Excerpt from BOSS Magazine - February 2008, page 63

Eugene Fernandez, Program Director
Mt Eliza Executive Education
Melbourne Business School

"MY FIELD involves working with leaders and groups to embed sustainable change and learning within organizations. Most training and change interventions are focused on increasing the knowledge and understanding of the individuals in isolation from the context and the group. In many the focus is on the teacher or expert injecting the learner with a new vision in the hope that this will create change. In such a model most learning is contained (competency driven) and controlled (assessment/qualification driven), with an emphasis on competition and individual achievement. Usually, once the indenture is complete the learner is cast adrift in a world mired in complexity.

What I have labelled Mode 4 learning looks at the whole system, and encourages people to co-operate and deal with more complex questions. It draws on the experience of experts, but encourages people to question that expertise and to reflect on it.

Mode 4’s focus is on liberating the individual, the organization and the system from the limitations of current models, practices and power structures. It enables groups to identify how they and others have constructed their own social morays, codes, unconscious norms, work practices, and ways of engaging with each other and the external world.

Groups research ways of dealing with a real organisational issue while at the same time looking at their inner functioning as a group. They use a model called DOOR - which stands for design, operate, observe and reflect – to advance the issue being researched. DOOR is an iterative model that gets the group and the individual to balance doing with thinking.

Ultimately, Mode 4 may result in real change. It is not for every organization but increasingly many – among them Thomas Cook, Masterfoods and Bunnings – are choosing."