Organizational Development must include “people development”.

People development necessarily means changes to people’s mental models.

One of the most reliable and beneficial ways to change people’s mental models in an organization is to broadly increase strong shared understanding of organizational operations and subjective views of them.

The ActionMap method and software application’s goal is to:

– rapidly created strong shared understanding among stakeholders
– of operational processes and plans,
– and each others’ tasks, values and ideas in those processes and plans,
– all supported by high quality work products, 
– which can be even more broadly shared.

The benefits of this increased strong shared understanding include:

For staff:

– Greater understanding of overall organizational value production and purpose (believing)
– Greater understanding of their role and contribution to organization value production (ability to assess job security)
– Greater sense of belonging (by seeing their work as part of whole)
– Greater ability to contribute their ideas, due to seeing the whole operation (ownership and personal fulfillment)
– Greater empathy with their colleagues, from understanding their tasks, goals, issues and ideas
– Greater ability to coordinate with their colleagues and with other departments
– Greater ability to see development paths within the organization (becoming)
– Greater sense of being respected by management, for being trusted with the information
– Greater bandwidth for coaching, using detailed models of job functions (see actionmap.org/jobmaps)
– More accurate training, from detailed job maps
– Greater ability to receive recognition and reward for actual work
– Less dependency on physical presence for oversight
– Direct increased professional capacity from having broader knowledge of business operations in general
– Erasure of “hiding” and “hoarding”

For managers:

– Distribution of knowledge which reduces the need to micro-manage
– More effective performance coaching (see actionmap.org/jobmaps)
– Less stress from relieving the sense of needing to know everything about every job
– Less need for physical presence of staff (job maps)
– All the productivity benefits from the benefits for staff

 For leadership:

– All the productivity benefits from the benefits to staff and management
– Greater ability to communicate vision, mission and strategy
– Greater ability to re-organize resources to a changing environment

Other aspects of shared understanding

Such shared understanding is often taken for granted, that is, assumed to exist where it does not, and the strength of shared understanding is often over-estimated. 

 And shared understanding is often impaired by the pervasive organizational behavior of “hiding”, that is not wanting to have one’s work exposed for fear of micro-management or negative performance evaluations.

In addition, most organizational process knowledge is “personal and tacit”. ActionMap specifically translates that knowledge into “explicit and shared”. This unlocks a large otherwise difficult-to-access resource for the organization.