[Arbitrarily linked to LO24759 by your host]
NOTE: I began writing this before Richard's notes on "Say What You Want"
and "Our LO Dialogue Here" but felt presumptuous. Now I feel better, so
here it is.
I'd like to look at Senge's model again, for a short refresher. If we
take Personal Mastery (self-realization, life-long learning,
spiritual/intellectual growth) and Share a Vision with our community, we
can begin to look at Mental Models (Paradigms, Ways of Seeing) in such a
constructive way that we begin to arrive at Team Learning (organizational
learning, synergy) in such a way that we finally understand the concept of
Systems Thinking.
What I am saying here is personal experience. It is NOT to be seen as
text book stuff, it is what I do, and how it works.
I am in the process of applying these thoughts on a broader organizational
level. They have worked well in a 500 person factory community and we are
now trying to take them farther to collections of factories (companies)
and collections of companies. It is not these concepts that are difficult
to integrate. It is their acceptance by all levels of an organization, be
it factory, village, university, or artist's colony, government, or
militia unit. Much has been written about "top leadership", "buy-in",
etc. Less has been written about our spheres of influence.
Organizational Learning, when, and if, it occurs, is the result of active
learning, action learning, active teaching, action teaching, and passive
resistance to resistance. The notion of passive resistance to resistance
takes time. It is a matter of going on with your life as a positive force
for change and making positive change until, finally, the resistors stop
resisting and begin to understand. I doesn't always work (remember
Ghandi?), but it is worth trying.
What then of At's "Essentialities" or Complexity theory? Or the dynamics
of a trout stream as I understand it? These are, for me, all a part of my
personal mastery, of the system of profound knowledge. The notion of
entropy production will not help me to teach an operator on the shop floor
how better to communicate with a curmudgeon of a supervisor, but it may
help me to explain it to a Physics professor. I don't often work with
those chaps, however. The trout stream, on the other hand, shows me (in
the same way that Covey uses the sowing/growing cycle) ways that I can
connect people to the systems in which they live by explaining systems
with which they are familiar but which do not frighten them. As much as I
like to present the Zen koans to young engineers and managers, I need a
lot more preparation with folks of my own generation who's last
educational experience was high school graduation thirty or more years
ago.
One of the things I remember about this list in it's early days was the
integrated approach of systems dynamics folks and organizational behaviour
folks. That seems to have disappeared or somehow or other changed to the
advantage of behaviour, personal mastery, and theoretical construction.
I, personally, need more stories from the organizationial side. At and
Andrew, as well as they write, both write from personal mastery, not team
learning perspectives. Many of those of us who are actively pursuing LOs
spend most of our time hear responding to the personal masters, not
dialoguing team learning, not sharing visions and values. I'd like to
hear both sides (success and failure) of the organizational learning
piece.
>From my own experience, I have related tales here in the past of one of my
favorite failures in which I became a focal point for a 'cult of
personality' which had the superficial appearance of organizational
learning, but which was not sustainable in my absence. Has this happened
to others?
An issue which sometimes bothers me is the assumption that the list itself
is the subject matter. Are we a learning organization, a community of
practice? Is this a forum for self-analysis? What are our expectations
of this forum? Where are we in the learning cycle? We don't use the
tools here, the left hand column, the ladder of inference, the learning
cycle check, all of the things which seem "intellectualy trivial" but
which are the essence of double loop learning.
John F. Zavacki
jzavacki@greenapple.com
OR (depending on my location in the space time continuum)
systhinc@msn.com
--"systhinc" <systhinc@email.msn.com>
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