Volunteer Organizations Continued

["Cliff" <cliffnorman@sbcglobal.net>]

Dear David, thanks for the reply to my post. I think you have captured
my frustration and the illusion that I was under in working with the
first church group described in my post. Having been anchored to working
with business and industry groups, I was frustrated to see the amount of
time being allocated to "who brings the next Jell-O mold." After three
meetings it became very apparent that this was important to most of the
people in the group and why they volunteered. Any system will have
multiple measures of performance and health. Your post reminds me to
keep those in balance! The Stewardship team (accounting team mentioned
in the same post) could have chilled out and spent some time on desserts
and fellowship. 

Your observation: "I should however warn that forcing people to face
their own illogicality and self-deception is dangerous, and may do more
harm than good. This is especially true in a voluntary organisation,
where people are only doing things because they believe in them." 

This was particularly interesting to me. While "forcing" anyone to do
anything can be harmful, we can get into an embarrassing situation quite
innocently. I am sure several in the audience have been in a management
meeting where the latest "trend of one" in sales or profits is being
celebrated only to have someone present the data on a control chart.
Once the chart is produced, we may learn that only "common cause"
variation is present and the celebration ends. If the person who was
leading the cheers was a key executive, you now have a very dangerous
situation, especially if this person is not in a learning mode. This
defensiveness is only natural and part of being human. The ideas,
methods and tools associated with the System of Profound Knowledge can
unleash both intended and unintended consequences. Being able to predict
the consequences and plan accordingly for the social adoption is key to
our work.

David, thanks again for your reply. 

Sincerely,

Cliff Norman