed to it.
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| And, this Program Statement will be structured by the Taylor 7 Domains Model: |
| It is the experience of MG Taylor, in thousands of collaborative sessions - and in the making of dozens of work places - over nearly 30 years, that people cannot be and do not need to be managed. If the body-of-knowledge, work-processes, learning-methods, physical-environment, augmentation-tools, the-projects-of-the-teams, and the venture is designed properly and operated properly, as a system, this creates a learning and work environment in which its Members will be creative, collaborative and high performing while exercising personal sovereignty, self-management; and, they will act mutually as keepers of the ENTERPRISE COMMONS. |
| We call these environments navCenters as they are employed to navigate successfully in the reality of a quickly changing, not predictable, complex, emergent future - a future which cannot be controlled yet can be created. This Program Statement will define such an environment as it can be best configured to facilitate The Johnsonville Way and how this capacity can be built in three affordable cycles of Design-Build-Use with each phase of work learning from the previous experience. |
| It is the planned, and ultimately the actual, USE of the Johnsonville navCenter COMMONS which will determine the appropriate level of ambition for this design. This usablity, in turn, will be determined by the methods employed for learning and collaborative work. What establishes the criteria for the selection and development of these methods is the judgment - on the part of the Johnsonville Sausage Members and Leadership - regarding the future it faces, the cycle of development the organization is in, and thereby the opportunities before the enterprise. In other words, the ambition of Johnsonville determines the requirements for the methods, which in turn determines the scope of the intended use - and term of use - of the environment. Only then can this environment of physical space and facility, work process, and technology augmentation, be rationally described, justified as a business investment, defined as a project, and thereby made into a project which can be built and operated. |
| MG Taylor has been in the business of organizational transformation since 1980. It was our premise then that the world would see as much change from 1975 to the year 2000 as had occurred since the Middle Ages. We believe, today, that this next cycle, 2000 - to 2025, we will witness as much change as the entire history of Humanity. In this reality, traditional, even improved, organizational structures break down. While we are all novices at change and transformation of this scale and scope, it can be claimed that MG Taylor has the most experience of any organization of the actual mechanics of the transformational process. This is what we set out to accomplish in 1980 in order to be ready when the real change process powers up. We have invented and patented a system and method based on a generation of designing, manufacturing, building and operating environments within which organizations, of all kinds, have creatively and collaboratively learned, designed, engineered and managed projects from the development of new products to the transformation of their organization and the creation of their ValueWeb® of investors, producers and users. We have documented this experience extensively. We have created a language of models that both speaks to the subject and provides a tool-kit to act upon philosophy, cultural, strategy and intentions to achieve their reality with excellence and in a radically reduced time frame. We have done this seeking neither publicity, fame or fortune as a low profile is the best one in this dangerous business. |
| Truth be told, I wish this experience base was many time greater than it is as the future I see is as daunting as it is exciting. It is, however, what it is and it is real. The organizational architecture which we practice is fact-based - it derives solely from design tested by experience. There have been few opportunities, over this last quarter of a century, for us to work with organizations deliberately embracing the future and setting out on the non defined path of continuous recreation. Given that, we have practiced our discipline always starting where those who came to us where with the intention for both of us, together, to advance as far as possible with the making of an new kind of work environment. This has involved hundreds of projects in start up to global scale requiring the cross boundary participation of “conflicting” cultures, businesses, NGOs, governments, and private citizens requiring new technologies, a scope involving thousands of people stretched across multiple nations and organizational venues. Facilitating the requisite variety necessary for this complexity and releasing the emergent GroupGenius® of this vast potential is the core of our practice. It is the ability to do this systematically, without biasing the outcome, which has been the basis of our successes. When we started in the 1980s, many good theories of organization, strategy, quality, the new workplace, and so on were being developed We discovered, however, that the means to implement them remained primitive. So, we took on the task of engineering the removal of the barriers to change and transformation. We did not take organizational theory, OD, or psychology as our starting basis. We studied the human body-mind as a system and from that derived a set of models and practices which we continue to refine nearly 30 years later. |
| In all these years, it is rare to have the opportunity to work with a company which has long committed itself to transformational process. Johnsonville Sausage is such an organization. From my “outsider’s” perspective, I believe Johnsonville has been through two transformational cycles: the growth from a small family business to a national player in their arena, the deliberate adapting of a management philosophy and process as described in Ralph Stayer’s and coauthor James Belasco’s Flight of the Buffalo. Now Johnsonville Members, like all of us, face the new challenges of our time - a task which I will address in more detail below. It is from the perspective of how these two generation-long journeys - that of Johnsonville sausage and MG Taylor - can pool experiences and seek a synergy to facilitate what I call the Third Transformational Wave that this Program Statement is written. |
