Building: High Performance Organizations
In over 20 years of real-world experience, OLC has helped organizations develop specific "Organizational Capabilities" that enable the achievement of high performance, foster innovation and engagement, and help knowledge workers use their full potential.
OLC's "Bigger Pie" Initiative
Let's stop arguing about who gets the biggest piece of the pie, let's work together to make a bigger pie. Lack of knowledge... that is the problem -W. Edwards Deming
"How do you make a bigger pie?" The purpose of "The Bigger Pie Initiative" is to share OLC's answers to this this question with individuals and groups who seek ways to build a better world for all.
Question: How Can We Enhance our Employees Capability to Innovate and their Commitment to and Engagement in Improvement?
Answer: Implement Business Process Management 
The Foundation of Organizational Success is the full utilization of the potential of the organization’s human resource. In the Industrial Age, when people were less educated and the rate of change was relatively slow, the answer to this question was to implement Scientific Management. A management method advocated by Taylor as the most effective way of utilizing the human resource. It involved breaking down work into basic tasks and the integration of the tasks was the role of the manager. Today, this style of management has been characterized by Drucker as “command and control”, by Raine Eisler as “domineering” and by John Cleese as a “Management by Fear.”
The majority of today’s workers are knowledge-workers who self-manage and self-organize their daily work and today’s work environments are characterized by continual change. There is a need for balance between structure and flexibility. In these circumstances, it has been clearly demonstrated nationally and internationally that Business Process Management is the most effective means of enhancing innovation and employee commitment and engagement.
Measuring the Implementation of Business Process Management
There are many sources of information on Tools and Methods to implement Business Process Management. One source is the information provided on this website. Regardless of the methods used, organizations implementing Business Process Management need a measurement system to track the level of implementation. OLC has established a methodology for measuring the Organizational Capabilities associated with the implementation of Business Process Management and the establishment of a Process Enterprise. Assessing all of the Organizational Capabilities is complicated and costly. OLC’s experience in over twenty years performing research and hands-on projects has found that the most effective way of tracking progress towards implementing a High Performance Organization Management System is to track the organization’s Human Effectiveness Capabilities.
The assessment that OLC has developed for measuring Human Effectiveness Capabilities was developed with the support of twenty managers from different companies and over 300 employees of two companies. It has been utilized in many different organizational environments and has consistently been found to valuable by organizations that have used it. The following is feedback from one Organization that tracked their Human Effectiveness Capabilities for over a period of three years.
“Our organization has used numerous surveys throughout our history. We find that the OLC Human Effectiveness Capabilities Assessment is the most relevant survey we have used.
OLC’s survey provides an inside look into what is most important to employees.
We have been able to identify internal champions through the survey. These internal champions have mentored others and enabled us to further improve our human capabilities and culture.”
How do You Improve the Organizational Human Effectiveness Capabilities?
It is not Rocket Science that excellence in areas such as such as Leadership, Team Work and Customer Focus are required to achieve high performance. What is the critical question to be answered is “How do organizations improve these Capabilities. To help answer this question we believe it is necessary for the organization to understand the importance of what we refer to as “Constructs each individual has constructed through their personal life experiences their own view of how the world works and what is important to them. These include historic events in the workplace which have influenced organizational members’ view of the organization, the organization’s managers and their level of engagement and commitment. There are strong arm tactics that can be used in the short term to modify employee’s behavior. However, people only change their construct and thus, their level of engagement because they choose to, and, in order to make this choice, people require new experiences which give them the basis for this choice. People gain these experiences as an outcome of participating in the implementation of Business Process Management.
Information is provided on this website of a generic methodology for implementing Business Process Management and establishing a Process Enterprise. This methodology was built from the hard school of experience and based upon theoretic principles advocated by W.Edwards Deming, Peter Drucker, Peter Senge and many others.
One company executive who had the opportunity to work with W. Edwards Deming made the following comment based upon his experience:
“Once these concepts get a hold of you, you’ll never let them go.”
We recognize that, for managers who have gained their experience in organizations that use a command and control management approach, it takes a strong commitment to understand the potential of Business Process Management. We recognize that it involves accepting a change in management paradigm, but we also strongly believe that once a person understands those concepts, they will never let them go.