Another Story of the Use of the Organizational Journey Map:  (see the original post for the map)

The chief of a police force in a small city was eager to get participation of all officers in decision-making.  He had scheduled participatory meetings across the force.  His “command staff”, who were committed to the traditional hierarchy of a police force, were commanding those who reported to them not to show up at the participatory meetings. 

So the chief asked for facilitation of a meeting of himself and the command staff to examine the issue and bring the discussion out in the open.

So we did an Organizational Journey Map exercise with the command staff – about a dozen people, including the chief.  Each officer marked each of the 8 sections on his own copy of the map where he thought the organization was and where he wanted it to be in the future. Then they talked in pairs, not to change each others’ answers, but to clarify their understanding of what was described on the map, and check to make sure they had a shared understanding.  Then they all went to the wall map and anonymously added a dot in each of the 8 sectors to show where they thought the organization was.  The focused conversation on this map brought some clarity on where the organization was.  No surprises here:  there was a lot of consensus that they were at Level 1 (Hierarchical) or 2 (Institutional) in most of the sectors, typical of most police forces.   

Then they all anonymously added another colour of dot where they wanted the organization to be.

When they looked at this pattern, they were really surprised by the number of dots that showed up on Level 3, the Collaborative Organization.  For example, there were more dots than they expected in the Skills sector that they wanted “managing group conflict” and in the Mission Context sector, they wanted “Quality impact of the organization on society and communities”.  With the focused conversation, they noted this pattern and realized that as a group they wanted a collaborative organization more than they had realized. The irony in this was that immediately the command staff started to command those who reported to them (Level 1 behaviour) to attend the participatory meetings (Level 3 behaviour), but that was a first step in positive change for the organization.