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Critical Mass Putting whole-systems thinking into Practice by Bob Filipczak
What if you held a meeting and everybody came? Some companies are doing precisely that, gathering large groups of people together to hash out past problems, current realities or a future vision. The more people in a meeting, the less that gets done. That may not be a cardinal rule of business, but it's close. The idea of pulling together a great big group to accomplish a task wars with that inner voice that tells us smaller is better. Our '90s team sensibilities insist that groups of more than eight or nine people are unlikely to do any real work. Isn't this why the business giants of yesteryear are downsizing, decentralizing, and trying to find the energy that smaller, more nimble organizations have harnessed? All compass needles seem to be pointing us toward smaller companies, smaller divisions and, especially, smaller work units. That's why it's hard to explain a new movement coming out of the world of organizational development (OD), one in which very large groups are brought together to work on a problem. These interventions wear many different labels, but one consistent factor is the size of the groups involved. Typically, participants number between 50 and 150, but there may be as many as 5,000 employees involved. Because these large-group meetings go by so many different names, we'll call them "critical mass events." There are umpteen variations on the theme, but in general, critical mass events are used to move organizations, often large organizations, in a new direction quickly. If Rosabeth Moss Kanter's book Teaching Giants to Dance comes to mind, you're not far off. No rigid formula determines the number of participants in these meetings, says Barbara Bunker, a faculty member of the department of Psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a student of the current groundswell of large-group interventions around the country. But she suggests that more than 10 percent of the people in the organization undergoing the change should be present. Ideally, most experts agree, everyone in the organization should be in the room. If getting that many people together sounds difficult, try this out: Many of these critical mass events don't just last hours, they last days. Three days seems to be a common stint. If your company prefers to keep information confidential, this is not the kind of gathering you'll want to sponsor. Many of the meetings include customers, suppliers, and community stakeholders. Critical mass events aren't called to decide what kind of paper towels to put in the company rest rooms or what colour to paint the cafeteria. These meetings are about change with a capital "C," and organizations currently engaged in battle with the change monster are beginning to see large-group intervention as an effective weapon. Companies like U.S. West, Ford, Levi Strauss and Boeing have used critical mass methods to attack a variety of challenges. In the case of Ford, the company needed to open a new plant quickly. For U.S. West, the task was to establish strategic priorities. As for Boeing, the next time you get aboard a new 777 jetliner, you'll be riding in one of the outcomes of this large-group strategy. The technique is most often used to do things such as change business strategies, develop a mission or vision about where the company is headed in the next century, or foster a more participative environment - simple stuff like that. In some cases, critical mass events are used as ways to kick off other popular initiatives committing to total quality management, starting self-directed work teams, or reengineering the organization. STS Grows Up Critical Mass interventions grew out of the field of organizational development, evolving from OD practices born in the 1950s. These current iterations started with Fred Emery, Eric Trist, the Tavistock Institute, and a bunch of coal miners in England. Trist's discoveries about self-directed work among these coal miners became the genesis of a theory called socio-technical systems (STS). As William Passmore, professor of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, explains it, the STS approach to organizational development means analyzing your company on at least three different levels. First you look at the outside forces acting on the business - customers, market forces, the community, competition and change. Then you observe the technical systems - the process the company uses to make and deliver a product. Finally you analyze the human side of the business - rewards, motivation, training systems, and the relationships among people. Once you've gathered all this data, explains Passmore, you get what OD people call a "whole systems" view of the organization. This whole-systems approach led to traditional OD "Interventions." For many years, the "right" way to bring about change in organizations was to assemble a design committee, a vertical slice of representatives from all areas of the company, that would collect data about the organization's "whole system." This design committee would gather the information, analyze it, and recommend ways the company become more effective. According to the current critical mass proponents, problems were inherent in this traditional approach: It tended to be slow, and the design committee became insulated. The data-gathering