Replying to LO27884 --
Dear Organlearners,
John Dicus <jdicus@ourfuture.com> writes in the
Subject: Quantum Lessons From My Dog LO27884
>I hope you all aren't waiting for any grand conclusions
>here. I don't have any. But the lesson from Dusty has
>planted some questions in my head.
>
>Like, how can we bring the stuff we keep packing into
>our heads about Organizational Learning back to a human
>level?
Greetings dear John,
I first want to answer this question from my point of view before coming
to a much more serious issue.
We ought not to keep on packing stuff into our heads. This is rote
learning. We ought to feed upon stuff with our tacit knowledge and the
"teeth" in it. This is the digestive part of authentic learning. What is
more human than getting teeth and using it to eat?
>How many times have we avoided mustering the
>courage to move ahead toward some desired future
>state simply because we didn't think we could ever
>get there from here? Or because we didn't have a
>detailed plan that we could "sell" in common
>organizational currency?
>
>Sometimes I think about Oliver Wendell Holmes
>when he said that "he would give his life for the simplicity
>beyond complexity." And I think that we make a wall
>out of complexity.
John, in the two days before your contribution got through in the "digest"
form, I also thought much once again on the intimidation effect of
complexity. A feeling of sadness took hold of me for every fellow learner
who has to deal with complexity on his/her own.
I actually began to compile a reading list of some books to show that many
vast changes made the 20th century radically different to all the previous
ones. (If fellow learners want me to copy this long list for the
LO-dialogue, I will do so gladly.) Some 2400(+/-200) years ago humankind
also experienced such a radical change. In my opinion it was the emergence
of humankind's creativity from its childhood into its teenhood. We are
now, especially since WWII, experiencing the second emergence of
humankind's creativity, but now from its teenhood into its adulthood.
The world became increasingly complex from century to century. But it is
only during the last decades of the 20th century that humankind began to
articulate this complexity. Complexity is now with us to stay for
centuries. We can bemoan this complexity, but we cannot undo it just as we
cannot undo the human creativity which causes it. We will have to deal
with it in a wise manner. How?
I think that Systems Thinking is crucial to deal with these vast changes.
We need a Systems Thinking with which it is possible to track the future
with fidelity. Since it is human creativity which is changing the world so
much, creativity has to play a prominent role in this Systems Thinking.
There are also some other aspects necessary to Systems Thinking. But as
for sufficiency, Peter Senge has articulated wisely that Systems Thinking,
whatever it involves, is not enough. We also need four other disciplines
which he called Personal Mastery, Team Learning, Mental Models and Shared
Vision. Think in a Smuts manner of Systems Thinking as the whole and the
other four disciplines as its field. Wholeness is the whole with its
field.
We need the wholeness of the LO (Learning Organisation) to keep track of
the complex changes (since the beginning of the 20th century) we are now
experiencing. Perhaps Arie de Geus would have proposed that we need the
Living Company to do so. I far too often meet people who are very unhappy
with many of their relationships. Whether it is the organisation in which
they work or an organisation in which they are involved privately, they
long for happiness. Whether Senge calls it a Learning Organisation or De
Geus calls it a Living Company, we need organisations which keep people
happy. Perhaps we should call them Happy Organisations ;-)
The sooner we learn how to live with complexity, the happier for us. Some
individuals are already living with this complexity. But like us they also
need to live collectively with this complexity and not merely as
individuals. This is where organisations as Learning Organisations or
Living Companies will play a crucial role in keeping track of our
complexifying world. It will become increasingly difficult for persons
alone to beat complexity.
Losing track of complexity often results in a loss of happiness. We begin
to do the "wrong" things for the "wrong" reasons. My "wrongs" and the
"wrongs" of others lead to "wrong" clashes. I put the word "wrong" in
quotation marks because I could not find a better word. I do not mean
wrong in the sense of bad or evil, but in the sense of "unfit for
complexity". All these "wrongs" drain our spiritual free energy so that we
can accomplish less the "right" things. To create the "right" things is a
profound source of happiness. Thus we need to avoid these "wrongs" rather
than avoiding complexity to cultivate our happiness.
>All the while we could dial our lives down a notch
>and find some eace and calm. Or we could learn
>make the jump into another realm on the other side
>of the wall. (What could we scoop on the fly?) It
>feels like we spend too much of our time trying to
>climb over the wall or discover ways to cope while
>banging our heads into it.
Complexity is indeed a wall becoming thicker and higher as a result of
human creativity. Thus, should we want to tunnel through it, we will have
to do it with combined human creativity. The Learning Organisation is the
organisational outcome of such combined human creativity.
>Dusty made the leap (and back).
>Maybe I can learn to do it too.
Maybe you and Dusty did it together as a human-dog LO.
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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