Shifting the Australian Paradigm from the Management to the Development of People

Abstract

This paper presents a viewpoint adopting a practice-focused approach. The mind-shift argued here is one from management of people to the development of people in organizations. The new environment of innovation and fluid intelligence is explored where people may prefer not to be managed so much as to develop themselves. The paper examines the applications and relevance of the new anthropology of organizational community-building, and strategies for planned repositioning of European nations to the Australian situation such as enhancing a mobile and responsive workforce, capitalizing on the nano-age and active engagement with emerging economic superpowers. The relevance of changing industries and economic activities such as the nature of goods exchanged and global ways of doing business are explored, as well as business models for enhancing collaborative endeavors. Models and lessons for human resources and organizational leaders are presented that should add value to global business approaches.Keywords: Human resource development, People development, Culture change, Business model, Learning, Adaptive organizations The new anthropologyThe old anthropology was typically focused on functionalism and had its limitations couched in positivism. There are several key dimensions of the new anthropology. The first aspect subsumes functionalism but, like a new ethnography, engages in the philosophy of science's intellectual struggles and postmodernism embracing field work, phenomenology and breakthroughs in sensemaking. Klein and his associates refer to sensemaking as the deliberate effort to understand events, triggered by unexpected changes or other surprises that make people doubt their prior understanding. It is different from situation awareness (a state of knowledge) and situation assessment (making inferences from data). It is the process of constructing data, as well as constructing meaning (Klein, Phillips, Rall & Peluso, 2007, p. 113).This definition is consistent with the classical conception by Weick (1995;2001) in that sensemaking is about creating, interpreting, and discovering meanings to comprehend organizational, community and other contexts. Although making effective decisions is an important outcome of sensemaking, it is not necessarily about generating understanding in order to make rational decisions (Nathan, 2004). Sensemaking is about enabling people to integrate what is known and what is conjectured, to connect what is observed with what is inferred, to explain and to diagnose, to guide action before routines emerge from performing tasks, and to enrich existing routines (Klein et al., 2007). In short, sensemaking helps people identify and understand decision problems. Sensemaking informs whether there are decisions to be made and what those decisions might consist of (Weick, 2001).The second aspect of the new anthropology is a focus as a new science of human development. Thakadipuram (2010) calls for a deeper quest for meaning from different perspectives and wholeness in human resource devel...