and analysis often took the better part of a year to accomplish. During this period, people on the design committee, though they contacted many different groups throughout the organization, often were consumed by the process itself. Then, at the end of the year, with all the recommendations in hand, the design committee faced the daunting task of selling them to the rest of the company, Not surprisingly, committee members often burned out on the whole process long before any of the recommended changes had a chance to cascade throughout the organization. The drawbacks of the design-committee intervention started STS people thinking in a new direction: Get the "whole system" in a room together and do a year's worth of work in an intense, three day session. Working with large groups is not a concept that just recently fell off the truck, says Bob Rehm, a consultant in Boulder, CO, who has been involved with STS and critical mass events for many years. Fred Emery was doing large-group work in the late 1960s, says Rehm, using a technique called a search conference. An Empowered Database OK, suspend your disbelief for a minute. If you sit around thinking about organization wide interventions, like a lot of OD professionals do, it makes a certain amount of sense to get a big group involved in a company's change. It's much easier to talk about whole systems when the whole system, or a significant part of it, is present. So, what are the characteristics of critical mass events? That's a little hard to nail down because the methods are so diverse, and different interventions fit with different objectives. For example, an 'open-space' meeting has no agenda, no limit on participants, and no real guest list; at the other extreme, a future-search conference has agendas, exercises, and lots of up-front planning. The conference-model approach can be used for everything from visioning to designing a new organization; a work-redesign event might tackle only one aspect of a production problem. Some methods require table groups-groups of eight to 10 gathered around a circular table - while others have no tables at all. Some have limits on how many people can or should participate; other approaches may involve thousands of people in a single event. The common denominators among all of these varieties of critical mass events are participation, information-sharing, finding common ground, developing action plans, and implementing change quickly. Participation is key because it can change the dynamic of a whole organization. For years, companies have tried to empower workers with varying degrees of success. Critical mass events also attempt to get employees involved and empowered, but only as a side effect. The real objective is to change the organization for the better; getting everyone involved is a means to that end. And that makes sense. If the decision to change a company is a mandate from the top, it usually generates resistance, cynicism or apathy among employees. If, however, front-line workers labor alongside executives and managers to build the new organization, buy-in is a likely byproduct. In critical mass events that rely on table groups, the tables tend to be mix-and-match collections. One group might consist of two managers from different divisions, an executive from a third division, and five employees from various areas. For example, Mobil Oil's Gulf of Mexico operation recently held a large-group event in New Orleans that involved more than 400 employees. The objective was to discuss how to turn Mobil into a high-performance organization. At this meeting, roustabouts who work on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico sat in table groups with executives and managers. This was probably the first time these disparate individuals have been in the same room, much less discussed business concerns, says Marleah Rogers, employee-relations leader with Mobil's Gulf of Mexico operation in New Orleans. "We like to get [input from the] roustabouts on up because this is about all of us creating our future together," she says. According to Robert Jacobs, a partner with Five Oceans Consulting in Arm Arbor, MI, and author of the book Real Time Strategic Change, another important part of the critical mass equation is a common database of information. During these large-group meetings, you don't have to go outside the room to get the information you need to make a decision. Every viewpoint and area of expertise, from front-line worker to supplier to customer to executive to stockholder, is present. Sometimes if it's impossible to get representatives of all the groups in the room, people role-play stakeholders. Bill Fitzgerald, vice president of organizational development and human resources for Comstock Michigan Fruit, a Rochester, NY, division of Curtis Bums Foods, tells of a meeting in which one individual played the role of a company bond-holder (the company had recently sold bonds to help finance an acquisition). The faux bondholder got up and said, "I'm 32. 