Replying to LO24759 --
>There are no winners or losers in this change, and this is not a
>slap on the hand for anyone... I just think the balance has drifted
>a bit from where we want it to be. I have named At and Andrew
>specifically here, but my policies apply to all. To At and Andrew, I
>have enjoyed your contributions and have learned much from you...
>and I am one of those who finds your writing difficult. I do hope
>you'll stay with us!
>
> -=- Rick
> I am now receiving a few msgs a week saying, "The LO dialogue is too
> distant, too theoretical, and long winded; a few people are
> monopolizing the air-time! I want to read more practical pieces,
> about creating learning in organizations like mine, and it's harder
> to find them."
Dear Richard Karash, Dear Learners past, present and future (I think that
covers it;-)
Summary. A reply to the message above quoted. This will in length be
around 'middle' of my range, where it will be in 'depth' I cannot judge.
If I chose to disclose (I do not) an underground stream of e-mails to you
it would easily be demonstrated that Rick's letter to us all and kindly
sent separately in advance, perhaps to save some personal 'shock', to me
and maybe another who learns here that such an event was easily
discernible upon the' virtual horizon'... Hey, John Gunkler, come back....
you always wrote more than me...(I am smiling when I write that) you got
out just in time;-)
Rick, I am sure you know that I (and maybe more than a few others) are
familiar with and so still comfortable in the wisdom of TS Eliot that -
only those who are willing to risk going too far can possibly find out how
far to go. But maybe TS Eliot didn't say that first...I do know that
Martin Luther King said that, "All labour that uplifts humanity has
dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking
excellence." Your singular and painstaking contribution here to whatever
resolves into a future model, mode or system of LO sits for me like a
creative tension 'par excellence'.
A few weeks ago someone wonders out loud; How did Jesus teach, Buddha
teach and some others who shifted the uneven course of human events. As is
often the case with me when I try to learn from the questions posited here
both synchronicity and serendipity brought me a fairly compelling answer,
' -each built painstakingly an irrefutable model of how they found the
world to be/become.' Obviously in the case of religious prophets or
Godheads models go beyond even that. This statement also included
Einstein, which I thought interesting. I think the author was Bertrand
Russell, but I will check if anyone asks.
I am truly fascinated at the complex mental (psychological/emotional
dynamics) manifestations unloosed by the variety of 'posts' of people
here. Part (small and perhaps inevitable given my emotional constitution)
of me is horrified by this continuing apparent 'fixate' that any amount of
verbiage by me or anyone else is using up the virtual space of others. I
beg anyone on the list to demonstrate in any way that their imagination
allows to show me how this is so in an 'open and virtual' domain. I think
the truer limit is their personal conception of space and time and their
purpose in both, but I leave the floor clear for that perhaps in a later
contribution.
A fitting solution to lack of space for me as an artistic soul and
operator is like that of the Directors of the Tate to 'become'; - Too many
'rich pictures'? Build a new gallery! And our experience is that you have
to shut the doors for the flood of people who want entry to the new field
but cannot get in, whereas the 'aimed' linear and rather over-controlled
learning of the 'Dome' is left floundering in a sea of disconcerting self
recrimination and political hoo ha! Maybe it's different in other
countries? If I read you new proposals right that is your solution as
well? I see no reason to go then for that expansion, but I am as sincerely
flattered as hell that you considered even to mention that I might stay
rather than go. As I read you Rick I have now have two places to frolic
while singing 'Tally-Ho' spreading these semeiotic fields with Greek "e"'s
while wondering of connections between physics, physicians, patients and
practitioners, Faraday's and hey! Rick, a question, What does "e" -in
e-mail signal?
David Bohm recounts what he tells for me as a most compelling insight for
changed perspective which I will then link to something that actually
happened two years ago, just before I realised the extent of Bohm's
contribution to the expansion of science into art and both into learning.
Bohm speaks of an experience in a room with a painting, he noticed that
after sufficient connection to the object/subject a Roualt painting of I
think of a clown;-) that the border framing the portrait face had colours
that re-iterated the content of the supposed inner image, he does not say
if they were 'complementary duals' but does go on to explicate for us what
for him became a very good image of what an expanded dialogue might
be/become as he describes how the colours seemed to 'lift out' of the very
framedness and serpentinely, flowingly to fill the entire room,- and so
enriched his understanding of a differing experience of the possibility
zones of human discourse or dialogue. Bohm felt powerfully the almost
impossibility of achieving the vision unless certain precepts were broken
down.
So, if I be accused ( I do not feel accused Rick et al) then let it be
that; let it be that I have sought deliberately with the few resources to
hand to stretch to my limited mental limit the 'understanding' of
conventional dialogue or discourse here in the LO. If my stretching of the
frame for want of a better term has in any way led to your inspiration for
change then I welcome it very much. And I will celebrate it with 'Bucket'
this evening in the fields. (A place where I often try hard to empathize
with all the suffering that I KNOW happens in organisational life among
the millions of un-named personalities from the 'sweat houses' and
'virtual slavery' in developing (sic) countries to the gold plated
washrooms of spiritually bankrupt millionaires. I have eaten with both and
beyond. I have shared food and love with the abandoned and then rescued of
the so called third world~~~~~~~and drank the champagne of millionaires
who have learned and earned well in what they specially understand to be
the purpose of a LO.) I know as an artist and simple humane being as much
and as long and as personal about 'creative collapses' and 'emergence' and
'immergence' as most sitting here.
