Replying to LO27828 --
Dear Organlearners,
Richard Karash <Richard@Karash.com> writes
by resonding to:
>>I often read articles by or about Senge's works
>>on Organisational learning but never come across
>>articles arguing against the substance claimed by
>>him. Do you have any articles which challenge
>>his views?
>Who are the most responsible people who DISAGREE
>with the organizational learning field? Who are the
>challengers to these ideas?
(snip)
>I was going to reply, "Many people think 5 disciplines
>are not enough." But this is a shallow reply. If the notion
>of learning disciplines is valid, then there are certainly
>refinements and additions to the disciplines.
>
>Ed Schein has said, "The learning disciplines approach
>is not the only approach." I think that's a little closer to
>the mark. But, if not learning disciplines, then what?
>
>I'm very curious who are the responsible voices with
>a view contrary to the organizational learning field.
Greetings dear Rick,
Your challenge is very interesting, especially with its wording "...most
responsible people who DISAGREE...".
Many management systems had been proposed since WWII, the LO being one of
them. Many of them got so far as being implemented in some organisations.
Many of those did not last very long. Nevertheless, with the LO one of the
many systems available to choose from, would choosing a system other than
the LO not mean disagreeing with the LO? Would the selling of such a
system to an organisation without comparing it with the LO not be an
irresponsible act? I wonder.
I have not yet encountered a convincing challenge against the ideas used
within the LO. Other than my inability to find such a challenge, I think
it is because the central idea to the LO is that of "learning". Whoever
wants to disagree radically with the LO, will have to substitute learning
with something which is more important than learning. History shows many
fools who tried to substitute learning with activities like waring or
excluding, but learning is that which makes us humans, more than merely
animals.
The main contenders in disagreeing with the LO will be systems of
management focusing on topics related to learning such as practice,
knowledge and information. However, I have not yet seen a thorough
comparison of say, Knowledge Management (KM), to motivate why KM has to be
preferred rather than a LO. Yet each such a main contender succeeds in
existing besides the LO because of its central idea is monadically
connected to learning.
This "learning" as its central idea makes the LO both strong and weak. As
I have argued in many contributions, authentic learning and rote learning
have vastly different outcomes. Authentic learning makes a LO strong while
rote learning makes it weak. Should someone be dissatisfied with the LO
and search for a better system of management, it would be because of too
much rote learning within the LO.
The publication of Senge's The Fifth Discipline had been a watershed event
in the history of organisational management. The reason is that before the
publication of the book, some organisations existed as LOs. And some
organisations exist even today as LOs without knowing the existence of
Senge's book. In other words, for the first time in the history of
organisational management Senge succeeded in focussing on a natural
phenomenon, even though rare, and not one engineered artificially.
In the appendix to The Fifth Discipline Peter Senge shows how
these five disciplines are formed by combining eleven essences
into five groups as follows:
PERSONAL MASTERY
being
generativeness
connectedness
TEAM LEARNING
collective intelligence
alignment
MENTAL MODELS
love of truth
openness
SHARED VISION
common purpose
partnership
SYSTEMS THINKING
holism
interconnectedness
I wonder whether Senge did it intuitively in terms of his own tacit
knowledge or made on purpose use of Husserl's phenomenology in which a
phenomenon is characterised in terms of its essences. Whatever, the case,
it was a brilliant move for it may help us much to understand the LO.
Is this combination into five groups the only one possible? I do ot think
so. These 11 essences can be combined into one, two, ..., seven ( ;-), ...
or even ten groups. However, any group of essences together should make
some sense in terms of an important organisational activity. For example,
compare the essences which hint to Personal Mastery to hte essences for
Team Learning. Some combinations may make little sense in the
organisational setup.
It is most interesting that these 11 essences can also be
combined into the 7Es (seven essentialities of creativity). I do it
as follows, leaving them in their five disciplines:
PERSONAL MASTERY
being => liveness (being)
generativeness => liveness (becoming)
connectedness => fruitfulness (connect)
TEAM LEARNING
collective intelligence => spareness (limit)
alignment => fruitfulness (beget)
MENTAL MODELS
love of truth => sureness (categoricity)
openness => openness (open)
SHARED VISION
commonality of purpose => otherness (quality)
partnership => wholeness (associativity)
SYSTEMS THINKING
holism => wholeness (monadicity)
interconnectedness => wholeness (associativity)
I think it is very important to understand what these 11 essences do to
the five disciplines. An "essence" in the phenomenological sense of
Husserl means that a phenomenon cannot be and become without all its
essences. Should only one essence be lost, the phenomenon will cease to be
and become. For example, when a living person loses his/her brain, he/she
will be die. Hence a brain is essential to a living person. Now, since the
eleven essences are vital to a LO (Learning Organisation), so is any
combination of them too. In other words, the five disciplines are
essential to a LO. A LO cannot exist and function with less than all five
disciplines.
