Page 133 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

102 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

Authenticity of the work also played a pivotal role. Because many par-
ticipants viewed this work as having been completed by another committee
several years ago, certain participants believed that the DLIT group was
formed as a political tool to demonstrate cross-functional participation to
the rest of the institution, which would then possibly lead toward institu-
tional acceptance. This perception negatively affected participation rates
and participants’ capacity for thinking of positive futures for distance
learning. Many times, organizations convene groups to institutionalize
strategies that have been already realized through emergent experience
or prior strategy development activities. This typically is visible to par-
ticipants and tends to disenfranchise them from the strategy experience
(Mintzberg, 1994).
Another overriding dynamic visible at this time was the concept of the
separation between strategic thinking and strategic planning. Mintzberg
(1994) argued for a clear separation between the creation of strategic ideas
and the institutionalization of those ideas into organizational process. He
suggested that organizations will typically develop their strategies by going
immediately to the implementation work, not taking the time to first work
through strategic thinking. However, in the real world environment of this
community college’s strategy work, this clear delineation was not pres-
ent. The strategy work was planned and architected to be respectful of this
demarcation. The rules of engagement were quite explicit, and participants
were frequently reminded to hold back from planning work whenever it did
surface in either the physical meeting room or the online space.
This created more tension in the system as participants began to focus
more on the question of why action could not be taken or began to view
the thinking and conceptual work as an avoidance or getting what they
referred to as the “real work” done, as evidenced by this comment of one
of the participants during an interview session:

The whole strategic planning thing, and trying to get people to participate, good
luck, this is a major challenge before us. Yes, and the long term is here. This is
what we are doing now. I forgot, the other day we were counting to see how we
are going to proctor exams, which is going to be a nightmare. I think in the
business division we have about 1,600 people in online classes. You need to deal
with it now. All this conceptual stuff is nice, but hum. I was waiting to see what
would happen. I guess I am waiting for direction and I haven’t seen much. I need
someone to tell me or e-mail me when are my final exams going to be? I have
people all over the world who are supposed to be proctoring. We don’t have a
framework for that and that is immediate, between now and December 4th. The
educational verbiage is good and fine, but it doesn’t help us on a daily basis. Just
like all the educational verbiage that goes on around here. That doesn’t affect us.