Three core beliefs:
Buurtzorg's team management is based on three core beliefs:
They believe that team management can only be properly implemented if everyone shares these beliefs.
Many organizations currently have a Hybrid Working programme. This mainly consists of the renovation of the office building and connecting all employees to an Office 365 package or something similar, so that employees are better connected digitally. Oh yes, and then there is something like Behavior in addition to Bricks and Bytes. But you can't control that anyway, so that's the job of the manager....
Delegating the Behavior part of hybrid working to only the manager is a shame. The movement towards hybrid working is ideally suited to take cooperation in your organization to a higher level and thus better align with the new behavior of employees. You now have the opportunity to build a learning culture. Time- and place-independent collaboration in any case requires experimentation, evaluation and adjustment; learning by doing, so.
But we also see opportunities for all five disciplines of the learning culture in the movement towards better hybrid cooperation. Check it out:
A learning culture has little to do with offering training on an online learning platform. That really takes a little more. For example, foster a learning culture by considering the following factors:
Fostering a learning culture requires commitment and commitment from both the leader and team members. By creating an environment where learning is encouraged and valued, you can promote the growth and development of individuals and the team as a whole.
When employees learn to work together optimally in a hybrid (time and location independent) working environment within a learning culture, an organization is agile and flexible and ready to face the rapidly succeeding developments in the outside world.
Do you want to develop a more learning culture in your organization, and could you use some help? The SOL Development Team regularly supports in creating a more learning culture. We do this through a tailor-made process of several months to a year, in which we work with a group of employees and managers on cases from their own practice. No new project, no separate training courses, no high costs, but simply with a helping hand in learning by doing.
And, what did you think of this article? Leave a comment below this post!
Sharing is Caring
Thalia Verkade's article in De Correspondent about Systems Thinking, inspired Rembrandt Zegers and Eline Faber to zoom out further, with the question: does systems thinking help us as a society, or does it not?
Book tip: Systemic Transition Management by Maaike Thiecke and Bianca van Leeuwen. This book is based on Hellinger's basic systemic principles of Inclusion, Order, and Exchange. The authors expose a process in the undercurrent of 'the organization in change'. They look from the system 'organization' at the language that individuals use, and what this in turn says about the phase of change in the undercurrent. Fascinating!
Patrick Bijman, chairman of SOL Nederland, saw a few years ago the latent need of society for the concept of 'learning', and two years ago set himself a gigantic, uncanny goal: SOL would again become the community where knowledge, experience and insights could be shared about increasing the learning capacity in people, teams, organizations and society as a whole.
An interview with a man with a long breath and a ditto vision.
In the late 1990s, it was a landslide: Peter Senge wrote The Fifth Discipline, a groundbreaking book on creating a learning organization. A classic, which served as the foundation for many theories, methods and instruments, such as Lean, Agile, self-management, etc. Yet there are now few people who know, let alone apply the model of the learning organization, while it is precisely in this time It is extremely important that organizations increase the learning capacity of the organization. A thorn in the side for Patrick Bijman, president of the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL) in the Netherlands.
Bijman, who has been affiliated with SOL Nederland since 2005, saw society's latent need for the concept of 'learning', and two years ago set himself a gigantic, uncanny goal: SOL would once again become the community where knowledge, experience and insights could be shared. are shared about increasing the learning capacity in people, teams, organizations and society as a whole.
He traveled across the country to select from his network a group of diverse and passionate professionals to give the necessary boost to the Society for Organizational Learning. “What I noticed was that the ideas were always good. But that the decisiveness was often limited. There was a need for action and continuity. A committed team that puts its weight behind it together.”
That sounds simple, but it certainly wasn't. “When we had just started cold with eight people, in February 2020, Corona started. While a starting team has to be together to give meaning to a common goal, we were talking to screens. That cost us a lot of energy. And in the meantime, two people have also stopped. The eight professionals brought together were all talented, passionate and intelligent people, but it didn't work as a group. In our pursuit of a shared vision, it turned out that their vision differed too much from that of the rest of the team. After the start-up period of six months, they therefore decided to go their own way.”
After that, it took at least a year and a half before this Development Team was able to translate the joint vision into text, images, and a new name: Organization Learning Foundation, a new house style and a new website.
“Yes, that was sometimes difficult. That everything seemed to be going so slowly. We are all idiosyncratic professionals and we have very diverse fields of work, from commercial to government, from science to sales. So the sensemaking, jointly giving meaning to the goal and the way in which we want to put this into the world, that just takes time. But we are convinced that that is precisely what makes us such a good team. It is precisely this diversity that makes us learn to do the right things, in the right way. All views of all members are important, however divergent they may appear at first glance. We have learned to explore the differences, and then learn from them. We call it slowing down to speed up.”
