Replying to LO27579 --
Dear Organlearners,
Ann Flynn <ann.flynn@city.fredericton.nb.ca> writes:
>A colleague and myself have been meeting to
>discuss how we can have an impact on the way
>our organization does business. We work in
>municipal government. Our Administrator has told
>us all that in order to provide the best services we
>need to change the way we work. There are many
>individuals in our organization who want to change
>the way we work, who want to provide the best
>service possible. But we do not have the skills or
>knowledge to be able to do things differently. Through
>discussion and reading we have come up with the idea
>of starting a support group for those of us interested in
>changing the way they work and trying out our
>learnings in the work place. But we need some help to
>get started.
Greetings Ann,
You have wonderful ideas. But what I admire most is the spontaneous manner
in which you have already proceeded. This is one of the keys to authentic
learning. Please care for it as something most precious.
I would personally suggest that you and your colleague keep on with your
discussions. I prefer to call a discussion in which each participent learns
a dialogue. The dialogue or "thoughts-exchanging" is one of five ESCs
(Elementary Sustainers of Creativity). We have discussed the ESCs a number
of times on our LO-dialogue. The main idea of each ESC is to sustain
spontaneous creating and learning.
To find these dialogues in the LO-archive, use Google's
advance search engine
< http://www.google.com/advanced_search >
Type in the top window "all words"
elementary sustainer creativity
and way down on the right hand window "domain"
www.learning-org.com
You should get the 14 hits which I got.
Perhaps I can give you the following advice on a LO-dialogue. It has
"chemistry" to it and this "chemistry" makes many fellow learners often
afraid to participate. Sometimes they get rubbed up when somebody replies
in a manner which they perceived as a conflict of interests. Occasionally a
fellow learner will get very excited how a dialogue is developing These are
good signs because they tell me that these fellow learners are learning.
The dangerous signs are when a praticipant keeps on presenting a recipe or
a monologue, oblivious to the thoughts of fellow learners.
I have taught chemistry for many years and supervised many a practical. I
have learned that the emotional (afraid, annoyed, excited) students are
seldom safety hazards in the laboratory. The safety hazards are those
students who are indifferent to what they are doing and who merely want to
get it over as quickly as possible following the recipe. I have learned to
spot such zombies among 60-80 in the first 10 minutes since sooner or later
they will do something potentially hazardous.
I do not want to go deeply into the relationship between learning and
emotioning. (It has to do with the topic entropy production and that is
another horse to ride.) I only want to point out that in the LEARNING
person there is a gradual decrease in emotioning on a topic as the sumtotal
of the learning (i.e. knowledge) on that topic increases. I do not mean
that the person becomes emotionless. I mean that the learner's control of
his/her emotioning becomes better as his/her knowledge of the topic
increases.
The reason why I tell this is that emotioning and learning in the
LO-dialogue often get astray because a learner who participate in any
dialogue has learned very little about the nature of dialogue itself! When
the dialogue takes any unexpected course, it leeds to emotioning and
possibly some learning as a result of it.
The LO-dialogue can sustain both Personal Mastery (PM) and Team Learning
(TL) which are two of the five disciplines of a LO). But should we not
recognise the "thoughts- exchanging" in the LO-dialogue as well as be
oblivious to the patterns in this exchange, much of the PM and TL will go
wasted. Our emotions will run high without us using them to learn
specifically about the nature of the LO-dialogue.
Let us think for a while about these patterns in "thought- exchanging" in a
"chemical" manner. Chemical reactions themselves can be classified in
several different ways. One such a classification is the "form of
exchanges". Let A, B and C symbolise clusters of atoms. When we write A and
B together as AB, we think of AB as one cluster consisting of two clusters
A and B firmly connected. There are three classes of reactions:
(1) Addition reactions
. A + B = AB
Clusters A and B are added into one cluster.
(2) Elimination reactions
. AB = A + B
Cluster AB splits into two separate clusters A and B
(3) Substitution reactions
. AB + C = AC + B
Cluster C substitutes cluster B in AB to set B free.
It is the same in the dialogue ("thoughts-exchanging"). For
example, one learner may write something which consists
of thoughts A, B, C, D and E connected into one coherent
cluster ABCDE. Some other fellow learner may add his/her
thoughts F and G to it, honouring the coherency ("sticking
firmly together"). Thus
. ABCDE + FG = ABCDEFG
is an addition reaction of thoughts.
Such an addition reaction of thoughts is usually experienced as most
pleasing by both learners. The reason is that the knowledge of both
learners increase. For the one learner it increase from ABCDE to ABCDEFG
and for the other learner it increased from (at least) FG to ABCDEFG.
But let us think of the opposite class of elimination reactions
of thoughts. One learner may write something which consists
of thoughts A, B, C, D and E connected into one coherent
cluster ABCDE. Some other fellow learner may strongly
disagree, thinking that for example D and E cannot be
connected coherently to ABC. Thus that learner will argue
. ABCDE = ABC + D + E
This elimination reaction of thoughts is usually experienced as most
displeasing by the learner who put ABCDE forth. But in most cases, should
that learner know the second learner better in terms of past dialogues,
that first learner will know that the second learner may have "cut to size"
ABCDE because of knowing little, if anything, of D and E. This knowledge of
why an elimination reaction may happen (there are several reasons) will
prevent unpleasant emotioning, but will rather result in a positive emotion
like compassion.
The third class of thoughts exchanging is the substitution
reactions of thoughts. One learner may write something
which consists of thoughts A, B, C, D and E connected into
one coherent cluster ABCDE. Some other fellow learner
may disagree mildly with one or more of the thoughts, say
B and C. He/she will then substitute B and C with his/her
own versions F and G symbolised as
. ABCDE + F + G = AFGDE + B + C
This substitution reaction of thoughts is usually experienced with mild
emotioning by both learners. When the emotions of both are positive, both
will learn from the substitution. But whoever has negative emotions as a
result of this substitution reaction will learn little, if anything from
it.
Trying to make addition reactions of thoughts is vitally important to the
LO-dialogue. At a certain stage most, if not all, learners who participate
will become aware that some novel and noble idea has emerged collectively.
This "collectively novel and noble idea" is most important to that learning
community. It is such ideas which will enable them to digest SPONTANEOUSLY
whatever the learning environment provides for it.
Ann, you also write:
>Are there members of your society who are
>available to provide workshops in our workplace?
>We are located in New Brunswick, Canada. We
>would like to start our efforts by attracting 10 to
>15 people to a workshop on the basic skills required
>to establish a learning environment. What would you
>suggest for accessing the services of a trained
>facilitator to help us learn the core competencies?
I have gone deeply, perhaps too deeply, into the form of
"thoughts-exchanging" (learning dialogue). But I did it to give a
persepctive on how a "collectively novel and noble idea" emerges. The
reason is that one or more such ideas are necessary to utilise a learning
environment, even that provided by a workshop (even one on how to provide a
learning environement ;-) In other words, those who want to have success in
such a workshop will have to get together in advance and prepare themselves
for it. The dialogue is the very tool with which they can prepare
themselves.
Does the above not describe what has happened between you and your
colleague with your discussions?
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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