Portland, Oregon in October 2006
From STS Roundtable
October is Harvest time in Oregon, and our meeting took a thematic lead from this rich time of year. An opening reception featuring Oregon wines and snacks set the stage for our first day of learning in Portland. Our meeting opened with leading stakeholders from The Northwest Agriculture Consortium, a business-labor partnership whose purpose is to advance the sustainability of rural Oregon communities through the assessment and development of workforce and economic programs who shared their story with us. They had been working together to research competitive approaches to production and marketing of Oregon products, develop a viable and professional skill and career path for farm workers throughout the State, identify the educational and developmental needs of rural communities, professionalize farm work throughout the industry, and stabilize Latino workers and their rural-agricultural based communities. Our colleague, Kevin Boyle (Boyle and Associates, Corvallis, OR, USA) brought us this exciting case.
To help us maintain a global perspective, our colleague Thoralf Qvale led a session on the Regional Development of Value Creation. Building on his work in Telemark, Thoralf helped us look at networks of enterprises in Norway pursuing joint efforts to create desirable change there - local and regional unions/employers, municipal and regional administration/politicians and a number of agencies dedicated to economic development in the region pursuing joint efforts to create desirable change in Telemark. Their purpose is to promote enterprise and regional development through democratic processes, and Thoralf reported very interesting new patterns emerging over a spectrum of issues.
Oregon Health Sciences University’s redesign of hospital Patient Business Services was also a compelling story – with an STS design. In 2003 the Oregon Health Sciences University had decided to put a Request for Proposal (RFP) out to bid to subcontract the Patient Business Services. The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 328 decided to take a non-traditional approach to saving jobs. The employees and local management did an STS assessment of the existing workplace and used a new design to bid for their own work against the performance measurements in the RFP. They succeeded with amazing results- a fascinating case.
Kimball Fisher (The Fisher Group, Beaverton, OR, USA) led a session on “The Changing ‘T’ in STS”. Kimball noted that the ‘T’ in STS has significantly changed, creating enormous new challenges from production to communication technology. The implications range from work-life balance issues to effective global work team operations. The fact that technology exists to keep people connected raises provocative questions like: How do you best use both synchronous and asynchronous methods for group decision-making and problem solving? How do you balance work and personal life in a 24/7 technology environment? In this session, Kimball shared a recent “60 Minutes” broadcast focused on this issue and facilitated our discussion about the changing “T”. This was also the day in which we scheduled time for walking, thinking and reflecting – we used Kimball’s session to help stimulate the walking conversations!
In addition, we heard back from colleagues about the Initiatives they took on in Montreal. One team will helped us look to the future, presenting their work to date on reinventing STS for the 21st century. Another team reported on progress organizing the Roundtable to provide knowledge services (the “STS Academy”). We also built in solid chunks of time for group discussion and time to reflect on what we are learning, in response to member requests.
