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I experienced a great OU Res-School at Lane End Conference Centre, Buckinghamshire, over the weekend just gone. I caught-up with fellow B830 tutor group members and some previous module colleagues. I was a member of Richard’s tutor group and also a member of a randomly generated learning set group formed to work through all our EBI proposals.

This EBI bullet-proofing process required us to map who we perceived as main EBI stakeholders on our power-interest matrices, define our EBI with the key issues outlined, and explore potential areas of theory relevant to our chosen EBIs.

I have decided to focus on a personal and very individually-focused EBI. I feel that I need to analyse my skill set, family commitments and employment opportunities in detail and work out the best career pathway for me. The best way of doing this, I believe, is to audit my work experience and competencies with a career coach. I have already had one session with David at C2 Careers and I already have some action points to work on following the meeting.

At the moment, I feel a bit like Dorothy traversing the Yellow Brick road to the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz. But instead of one road to Emerald City I have numerous choices and crossroads! I recognise that too much choice is a nice problem to have, but it complicates the process markedly. It doesn’t help when everyone has an opinion on the best way forward depending on their interest in my background and skillset.

Right now I feel that I need to follow a very divergent process in order to explore and narrow down my choices. I can see this process of self-discovery being extremely iterative as I work through my options and converge on a suitable pathway. I think I’m likely to follow the Buffalo 6-stage creative problem solving process during my EBI. I already feel that I am at stage two of the divergent fact-finding part: discovering suitable work structures and work opportunities for me following the completion of the OU MBA.

As part of my career audit I think that I can use the CV Plus method mentioned by Dealtry (2004) in his article The Savvy Learner. He believes that existing and prospective managers need to establish where they are in their learning-to-learn journey. He argues that CV Plus is a diagnostic self-appraisal tool that provides a framework of six core areas (Family, Location, Education, Work Experience, Social Activity, and Political Opinion) in order to help an individual work through their past learning experience and ideology. By mapping the learning progress from birth to adulthood, without thinking of a particular job or industry influencing the self-analysis, it is hoped that an individual can understand how they arrived at their present career path.

Dealtry believes it is important that an individual knows three main things about themselves in relation to their learning journey: their learning styles profile, learning diagnostics and team profile. He states that knowing the learning self leads to the recognition in differences in behaviour in those people we work with and live with. But this insight needs to be managed within the context of the influences that affect an individual’s learning development such as job context, culture, methods of learning etc and their own strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Fundamentally, Dealtry argues that an individual’s learning-to-learn journey is about managing all the stakeholders involved in the learning experience: the learner, the organisation, and also work colleagues, family and learning providers. We do not learn in a vacuum. Furthermore, how an individual shifts his/her world-view paradigm after discovering new ideas can markedly impact others and the way they are perceived by them. It’s important to recognise the changes in you and the positive or negative impact it may have on your personal or work relationships.

References:

Dealtry R. (2004) “Professional Practice: The Savvy Learner”, The Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol.16 no 1, Emerald Group Publishing, pp 101-109.

As part of the pre-residential school’s EBI preparatory work, I’ve been reading Ackerman and Eden’s (2003) speech on powerful and interested stakeholders. In general, they advise managers to assess in a group environment all stakeholders who they think could support or derail their strategic plans. By undertaking this type of analysis, it is suggested a more proactive style of stakeholder management could occur.

Ackerman and Eden (2003) advise using three techniques in the process of proactive stakeholder mapping. Firstly, create a power interest grid with all the perceived relevent stakeholders plotted on the matrix. Secondly, filter the list down to the most important few and create star diagrams to analyse the influential interconnectedness of your key stakeholders. Thirdly, role-think what these stakeholders may think of your strategic plans and develop ways of working with them to achieve your organisation’s strategic goals.

In principal, I think that analysing the environment your organisation operates in and the potential impact other organisations, not just competitors, can have on your strategic plans is obviously good practice. I recently experienced a situation whereby the Residents’ Association of a block of flats where I own a garage en bloc has decided to erect a keypad entry gate without prior warning or notification to non-flat owners.

This access point to the garages has been un-gated and open access since the estate was created in the late 1970s. My house deeds also state that I have access from this point of entry at any time despite not owning a flat in the block of flats where my en bloc garage is situated. My neighbour who owns the last garage, and is also a house owner, has had her garage damaged by the anchoring of the gate-frame to her property. She only found out a gate was being erected when she was parking her car in her garage the day they happened to be there working!

Obviously a lot of telephone calling has ensued over the last few weeks because of this poorly thought out action by the Residents’ Association. I was even visited by the Chairman herself, who crudely said that as they owned the freehold they could do what they liked and they were going to notify us after the keypad code went live anyway. When I pointed out that there were about 30 other householders that also own freehold garages on that plot and that they all needed to be notified of the code to the gate she seemed shocked.

Clearly at lot of aggravation could have been minimised if the Resident’s Association had taken the time to communicate to all garage owners that they wanted to erect a gate, and found out who legally owned them in the first place. A consultation process could have been followed and a case made to all the freehold garage owners about why it was necessary to erect a gate. This type of action would have avoided the clear breach of trust that has now occurred.

What I worry about, however, when undertaking stakeholder analysis, particularly as a group activity is that the wrong stakeholders are flagged up as the main “players”. Surely one would have to avoid groupthink and reinforcing each other’s biases during this process. In the OU B820 Strategy module, Monsanto, a US biotechnology firm, is used in unit four as a case study to illustrate just how badly you can underestimate the power of your stakeholders, despite undertaking this type of analysis. Monsanto believed that the clear benefits of GM crop-growing outweighed the negatives. Unfortunately the general public, the end customers and consumers of foodstuffs, made it quite clear that they would not buy or consume these products anytime soon in Europe.

No doubt the Monsanto case illustrates an extreme example of thinking that you have the main stakeholders on board (government, farmers and scientists in this case), but I think in this rapidly changing world, organisations need to anticipate changes in primary and secondary stakeholders regularly. The advent of social media can rapidly turn consumer sentiment against an organisation within a matter of days now; there is clearly little room to get things wrong.

References:

Ackerman, F. and Eden, C. (2003) “Powerful and Interested Stakeholders matter: Their Identification and Management”, Strathclyde University, Glasgow.

Open University, (2007) B820, Unit 4, “The Organisation: Stakeholders, Purpose and Responsibility” Milton Keynes, Open University, pp 29-31.