The Doom Loop

Teaching Smart People How to Learn is an article I will continue to read for years to come.  Within the article is a concept called the Doom Loop.  The Doom Loop is something I have experienced both personally and professionally.  I have been the doom and gloom person who no one wants to talk to and have learned ways to self-correct these bad habits.  I have also learned how to immediately pull out of conversations with someone who zooms into doom.

According to Argyris, "people who have rarely experienced failure end up not knowing how to deal with it effectively (Argyris pp. 104)."  When some people are faced with a sudden situation they need to address, they don't act the way they think they act.  Most people are unaware of their actions and behaviors exhibited and need to pay attention to ways in which they can self-govern themselves.  Positive energy feeds positive energy and drama feeds drama.

Some people are driven internally by unrealistic high ideals of performance and pressure to be the best and most efficient contributors to their organizations and do not look at failure as an option.  This has been an extremely difficult thing for me to manage throughout my career and personal life.

I was raised in a home where we were expected to be the best at everything we did and may have blamed things on others if they did not turn out right.  I cannot believe I am saying this out loud.  I learned a long time ago how bad that is for any kind of relationship, whether personal or professional.  I still see some of these behaviors in family members but I catch myself most of the time.  The times I don't are the times I really should, like in times of high pressure for an immediate answer or in an extreme crisis.  However, please know that I have been told that I am someone who handles stress and emergency situations well with a calm and decisive demeanor.  It's those rare times, when someone pushes my buttons that I am referring to.  It's those individuals who seek excitement and drama and immediate satisfaction and gratification that put me in an uncomfortable zone.  Rather than walking away to diffuse the situation, sometimes I feel I have to fix it and oftentimes apply too much pressure to myself to have the perfect answer.  I need to practice thinking on my feet in these urgent situations so I can think clearly about what is at stake.  Sometimes I feel threatened so I act accordingly but I need to learn how to diffuse the threat and calm the person down.  Sometimes, if I don't give them immediate action, they act even more dramatic, which heightens my stressors.  I have to learn to excuse myself in these situations.

This class will help me to continue to develop the skills I need to get rid of the doom loop.  It is already helping me help fellow co-workers who suffer from the doom loop much more than I do.  One such colleague has taken 3 weeks to write her own performance evaluation.  I plan on working on this with her when we meet to discuss her evaluation and goals for next year.  Learning on the job is more than I had ever imagined.  Learning through this class just makes it all the better.  I look forward to learning how to reason more effectively.  Feel free to look at this explanation of The Doom Loop

References

Argyris, Chris. Teaching Smart People How to Learn. Harvard Business Review, pp. 99-109.
The Doom Loop

ORID 1 Learning Organizations

My name is Diane Fornieri, I serve as Chief of Staff, Board Secretary and Chief Communications Officer at a college on Long Island.  I have worked here for 21 years and have enjoyed every learning moment.  Since I have a very demanding job and am currently pursuing my master's degree in Organizational Leadership, I purposely carve out as much time as possible to spend with my family, including my grandson.  I enjoy reading, learning, decorating, the beach, walking, biking, and spending as much time outdoors as possible.  I also enjoy people; I find them fascinating.

I have learned many things since beginning this program in organizational leadership.  The reason I applied to this program was not only to enhance my leadership skills but also to take what I have learned throughout my professional career and apply real-world experiences to my coursework.  To date I am very satisfied with the ability to apply both sides of my learning experiences toward my degree.

Since I work in an academic institution, I feel I have an advantage since we typically operate in a learning environment.  However, this does not mean that we do everything right.  We have much to learn and much to implement. As a result of a college-wide listening tour in 2014, I am currently undergoing a change in how we communicate at the college.  This is good news but I am consistently running into various setbacks.  We have to retrain everyone with the onus that everyone is on board to a new and improved form of communicating.  Since not everyone needed to implement this new way of communicating does not directly report to me, I am challenged with figuring out how to manage this.  I have met with dozens of people on campus - all of whom can be considered stakeholders and whom I would call "champions," we need to begin meeting to put the plan(s) in place that I am still drafting.  I need them to help me build upon the goals and objectives with strategies to make things happen.  I have a limited staff to help me do this and am I need of a senior director to execute the plan(s).  All in good time, some would say, but the time lost by researching and interviewing people, is not totally lost as transfer of information is taking place but is also making the implementation lag a bit.  We need this process to be reliable and I constantly find myself learning new and more things that can build upon what we have already started. At some point, however, I need to get these plans and strategies approved so we can begin our work.

Organizational effectiveness is at the core of this communication initiative and we must be "adaptive, problem-solving, organic structures (Garvin 2000)" in order to be flexible enough to move through the ever changing internal and external forces that come at us every day.  Our president is a master at being flexible.  I have seen him move from Plan A to Plan Z within a matter of weeks on some very key strategic initiatives for the college and his ability to change with the tide is one of the best learning opportunities I have been exposed to while working with him all of these years.  It has led to the financial health and the sense of pride in our community that has come to be known as the culture of the college.

Questions we asked ourselves when we considered innovation and change as evidenced by the previously mentioned college-wide listening tour are outlined, below.  This list includes objectives, reflections, interpretations, and decisions that took place during and after the process:

O R I D

Objective questions:

What do we want to accomplish in making the college the best it can be?  We gathered all of its employees to ask this question in addition to the reflective questions, below.  Through this listening tour process, we were able to define what we want to accomplish and outlined these objectives in our 2020 strategic plan.

Reflective questions:

What is it that works currently?
Again, through the listening tour process, we discovered many systems and processes that work and some that do not.  Examples of this include our transparency of thoughts and ideas and our learning culture.

What would you keep?  We will keep those things that work, i.e., our mission outlines clearly who we are as an institution.

What is it we need to change?  One thing we discovered through this process was our lack of consistent communication.  A communications plan was developed as a result of this.

Interpretive questions:

What did we learn from the listening tour process?  We learned many things from this process, including how important it is to be heard.  Many individuals to this day thank us for allowing them to be a part of the process of improving our wonderful college.

What do we want to consider implementing?  Throughout this process, many suggestions were made on processes that needed to be developed to ensure the smooth operations of our institution.  Since that time, many processes have been put in place, including the formation of a process improvement culture and department that researches and manages process improvements.

Decision questions:

How could we implement proposed changes?  This is the tricky part.  Implementation of these changes has been spotty and stretched out over time due to competing priorities and other factors.

When do we implement various phases of implementation plans created?  Timelines continue to be drawn with resources attached to them.  This is still a work in progress.  A strategic plan, I have learned is a living document that continues to evolve.  It is not a one and done type of document.  This is why, I believe, it is so hard to implement the objectives outlined in the plan.

Who implements the plans?  The people who implement the plans are the various stakeholder(s) who own the plans.  This may be a group at times.

This process has been an eye-opener to everyone at the college but consumed a great amount of time and manpower to manage.  However, it was money well spent.  Everyone on campus felt listened to and empowered to contribute their opinions on what they think we should change.  In addition, some employees are being invited to join in on the planning and implementation phases of this project, which is also a wonderful learning experience for me as a leader and everyone else involved.  Here is where we transfer knowledge to each other and work together as members of a very large college-wide team; not just experts within our own departments.

References
https://hbr.org/1993/07/building-a-learning-organization