In the video “the learning organization,” Peter Senge discourses on the importance of an organization’s ability to work at its best by bringing together the various contributions of the members of the team. Senge proposes that an organization needs to encourage its members to shift from traditional thinking and challenge new boundaries so they can improve themselves from within through diverse experiences. When people work in teams, he proposes, they should develop a sense of candidness that allows them to be open and criticize each other. He is especially concerned with the ability of leaders to positively take criticism on their leadership styles, but also be capable of criticizing themselves.
The central issue in the lecture is the capacity of the members or an organization to reflect on various issues, and this is something that could greatly benefit the Dubai police force. Senge suggests that an organization should practice reflection so that it can avoid being fixated with treating symptoms and work on reflecting on the bigger picture to discern the underlying causes of the problem. Take, for example, the problem of traffic congestion in the city; the police officers are constantly engaged in dealing with the traffic snarl-ups and cases of road rage because there are simply too many vehicles on the road.
However, while towing cars and issue parking tickets solves the problem, in the end, the force would benefit from reflecting on how to solve the problem in the end. A possible solution could be cooperation with the city authorities to increase the parking fees or prevent personal vehicles from accessing some parts of the city. Nevertheless, Dubai law enforcement seems to have adopted some of the proposals suggested in the video, although this may have been done independently. For example, outside the city, there are limits due to the excellent roads and the many wealthy inhabitants who own supercars, there have been many issues of speed-related accidents.
The police force has moved to tackle this problem in a very creative and non-traditional way that reflects the spirit of challenging traditions, as suggested by Senge. They procured supercars for the traffic patrol officers, making Dubai the only place in the world where police drive around in official and Marked Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and other high-end supercars. As a result, unlike other countries where the police will have to rarely on-air support or roadblocks to apprehend speeding motorists, in Dubai, they are literary given a run for their money. This is a case of the police reflecting on the speeding problem and realizing that the only way it can be solved in the long term is to ensure that the offenders are made aware that they no longer have the monopoly of fast cars. Senge further suggests that an organization should have a clear image of what they want to achieve in the end to motivate their staff.
The Dubai police force will have to do more than get a few fast cars on the road to enhance such an image; to do this, the channels of communication between the superiors and juniors will need to be more accessible from down up. In many police and military organizations, there is often poor communication because of the strict hierarchical bureaucracies, and this tends to cloud the possibilities of a shared vision as the lower and higher ranks have radically different perspectives.