Replying to LO27866 --
Rick:
Thank you for leading the discussion on this issue. I write to you, now,
mainly in my identity as president of the Knowledge Management Consortium
International (KMCI), the home of so-called second-generation KM, because
I believe we have a perspective that adds value to this conversation. As
you know, I am also an avid SoL Member and supporter of OL concepts, and
former board chair of the Sustainability Institute, Dana Meadow's creation
-- a citadel of systems thinking. I am also deeply involved in a proposed
SoL study in which we hope to affirmatively link OL practices with strong
shareholder returns. I support OL concepts in these ways and more.
If I have criticism of the Fifth Discipline's view of the solution to
organizational performance, it would NOT be that I disagree with its
prescriptions, but that I disagree with its framing of the problem. In
particular, I have trouble with its failure to cast the organization in
terms of the pattern-like social system that it is, as well as the
tendency of people in organizations to self-organize in particular ways
for knowledge production, diffusion, and use. There is regularity to the
patterns that we see in human social systems as they engage in fruitful
problem-solving and learning, but recognition of this regularity is
missing from the OL agenda, as I see it. In our conception of
second-generation KM, we start with this view of learning and innovation
as a self-organizing social system with regularity to it, and we interpret
our discipline as one which seeks to enhance the pattern. The purpose of
KM, in our view, is to support knowledge processing, not to shape it.
To be very more specific, there is a difference between the learning
system of an organization and its operating system. In other words, there
is a difference between an organization's behavior and dynamics at the
level of its 'knowledge processing' behaviors versus its behaviors at the
'business processing' level. It's not clear to me that the OL community
has embraced this distinction yet. While Argyris and others have broached
this subject in the past, it is my view and others' that the discipline of
OL has failed to fully capitalize on this distinction, and that it
continues to muddle the two together. At KMCI, we are now taking steps to
formalize this distinction by formulating models for what it might mean
for organizations to be truly 'open' in terms of knowledge processing
(i.e., as a learning organization) without confusing the notion of
democratic knowledge making with democratic decision making. The truly
'open' LO is the former, but not necessarily the latter. Again, I see
this kind of distinction entirely missing from the OL agenda. But then, a
significant source of these ideas, complexity theory, is relatively new to
all of us.
In fairness to Peter, and to ourselves for that matter, the patterns of
regularity I speak of have only been 'seen' by us since, say, the
mid-nineties, when scholars of complexity theory, such as John Holland and
Ralph Stacey, made them clear to us. Now we look with arrogance, in
retrospect, and say to ourselves, "How could we have missed that in 1990?"
Well, we didn't, and neither did Peter, per se. He didn't necessarily
overlook these things. They were simply unknown to us, collectively.
But now we CAN see them. And we should. We should continue to 'build on
the shoulders of giants,' Peter Senge among them, by aiming our focus on a
new understanding how people learn in collectives, and the self-organizing
patterns they form as they do so. Strengthening the pattern is what we
should be doing, in my view.
If I may, I'd like to draw a distinction between what I would describe as
"presumptive" versus "system-specific" prescriptions. The '5 disciplines'
are, in my view, presumptive in the sense that they suggest that adherence
TO them will lead to successful outcomes. By contrast, the
"system-specific" approach says, 'No, you must begin with an understanding
of how the WHOLE system wishes to operate in its self-organizing form --
because it IS a self-organizing system -- and you must then choose
interventions that enhance its ability to operate in its own ways. Then,
and only then, can you expect the system (the 'organization') to learn.'
Why? Because organizations learn in their own endemic ways. As I said,
people tend to engage in mutual learning -- and mutually-arrived-at
learning outcomes -- in self-organizing ways. And the patterns they form
as they do so have regularity to them. And it is only when we take steps
to serve and support this regularity that we can expect to receive the
kinds of performance outcomes we hope for.
Systems thinking does a superior job of explaining the manner in which the
structure of complex systems gives rise to unexpected and even unwanted
behaviors. In that sense, it does us all the good service of displaying
and explaining the property of non-linearity in human social systems.
But there is where it stops. It utterly fails to show us the way, as it
were, to the particular KIND of structure that we should be striving for
at a social system level for superior OL, other than to suggest that if we
adopt the 5 disciplines, somehow we will get there (this is the
presumptive aspect I spoke of above). But what does "THERE" look like?
How do we know when we've arrived? This is where OL has let us down in my
view, and this is where second-generation KM begins. We actually have a
target we're aiming for and we can describe it in detail. We can then
make specific interventions and test how we do against our target. So
when we get "THERE," we know we've arrived.
I've seen none of this reasoning in the OL literature to date. Where is
the foundational vision of what the healthy learning organization should
look like in its fully elaborated form? At KMCI, we've attempted to
articulate this in what we call the Knowledge Life Cycle, or KLC, and
we've embraced OL as our desired outcome (www.kmci.org ). And armed with
a vision of what the actual, explicitly articulated dynamics of
organizations engaged in high-performance learning LOOKS LIKE, we've been
able to formulate intervention strategies that will arguably (and
measurably) support, strengthen, and reinforce them. I'll stop here and
wait to see what kind of response this attracts.
Regards,
Mark W. McElroy
Richard Karash wrote:
>Who are the most responsible people who DISAGREE with the organizational
>learning field? Who are the challengers to these ideas?
--"Mark W. McElroy" <mmcelroy@vermontel.net>
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