| To start, the following MATRIX layers the Johnsonville Way along side the Taylor 7 Domain Model togehter illustrating the design issues which this Program Statement addresses. |
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the Johnsonville Way |
7 Domains |
| “We at Johnsonville have a moral responsibility to become the Best Company in the World.” |
| This is a carefully crafted sentence. A moral responsibility is not just an everyday kind of commitment. It is to take on the goal of becoming the best company at the highest human fiduciary level. It is a personal responsibility not just a job to be done well and as long as things go well. The best company in the world leaves no room for equivocation. It means the best. Period. It means when others get better Johnsonville gets better. This demands continuous learning of the right kind. It requires constant innovation. It is an evolving, never ending aspiration. Notice that this does not say the richest, or largest or most successful by contemporary standards. It says the best and the best has be be constantly redefined as circumstances change - not the core values, they do not change yet the specifics do - always. Also, it does not say a sausage company. Often, what is not said is as important as what is said. What is best and how do you know it? What will be the world of the future and how do we anticipate it and help shape it? How do we know what we do not know and have to know? How do we break out of old, no longer useful, patterns we may not even realize we have? |
| A Body of Knowledge is not, as it is commonly thought, just a moving forward arrow where today’s understanding totally replaces yesterday’s. This is a relatively static and linear model and, no matter how fast this arrow is moving “forward,” is false to fact. |
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| An enterprise’s Body of Knowledge is its greatest asset. People are not an asset. People are the cause of an enterprise. The enterprise structure supports and augments human effort. An asset is something which can be created bought and sold which people cannot be. This is wy I object to term Human Resource Management - as well meaning this may be - people are not resources. All legitimate assets of an enterprise have the sole mission to augment human learning, design, invention, production, health and well being. |
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| Few organizations of any kind actually manage this precious resource. Its body of knowledge comes and goes as people do. It gets lost in old records and out of date systems. it is not delivered throughout the network of the venture to bring “the right information to the right person in the right way, at the right time.” In today’s world, and with the challenge of being the best company in the world, Johnsonville’s past, present and emerging future knowledge has to be “wired” throughout the company into, and back from, the larger world of which Johnsonville is a part. Knowledge about Johnsonville, it products, methods and means, customers and markets is not enough. Knowledge about the world is necessary and this knowledge has to be distributed throughout the company not remain the province of “management.” Of all knowledge tacit knowledge is the most illusive to capture and pass on to others. “Objective” (so called) knowledge seems easier to learn and transfer yet remains sterile without experience and tacit knowledge. Just as everyone in a learning organization has to be a learner, the Members of Johnsonville are the holder of its knowledge and the hunter and gatherers of new knowledge and Weak Signals about the world. |
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| Work Process Facilitation |
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| “We will accomplish this as each one of us becomes better than anyone else at defining, and then serving, the best interests of those who have a stake in our success.” |
| This statement addresses the core ethic of what MG Taylor calls a ValueWeb®. The “competition” here is of who can be the best at what Greenleaf calls “servant leadership.” “Those who have a stake in our success” makes up a broad and growing constituency. |
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| “We will succeed by setting near-term objectives and long-term goals that will require personal growth and superlative performance by each of us. We will change any objectives or goals that no longer require personal growth and superlative performance to ones that do.” |
| This Objectives and goals that require less than one’s best: personal growth and superlative performance are not human work. Automate or eliminate this false activity masquerading as productive work. |
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| “As an individual, I understand The Johnsonville Way is about my performance and my accountability to the team. My commitment to stretch, grow and excel is an unending one.” |
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| “This is the Johnsonville Way and I am committed to it.” |
| The name the traditional Japanese carpenter gives for the tools of carpentry is Dogu. The literal meaning of Dogu is “the way to enlightenment.” When we at MG Taylor refer to a way of work we mean it with this spirit. The Johnsonville Way, I think, has to be thought of in this same light.The japanese carpenter approached the use of tools which great respect. A young carpenter merely stepping over a carelessly discarded (care less un guarded) hammer would receive great rebuke from the Master. This oversight was considered an abandonment of the Way - an unconscious act - a sacrilegious lack of respect for self, the craft of work and the community of workers. |
| An Enterprise is composed of a set of covenants be they explicit or not. This framework of agreements is the enterprise. Overlook this, and the importance of this last statement is missed. This is the johnsonville way and I am committed to it is not a simple affirmation - it is the deliberate self aware commencement of a journey which in reality has not end. |
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posted:
January 5, 2008 • revised: January 28, 2008 |
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