1 drive a Porsche. I have three goals right now - to make money, to make money, and to make money. I don't care about your jobs. I don't care about your families. I care about my 12 ½ percent And you owe that to me twice a year on this date." That, says Fitzgerald, brought home the reality of the situation to the people in the room in a way that just explaining it couldn't. It's not just information from the outside that is shared in a critical mass event. Because such a mixed bag of functions and levels are represented in table groups, some surprising conversations occur among people who never had reason to talk before. There's often quite a bit of laughter when front-line people report to the group what's actually going on with customers or on the shop floor, Passmore says. He's even seen a case in which managers and executives tried to convince front-line workers that they weren't actually seeing what they were seeing. There was a real sense, says Passmore, that "that can't possibly be happening here." 'And The Scales Fell From Their Eyes....' Once this information exchange and participation gets started, a miracle happens. No, not really. But a certain energy is generated, although everyone who led or participated in these meetings has a difficult time describing it. Consultant Jacobs calls it alignment, the point at which people begin to see how the organization fits together as a whole system. In his book Discovering Common Ground, Marvin Weisbord describes this alignment as - you guessed it - common ground. Sandra Janoff, co-director of SearchNet, a non-profit group dedicated to furthering future-search methods, and partner in Future Search Associates, a consulting firm in Philadelphia, works closely with Weisbord on future-search conferences. These events are designed to help organizations collaborate at all levels to find an ideal future and then aim for that future. Janoff says she and Weisbord try to develop "a group that's able to hold on to its differences, work in spite of differences, and choose to go forward on similarities. "That's the key shift that happens in our work." The energy, as Janoff describes it, becomes transformative when the group decides to work beyond intractable issues toward a more ideal common future. Janoff says she's never facilitated a future-search conference in which the group failed to find this common ground. In one case, she and Weisbord were working with a group composed of managers, union members, union negotiators, internal customers, shop stewards and upper managers. The tension in the room was palpable. But after the group established what it couldn't talk about, Janoff says, it went forward and found some common ground. Kathleen Dannemiller, president emeritus of Dannemiller Tyson Associates, a large-scale meeting consulting firm in Ann Arbor, MI, describes this alignment as "one brain, one heart" But, she adds, it's a very complex union of brain and heart that encompasses a wide array of individuals who have joined together for a common purpose. That's all well and good, but what's to stop a critical mass event from turning into a warm, fuzzy, brainstorming session - one of those affairs where everyone leaves feeling as if they've just had a big oriental dinner, filled up temporarily but hungry again in two hours? One of the most significant aspects of these large-group interventions is the final action plans built into all of the models. Action planning means that Participants do more than just talk about change: 'We must commit to the change in concrete and Practical ways. Birgitt Bolton is the executive director of Wesley Urban Ministries, a large social service organization in Hamilton, Ontario. She facilitates Open-Space meetings both for Wesley and as a consultant to private companies. She recently held an open-space meeting on the issue of creating a community health center. Participants included government ministers and the margizinalized people who would be served by the center. Wesley already had the $750,000 grant to build the facility: it remained to work out the specifics. When it came to action planning, the homeless people in the meeting "were willing to take responsibility for this health center, against what everyone has told me," says Bolton. The marginalized people on the steering committee, for example, will elect the board of governors for the health center and get the paperwork together so the center can be incorporated. As customers of the health center, the homeless determined that the standard package of medical care was inappropriate. Instead, explains Bolton, they decided the center should stress psychological care, emotional counseling, dentistry and foot care. At the end of three days, the group had appointed 21 people to a steering committee that would determine what kind of services the health center would provide. If the event is just about brainstorming, the change process comes to a grinding halt, warns Bolton. "But when you have to ask yourself if you'll put your name on the bottom line and take responsibility," she says, the large-group meeting becomes meaningful. Action planning is the beginning of real change in the organization, says author Jacobs. When people commit to new ways of working, they are already starting to work in a different way. For example, barriers that are broken down between departments at the event often stay down when people get back to work. Consequently, he argues, transferring what happened in the event back to the job is not so big a leap because a significant proportion of the organization has already touched, seen and participated in a new way of working. That makes transfer and buy-in all the easier. The action planning that occurs in large-group meetings is not your typical end-of-the-training-session variety: Everyone who