Another important issue is how these 11 essences and thus any combination
of them like into the five disciplines are related to each other. Should
the 11 essences be independent of each other, so would the 5 disciples
also be independent of each other. On the other hand, and I am convinced
that it is the case, when the 11 essences depend on each other, so do the
five disciplines also depend on each other. For example, the fifth
discipline Systems Thinking depends on Personal Mastery, Team Learning,
Mental Models and Shared Vision. Therefor I myself would never specialise
as a consultant in only one of them, say Systems Thinking, as so often
happen.
A difficult question is whether Senge identified all the essences of a LO.
Is it not possible that a 12th or even 13th essence have not yet been
identified. What will happen to our understanding of a LO when a 12th
essence becomes known? Will a sixth discipline manifest itself or will we
end up in a better combination of the 12 essences called the four
neo-disciplines of a LO? In my own studies of the 7Es (seven
essentialities of creativity) I became convinced that it is not only
possible to combine them into less than seven hyper-essences, but also
into more than seven hypo-essences. The fact that the 7Es are complete
(that is why I call them essentialities rather than essences) comes from
the manner in how they were discovered. Since the 11 essences of a LO can
be combined into the seven essentialities of creativity, or the latter be
divided into the 11 essences of a LO, I think that finding a 12th essence
would not change our understanding of a LO very much.
What will happen when we combine all 11 essences not into five groups
known as the five disciplines, but into one and only one group? What sort
of "suer-discipline" will we then have. When I do this exercise for the
7Es, I invariably end up with something which I cannot describe better as
the "complex form" of creativity. In other words, the 7Es give a complex
form to creativity. When I do the same exercise for the 11 essences of a
LO, I also invariably end up with the "complex form" of a LO.
I have no doubt that each LO is complex. It is for this reason why there
are so much misunderstandings of LOs. Many organisations, having explored
the possibility of becoming a LO, eventually decided not to become one,
fearing that their organisational culture would change so much that they
will lose their identity. This will never happen, unless they had some
caricature of the LO in mind. By becoming a LO the organisation's culture
or identity will rather improve considerably. It will become an
organisation in which everybody would love to work and with which
everybody would love to have relationships.
As far as I can see, the only serious "contender" for the Learning
Organisation (LO) would be the Living Organisation (LO) (De Geus' Living
Company). The fact that both has the acronym LO ought to tell what the
"contest" will be. The tacit form will be very much the same since
learning is a way of living and living is a way of learning. It is the
dedicated terminology, metaphors and cultural grammar which will differ.
In other words, the articulation of the form will be different. It would
be like talking in English or German on the same topic.
Some months ago I suggested in a reply to Artur da Silva's series of
essays on the Living Organisation that entities which I named
"biomorphisms" would play a much more important role in its
characterisation than the 11 essences in the characterisation of a LO. I
also put my hand at defining some of these biomorphisms so that fellow
learners can develop a feeling for them. A biomorphism is a pattern common
and thus essential to all forms of living organisms. While identifying
these biomorphisms (which is very seldomly done in biological text books),
I had fleeting glimpses how they tell what I know of learning and
organisations in novel and exciting manner.
I think that the LO as a management system has come to stay. Its future
history might be very much the same as the past history of mechanics.
First there was a lot of ideas, but then came Newton who brought order
with his book Principia. First there was a lot of ideas, but then came
Senge who brought order with his book The Fifth Discipline. Then came more
than two centuries where the full course of Principia were explored,
gradually learning about its limitations too. We are now doing the same
with the Fifth Discipline. Eventually, after more than two centuries, two
anomalies were found too important to neglect -- the quantum effect
(Planck) and the relativistic effect (Einstein). Thus relativistic quantum
mechanics superseded Newtonian Mechanics, not over throwing it, but
telling more what the former could not do. It needed a paradigm shift.
People like Leibniz, then La Grange and later Hamilton improved
considerably on Newton' own original articulations, but the paradigm
remained the same for more than two centuries. This will also happen to
Senge's articulation of the LO. The paradigm of the LO will be with us for
many decades to come. We will need a Leibniz, a La Grange and a Hamilton
to do for Senge's LO the same before we will reach the stage for the next
paradigm shift. Those enterpeneurs who lay claim to a paradigm shift in
their novel management systems are merely crack pots who do not understand
evolution, whether basic science or management science.
Have we already found even one such a too an important anomaly in Senge's
LearningO or De Geus' LivingO? I really do not think so. But I can see two
in the making. The one is that should we not be aware that learning is a
way of living and living is a way of learning. The anomaly would then be
in thinking that LOs can be found only among human organisations. The
other one concerns our educational institutions, especially universities.
They are organisations for learning, but not Learning Organisations.
Because of this anomaly which exists already, they are going to suffer
immensely rather than the learning organisations for not being learning
organisations. Please mark my words because it is going to happen as
surely as I am typing these words.
A few people have written over the years in private accusing me that my
"art of deep creativity" is an undercover contest with the LO as
management system. This "art of deep creativity" is not a management
system. It is like Goethe said of his "Steigerung" or Smuts of his holism
-- it is a way of living by exploring everything. It is a way which
enabled me to understand the LO better, but it has not (yet ;-) enabled me
to offer something better than the LO as management system.
Well Rick, I did not give you what you asked for. Perhaps It will explain
if you do not get what you asked for.
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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