So, back to new Andrew manifestation. I was asked to input a painting
session within a broadly systemic programs. One outcome for delegates was
the noticing that much of the rich material lay in the sometime inchoate
materials found at the edges, or embedded in deep sub-structure in the
'involved brushwork'. For one or two people in say twenty this simple
realisation, like Bohm's became, sure not epiphanies in any grand sense,
but let me claim enables of significant emergent, freeing up paradigm
shifts. That was the feedback from the people. I was shocked. So 'shift'
for Andrew too. Symbiosis? With us was a world class facilitator of
leaders (no I will not name the person, sorry;-), as is often the case
with those who have certain reputation and a propensity for clear
'feedback' (which is not quite the same thing as critique) offered, "Wow!
What an amazing person you are- how much you have to give and how freely
you give it, I would very much like to know how, etc. ." Em-powered
encouraged or com-powered by that I effectively threw away my brushes and
took to the keyboard, taught myself all I could about LO, most connecting
disciplines from Maturana's long Amazonian meandering, Senge's, well, as
we all knows, the list is long, through and throughout to the vast
divergent deltas right into the hearts and minds of young executives like
mothers torn between the needs of the child born, the wants of the husband
she supported and the often caustic demands of the supposed employer often
bedecked with certificates for 'developing people', spirits or souls or
something;-(. I have openly spent fifteen years with the results of failed
organisational caring, imperfect LO impositions, the suicidal results of
ill thought out 'symptomatic solutions' and 'interventions'. I am close,
sometimes too close to the heart of the LO. (Not this one it seems, or
thinking about it, too close?)
I am driven to serve at the very lowest levels of organisational life, but I
never find the people in the personal development, team development seminars,
I just find the 'company toys, in the car parks and the endless company
chit-chat in the seminars and quietly, 'off stage' people come up to me and
say, but what can we do? So I go away and do what they could do if they sat
outside the dears of wrong doing, saying what they feel, asking for what they
need and do you know Rick, slowly it is taking hold. That 'colour' is out of
the 'frame', it is moving around the 'room', something has stepped outside
the 'cell' wall, there is a collective epiphany going on.
When St Francis went along with his two friends into a chapel to dedicate
themselves to the projects of unconditional caring they were embarrassed and
ignorant among themselves as I have often felt embarrassed and ignorant so
they trusted in what we might call serendipity or synchronicity or what
others might call simple grace. In the opening of the book they found three
simple passages that served them to the end of time. This morning I have
simply sat down and opened the single most commonly approachable book that
anyone in LO might get hold of or have already read or practices with - The
Dance of Change-
The book opened at page 553. Strategy and Purpose. In the middle Art
Kleiner. The simple paragraph says much for me this morning in words you
can all relate to. I respond very much to the sentences, " -debunking the
idea that "being responsive to your customers" is a prescription for
success..Šit can prevent reinvention..Šetc" and it goes on to delineate a
wonderful paradox that I once alluded to in an earlier posting. One I hope
to help all resolve.
I have to close to meet the unremitting demands of my own life and desire
to close with a few words from a book given me this very morning, which is
an account of the peoples that have lived in my small LO, called North
Moreton there last thousand years. It is a still pond and a running river
both. Buy the book and visit my home for now. But not yet, I have not
asked Gerald Howat MA, Ph.D. FRSH etc the esteemed author permission to
quote and I do not have time to count the words I know he will allow me.
"From these clumps are viewed the flat fields North Moretonians have
farmed since time out of mind, even in the changing circumstances of the
last years of the twentieth century there remained a vestigial connection
with the land. snip. As the evening shadows fall on the valley below the
contours of man's architectural achievements are blurred, it may not be
too fanciful to discern Toti (First named villager in the 11th C. under
"Edward the Confessor") seeking fish from the River Thames; Richard
Horlock caring for the river banks; Miles de Stapleton 14th C (casting a
last look at his chantry before going (with his two sons) to meet his
destiny at Bannockburn snip, Anne Gunter at the mercy of an abusing
father, Ernest Shalyor setting off to the United States, snip , John Barr
teaching his young charges (19th C), and Bud Finch, (20thC) * Ploughing
the fields and watching a peewit sitting on her eggs.*"
Gerald reflects in closing an account of learning, human development and
evolution and occasional revolution that, ' These, and much else, were
evocative of a community whose eternal roots lay in the soil.' I want to
ask everyone, where do you think you, as a 'community' desire your own
fruitful flowerings to eternally lay?
~~~~~~~Now Bucket, we may leave to go for our eternal walk!
Best,
Andrew
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