can make a decision is in the room; no one needs to wait for a decision "from above" to implement a plan. Moreover, if someone tries to stall the process by pleading that more information is needed, it is quite likely the holder of that information is also present. That's why it's important to get as many stakeholders as possible to attend the event. Even board members should be included in a critical mass event. One source, who prefers anonymity, relates an incident that demonstrates why: At one organization, the board of directors was not as involved as it should have been, either in designing or participating in the large-group meeting. At the end of the event, after the action plans had been agreed to and the group had just given the executives a standing ovation, one of the board members stood to announce that "the iron boot of the board will be on the neck of the executives to make sure they carry this through." So the group had one brain, one heart and one iron boot. The incident showed the manager who shared this story that the board really didn't get it. The director's threat didn't destroy the community spirit that had been built, but it certainly shattered the mood. How Much Structure Is Enough? While critical mass events have a basic philosophy in common, the various methods look dramatically different. The most obvious differences lies in the structure. Open-space meetings, for example, have very little structure, while Dannemiller's large-scale interactive process involves a lot of up-front work, including lists of who should attend, specific issues that will be dealt with, and a detailed agenda. Regardless of the critical mass method to be employed, many consultants begin by choosing a task force of cross-functional employees to plan the event-just as they would for a traditional OD effort. Instead of spending a year gathering information, these planning committees simply plan the event, making sure the right people will attend and setting up the agenda and activities. Often another team handles logistics, seeing to it that handouts, pens, flip charts, sound systems, microphones and meal orders are in place. This team's job is to ensure that the meeting remains distraction-free. Comstock's Fitzgerald contends that the logistics team is the backbone of the event; without good logistics, the meeting can easily get bogged down. The planning committee should be a microcosm of the group that will attend the event, says Dannemiller. Dannemiller asserts that once she has a microcosm of any large group, she can plan a critical mass event that will work for the whole group, no matter how large. When Ford Motor Co. was planning to open its Mustang plant in 1993, it held a critical mass event for a group of 2,400 people in four separate ballrooms. Each ballroom had two facilitators, but it all occurred simultaneously, with Dannemiller coordinating the whole thing. Still more structured is the conference model, created by Dick Axelrod, a partner in the Axelrod Group Inc., a consulting firm in Wilmette, IL. This conference model, a comprehensive large-scale intervention, consists of four separate events, which last from two to three days with a month between each event. The first conference is a vision quest, which focuses on creating an organization's direction for the future. Next is the customer/supplier conference, which examines the outside forces that will shape the direction of the company The third conference is a technical meeting, which concentrates on the processes used to create the company's products or services. The final meeting is the design conference, in which the new organization is designed and action plans are developed. Each conference has a detailed agenda, group exercises, scheduled presentations, and discussion time for table groups. In some cases, there is a fifth implementation conference. Even in a very structured event, however, there has to be some freedom to change direction. "We never have a completely open slate," says Axelrod, "[but] the outcome really has to be in question." On the opposite end of the structure spectrum is the open-space meeting, invented by Harrison Owen, president of H. H. Owen and Co., a consulting company in Potomac, MD. Open-space meetings have no up-front planning, no agenda, no tables, and only a few rules. It is Owen's contention that organizations tend to be too structured and people try to control things too much. So his open-space events take the opposite tack: The large group is assembled in a room with a bunch of flip charts. Anyone who wants to talk about any aspect of the company can sponsor a discussion by writing the subject on a flip chart and gathering others who want to talk about it. Owen's meetings are governed by two sets of guidelines: the law of two feet and the four principles of open-space meetings. The law of two feet simply states that anyone who is bored, not learning or not contributing to a particular discussion is honor-bound to use her two feet to walk out of the meeting or discussion. This law is designed to stress the voluntary nature of the event. Owen's four principles are more Zen-like, but equally straightforward: # 1.Whoever comes is the right person. # 2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. # 3. Whenever it starts is the right time. # 4. When it's over, it's over. Owen's primary caveat to anyone who wants to hold an open-space meeting-. "It