When asked about the most important new insights that he himself has learned in the past period, Bijman answers with the term - Facilitating learning -. “I have experienced from action research that we ourselves have started at organizations that a learning organization is not created by focusing on learning itself. Firstly, the biggest challenge lies not in formal but rather informal learning. And in addition, you achieve the best learning results not by pulling or pushing, but by responding to the intrinsic need of every person to learn. And preferably together with others, this is a lot more effective. At its core, it is simply about attention and facilitation. Sincere attention to the person and his or her work environment. And subsequently properly facilitating the desired formal and informal learning. The focus is on the development of a more learning culture in which you work on sustainably strengthening the learning capacity of the organization.”
The Development Team is working hard to breathe new life into the SOL Community. “We want to bring the model of the learning/living organization more to life. For example with practical examples, interviews, animations, short films. The model is complex. But if you make the complexity visible, it is no longer complicated. We will commit ourselves to that. We also work internationally to collect best practices when it comes to setting up a learning culture in organizations. We are also developing an online learning environment with blended learning programs for Learning Culture, Learning Leadership, Learning Practice Teams and Personal Mastery. And we are regularly called in by organizations for presentations, inspiration meetings and workshops. Ultimately, we want to move towards long-term processes in which we help organizations to increase the learning culture in their organization.”
To stay informed? Join the SOL community and get regular news in your mailbox.
And, what did you think of this article? Leave a comment below this post!
Sharing is Caring
It's half past four in the morning. I wake up early again and then I often read, trying to get another hour of sleep. But today that doesn't work. The book I'm reading, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, suddenly gives me an insight into what I need to write about NOW. It's about 'Attention'.
Eline Faber, February 2022
More and more you see conflicts in which a social contract is at stake. This means that a conflict will take place beyond the social order; beyond how certain groups are used to interacting with each other. That is a sign that sections of the community are not only dissatisfied with material outcomes, but are also increasingly thinking differently about what matters in society and how to achieve this.
Rembrandt Zegers, February 2022
As an example, we can mention how the international climate scientists openly put on the table earlier this year that they want to stop their work. Politicians and governments don't listen anyway. That is one such example of a social contract that is under pressure and perhaps even broken. That comes to light because one group in the contract (the scientists in this case) has announced that it no longer believes in it. Examples of differences in thinking about what matters in society include the movement to decolonize, the movement to denounce systemic racism, and the movement to reverse the ideology of unbridled growth or the movement to different way of interacting with nature. We are talking about changes that last several generations. But we now know that if we look at the climate, we don't have that time.
Breaking a social contract leads to conflict. The question is, of course, when it was broken. When climate scientists throw in the towel, or much earlier, when politicians and governments decided for themselves to ignore climate scientists? But can the signal from the climate scientists make us look at the problem in a different way, and more connected?
Recently I was involved in a conversation of mediators about the contemporary nature of conflict. There is a clear trend in which those involved in social development and conflicts are looking for the most appropriate intervention. In particular, the prevention of conflicts is becoming increasingly important. There is, of course, a connection between the development of conflicts and the way in which they are sought to be dealt with.
The Belgian psychiatrist Damiaan Denys shows that fear and intolerance (or tolerance) are related. An increasing fear or an increasing sense of insecurity increases the chance of (unlimited) aggression. The reflex is to respond with more enforcement, stricter rules and their application (legalization), but that does not take away the fear. And what was the outcome of the recent research into the undesired effects of care in closed juvenile detention centers? Yes, that many young people come out more traumatized than they go in.
Social conflicts that lead to tension or breakdown of social contracts do not have an unambiguous client who can order mediation or a different approach. We see the same when we look at the major societal challenges; housing, care, energy and climate, nitrogen/biodiversity. Now that they are on the political agenda, they seem to have a principal and seem less conflicted, as if we collectively have this crisis under control. But the practice is far from it.
The climate scientists are sending the message that it no longer works like this. A message that might help break the cycle. In this way everyone who has a heart for social issues is challenged to find new forms and ways to solve them. The core is that we enter into a dialogue with each other, enter into a dialogue or renew it where it has got stuck. There is no point in answering fear with bigotry. Deep ruptures and lost trust are not a suitable breeding ground when it comes to solving the existential issues and transitions that society faces. How do you deal with this?
And, what did you think of this article? Leave a comment below this post!
Sharing is Caring
The Netherlands was one of the first countries to establish a Society for Organizational Learning.
English (UK) 
Nederlands