Preface
This document is a learning history of collaborative efforts undertaken by AutoCo and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management Center for Organizational Learning. These efforts took place between 1991 and 1994 on the Epsilon vehicle development program. The project's objective was: To develop and study learning capabilities in a product development team of more than 300 people, while having a positive impact on business results. The purpose of this document is to report on those efforts and create materials from which other interested teams might learn.The name of the company, AutoCo, is a pseudonym for an automobile company. Epsilon is also a fictional project name, as are all other formal names used in this document. People in the learning history are identified only by their titles. The company, program, and people are disguised to provide anonymity, protect AutoCo's need for confidentiality, minimize distraction and help the reader to focus his or her attention on the universal themes herein.
This document was written by a small "learning historian" team composed of people from AutoCo and from MIT. We developed the learning history in the hope that it could help other teams and individuals at AutoCo, and other companies, to benefit from this program's experience.
A learning history is a new format for presenting the story of a project. It is designed to portray the project as participants experienced it, and to invite readers to draw their own conclusions. In this history we make the "sense-making process" visible -- we report not just what people did, but how they interpreted events around them and what reasoning led to their decisions. To gather this information, we interviewed over fifty individuals. The interviewees included engineers, process leaders, content leaders (see Sidebar: "Content leaders" and "process leaders" page ), and managers at all levels and functions within the Epsilon team, along with suppliers, engineers from other functions, senior AutoCo management, and other key figures at AutoCo. We also reviewed transcripts of meetings, interviews, program documents, and speeches given by key participants during the program. People's perspectives and attitudes varied; we have made an explicit effort to include as wide a range of points of view as possible. [1]
The value of this document depends on the conversation it generates: How can AutoCo's Epsilon experience provide a useful example for your team or project? We ask readers to suspend their assumptions -- about automobile companies, management, engineering, and all other aspects of vehicle production -- so that they can focus on what happened, how people described events, how they felt and what their attributions were.
The learning history report starts with an overview, and then there is a chapter describing the origins of the Epsilon learning effort. (The critical events and observable measures which provide data on how the Epsilon program progressed, "Noticeable Results" are listed at the end of this document, on page .) The subsequent sections represent themes -- key concepts which represent the underlying significance of this project, and which emerged from a close reading and examination of the materials collected in our research. We present each of these themes in the form of a "jointly-told tale," separating the researchers' comments from participants' narrative. There are four different types of material in these "jointly-told tales:"
- The right-hand column of text, within each theme, tells the story in the
words of key participants, taken directly from the "primary data" of
interviews, speeches and meetings. (Each participant has seen, and approved,
his or her quotations.)
- The left-hand column of text provides interpretive and synthesizing
material:
questions, analysis, generalizations, and implications, developed by the
learning historians to help readers begin to apply the material to their own
situation.
- There are also full-column passages which introduce topics, provide context,
and set the stage.
- Finally, boxed "sidebars" provide background information on methods, tools
and key topics, referred to in the text, which would otherwise distract you
from the narrative.
-- AutoCo Epsilon Learning History Team
Five internal AutoCo
team members
George Roth & Art Kleiner
Footnotes
The learning history team used a grounded theory, qualitative data analysis methodology to discern key concepts and patterns. See Strauss, 1987, Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists; Corbin and Strauss, 1990, Basics of Qualitative Research; Miles and Huberman, 1994, Qualitative Data Analysis, and Glaser and Strauss, 1967, The Discovery of Grounded Theory. In analyzing of large quantities of qualitative data with a team of inside and outside learning historians, we have found it helpful to think in terms of meeting three "imperatives" -- research (loyalty to the "data"), mythic (loyalty to the "story"), and pragmatic (loyalty to the audience's needs). Each of these imperatives represents a set of "pure" priorities -- all important, and all in contention with each other. They can't be approached simultaneously. They are attended to in sequence, but there must be deliberate, balanced consideration of all three, in every phase of a learning history effort. [Back]
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