won't work if anyone thinks they are going to control the outcome." The Open-Space model taps into the informal ways in which companies really operate, he says. "If we actually did business the way we say we do business." he contends, "we'd be out of business." Instead, Open Space recognizes that the employees who do the work often get the job done by circumventing the structure instead of following the formal dictates of management. Still, Owen says, Open-Space meetings are not as chaotic as the press has portrayed them. A structure emerges as the meeting progresses: but rather than being imposed by those at the top of the organization, it comes from all the participants at the event. "When the space is safe and the direction is clear and the people are present, structure happens," says Owen. Form Follows Function Just as the structures of critical mass events vary so do the objectives they are designed to accomplish. Axelrod's conference model. for example, is used to redesign every aspect to a company's operations. A future-search conference helps an organization's stakeholders create a shared future vision and strategic-action plans. Consultant Rehm uses participative work redesign, another method developed by Fred Emery, to help companies rebuild the processes that are either interfering with their success or hampering future effectiveness. Dannemiller uses her method to help execute popular business solutions like total quality management and reengineering. Owen says that Open-Space meetings can do all of the above and more. Professor Bunker and her compatriot, Billie Alban, president of Alban and Williams Ltd., a consulting firm in Brookfield, CT, have become proselytizers of large-group interventions. They travel the world explaining these techniques and which methods are most effective for the objectives the organizer has in mind. Sometimes "none of the above" is the answer. Take, for example, the California government agency that decided to do a future-search conference to convince its suppliers to adopt ISO 9000 standards. The future-search method was not appropriate for the organization's objectives: the method is a way collaborate about the future of an organization, not to sell suppliers an idea. To their credit, explains Alban, the consultants involved said so. If you're considering a large-group intervention, pick your company's most important objectives as the focus, stress Alban and Bunker. The meetings are expensive to run. And keep in mind that if your corporate culture isn't participative, and likely never will be, a critical mass event will probably backfire. "Think about what the power structure of the organization is, and how much power management is genuinely willing to give away," says Bunker. Leaders It takes a special kind of facilitator to handle a group of 50 to 500 people. Most of the consultants and practitioners we spoke to stressed that the danger lies in over-facilitating, interfering with the small table groups when they don't really need help or direction. On the other hand, when 150 people start to head in a direction that won't yield positive results, it takes a strong facilitator to intercept them. At one of their workshops, Alban and Bunker asked their professional colleagues what characteristics were needed to say "no" to a group of 600 People. "They described it as chutzpah," says Bunker. "Or, in one case, one of our groups said, 'You've got to have ovaries.' " Other necessary qualities for large-group facilitators include a good sense of humor, stage presence. comfort in the face of conflict, and an ability to interact with an audience. Janoff would add another skill: The facilitator must be able to manage the anxiety of a group faced with so much information. "We pay attention when groups are getting into fights rather than dealing with the task, when groups are doing anything but facing the issue," she says. Owen sees his role as a facilitator of Open-Space meetings in more ethereal terms. In one case, he was doing a meeting with Sugar workers in Latin America who, in previous weeks, had held the plant manager and shop steward at machete point. "My job under those circumstances is to kind of hold the space, and everybody else's job is to get the job done,' says Owen. If he does it right, he explains, no one remembers who facilitated the meeting. In the case of the sugar workers, he says, all he did that was observable was sit beneath a tree and tip his sombrero from time to time. Both Owen and Bolton say they prepare for an Open-Space meeting by meditating. Courage And Commitment While critical mass events have been around for 20 years, we are only now seeing significant number of companies and communities using them. We are still learning how they work. A lot of questions still remain to be answered. For example, how do create a the environment for participants, but still use the anxious energy of the group to keep people from sitting on their hands? How do you balance the structure and chaos of the event so you get results without forcing your solutions down the throats of the participants? And once you get everyone in the room participating and taking responsibility, how do you deal with issues of workplace democracy and authority? We do know that the decision to use a large-scale intervention requires a certain kind of leadership. "It is a very courageous thing for the leaders to do," Mobil's Rogers says. "You either do this really well and commit to radically changing your own behavior or you do damage to your organization. You'd better be committed going into it. There are no two ways about that." Yet more and more leaders seem willing to make that commitment. Why? Perhaps because if critical mass interventions work their magic, say proponents, organizations see results immediately, not a year down the road. Rogers sums it up: "You are making decisions right there in the room. You're changing behaviors right there in the room. You're using your processes right there in the room. So people who are part of that experience will never be the same. And that's fundamental change." We could lump large-scale interventions under one big category and just leave it at that. But if you're contemplating a critical mass event for your organization, you might find it helpful to know the labels and the players involved. Here are the primary practitioners of the most popular variations on the theme: Future-Search Conferences The goal in these meetings is to help the organization find an ideal future and aim for it. The event is typically scheduled for 16 hours over three days. The ideal size is 64 people (eight tables with eight participants at each). Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, partners in the consulting firm Future Search Associates in Philadelphia, are the recognized experts in this method. It closely resembles the search conference invented by Eric Trist and Fred Emery. Emery's wife, Merrelyn Emery, who is on the faculty of the Australian National University in Canberra, developed the methodology over the last 30 years and runs search conferences all over the world. Conference Model. This comprehensive system involves up to four separate two- or three-day events. It is used to accomplish a top-to-bottom redesign of an organization and includes a customer/supplier conference, a vision conference (sometimes using future-search methodology), a technical conference, and a design conference. Dick Axelrod, a partner in the Axelrod Group Inc., a consulting firm in Wilmette, IL, created this system. The method can be reconfigured to fit the needs of an organization, he says, so you don't necessarily have to go through the 'whole treatment'. Large-Scale Interactive Process. Kathleen Dannemiller, president emeritus of Dannemiller Tyson Associates, a consulting firm in Ann Arbor, MI, uses this method to implement organization-wide changes. This intervention, like many others, involves mix-and-match table groups of eight to 10 people and usually lasts three days. Dannemiller recommends using it with groups of up to 600 participants, although she has used it with much larger groups. Real-Time Strategic Change. This approach grew out of Dannemiller's work in large-group interventions and is likewise used to implement organization-wide change. It was developed by Robert "Jake" Jacobs, a partner with Five Oceans Consulting in Ann Arbor, MI, and author of the book Real Time Strategic Change, who worked with Dannemiller's firm for many years. The event follows a similar trajectory as the Dannemiller intervention, but Jacob stresses that this is an approach to work, rather than just an event. The event, he says, is just the beginning of a process that changes the way an organization works. Participative Work Redesign. Another innovation from Fred Emery, this one emphasizes a democratic approach to job design. The people who do the work are in the best position to determine how it should be done, explains Robert Rehm, a consultant in Boulder, CO, who works with Fred and Merrelyn Emery. This too involves table groups of eight to 10, a three-day event, and is suitable for groups of 30 to 40 participants, rather than hundreds. It often follows a search conference; the vision for the future of the organization is established before this event occurs. Open-Space Meetings. This is the least structured event. Its creator, Harrison Owen, president of H. H. Owen and Co., a consulting company in Potomac, MD, calls it a technique for holding better meetings, not just large-group events. The group gathers, a blank page on the wall constitutes the agenda, and participants are encouraged to sponsor their own discussions by writing the title of their "session" on one of the many flip charts in the room. People then gravitate to the topic of their choice. The strengths of this method lie in the safety and openness of the space created for the discussion, says its creator. The bane of Open Space: someone who tries to control the meeting or take it to a predetermined outcome. - B.F. The Triple 7 One of the most remarkable examples of large-group intervention is embodied in Boeing's newest airliner, the 777. Most applications of the critical mass idea are events - meetings that kick-start significant changes in an organization. Boeing, however, applied these same methods to a way of working: Large groups used the techniques learned in the initial events as a way to manage meetings. Some of the meetings involved 500 to 5,000 participants. The effort lasted four years and was the single largest product-development project in the United States in this decade, says Don Krebs, director of organization development for Boeing Commercial at its headquarters in Seattle. Krebs, the primary consultant on the project adapted for Boeing's needs what he had learned about large-scale meetings from Kathleen Dannemiller, president emeritus of Dannemiller Tyson Associates, an Ann Arbor, MI, consulting firm. He had significant support from Phil Condit who was in charge of the Triple-7 project until he was promoted to his current position as president of Boeing. "I'm delighted with what was accomplished," says Condit. 'It was very definitely a learning experience. We were learning as we went' He adds candidly that he and Krebs invented much of the process they used on the fly (no pun intended). Condit had been the chief designer on Boeing's 757 project and he wanted to try something new with the Triple-7 project, explains Krebs. 'He wanted to get everybody on board, get them involved in the process throughout the design-and-build cycle, get feedback on how we were doing, and build a different kind of community." A tall order? Yes, but one that meshed with the strengths of critical mass events. The method was well-suited to Boeing's needs because many of the Triple-7 working groups were large. A gathering of just the top managers in a team called the Oxbow Group, for example, included some 80 people. The Oxbow Group met about every six weeks. Managers and directors from engineering, manufacturing, finance, personnel and tooling gathered to solve problems and talk out issues. Condit set the stage for every meeting by delivering a 20-minute "View From the Bridge" presentation, an overview of the progress of the project that included an update on competitors, customer orders, and significant outside events that might have an impact on Boeing's work. Table groups then discussed the new information and asked clarifying questions of Condit. The first hour of the five-hour meeting was reserved for this information exchange, with a break built into the agenda so that participants could have informal discussions before they reassembled into the larger group. The rest of the meeting homed in on one or two issues, and possible solutions to the problem that had surfaced were batted among the table groups and the large group. One stubborn question that came up during three different meetings was how to best organize the Design-Build Teams (DBTs). There were 220 of these DBTs, with 20 to 60 people on each team. The Oxbow Group wrestled with the question of who would lead these teams: Someone from manufacturing or someone from engineering? The group eventually arrived at the only solution that made sense, says Krebs: The teams would have co-leaders, one from each discipline. And, because everyone who needed to agree to this solution was in the room, the Oxbow Group could make the decision at the meeting. After a year of these meetings, says Krebs, he and the group decided that formal action planning at the end of each meeting, a veritable staple of critical mass events, wasn't necessary. The combination of Boeing's can-do culture and the five-year deadline on the Triple 7 made action planning superfluous. Once a decision was made in the meeting, says Krebs, "these guys knew how to take the ideas and put them in place.' Getting a bunch of manufacturing and engineering professionals to act on a decision has never been a problem at Boeing, he says. An indication of how critical mass events can speed up a process: When the whole Boeing organization went through a quality-improvement program, Triple-7 employees completed the program in just two days of meetings. Every other group at Boeing required four days. Large-group work wasn't the only innovation that brought the 777 to fruition. Condit also used concurrent engineering principles, which call for a mix of everyone who will be involved with a product to have a hand in the design right up front. For the first time at Boeing, all the design work was done on 3-D mock-ups using computer-aided design (CAD) software; no paper drawings were produced. Every group that joined the project attended a large-scale meeting, an orientation to this new way of working. Each session was led by a vice president of the company, which was also a change from the norm. In the past, says Krebs, people could work for Boeing for 20 or 30 years without ever talking to a vice president After successfully using critical mass methods to design and build the Triple 7 Condit says he would like to see the rest of Boeing begin to apply them as well. He wants to keep improving the process and use it to break down more functional barriers, share more information, and get customers more involved in product development. For Further Reading Discovering
Common Ground, by Marvin Weisbord and 35 international co-authors,
Berrett-Kohler Publishers, San Francisco, 1992.
Real Time Strategic Change, by Robert Jacobs, Berrett-Kohler Publishers, San Francisco, 1994. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Special Issue, December 1992, Volume 28, No. 4, Sage Periodicals Press, Newbury Park, C.A, (805) 499-0721, Ext. 211. Large Group Interventions for Organizational Change: Concepts, Methods and Cases, compiled and edited by Tom Chase. "Readings" from a March 1995 meeting in Dallas sponsored by the OD Network. Contact: Tom Chase, OD Network, Northwood, NH, (603) 942-8189. Tales from Open Space, edited by Harrison Owen, Abbott Publishing, Potomac, MD, 1995. Future Search, by Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, Berrett-Kohler Publishers, San Francisco, 1995. |
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