Replying to LO29452 --
Dear Chris and LO,
Replying ostensibly to LO29452 --
>>From: "Chris Macrae" <wcbn007@easynet.co.uk>
>>
>> Richard has been very kind and put up a pdf file at
>> http://www.learning-org.com/docs/021101_Macrae.pdf
>I thought I would occasionally try and follow up this mail with a
>different opening perspective to see if I can find a window whose view
>inspires you most. If I discover one, do feel free to dialogue with this
>group or me at wcbn007@easynet.co.uk
>
>Window 1
>What is the most important assumption around which 21st C organisations
>should be designed? I don't know but pretty high up there could be the
>idea that anyone can learn from anyone.
-- Here is a story cobbled together for this Learning Organization,
founded by Rick Karash some time in the last century.
"Andrew...why do you sometimes write 'Angel Meadow' as your postal
address, while no such 'postal address' exists, on any map of Oxford... I
have ever seen?..."
--
I was looking at some original works of art
yesterday...Michelangelo...Raphael... El Greco... Vincent... Picasso...
Hodgkin... none have changed (much) except Hodgkin... ;-) -- I once made a
painting, a collage mainly out of 'kitchen roll' and pigment, called
'Dakota'. A throwaway kind of art piece...it didn't know then ;-) that
"...the Dakota (people's) language possesses no word to designate time,
but it can express a number of ways modes of being in duration. For Dakota
thought, in fact, time constitutes a duration in which measurement does
not intervene: it is a limitless "free good"". Levi Strauss (Totemism from
Within) A 'kinda' ;-) of 'present' ;-) to be going on 'with' ;-)
Common to the Sioux in the south to the Dakota in the north, all things
and beings are nothing but materialized forms of creative continuity.
(Original American source -)
"Everything as it moves, now and then, here and there, makes stops. The
bird as it flies stops in one place to make its nest and in another to
rest in its flight. A man when he goes forth stops when he wills. So the
god has stopped. The sun, which is so bright and beautiful, is one place
where he has stopped. The moon, the stars, the winds, he has been with.
The trees, the animals, are all where he has stopped, and the Indian
thinks of these places and send his prayers to reach the place where the
god has stopped and win help and blessing."
Please allow me to jump to Prigogine ;-) " a new science has been born,
the physics of nonequilibrium processes, leading to concepts such as self
organization and dissipative structures. - We now know;-) that
irreversability leads to a host of irreversible phenomena, such as vortex
formation, chemical oscillations and laser light, highlighting the
essential constructive role of the arrow of time. Figuratively speaking,
matter with no arrow of time is blind, but with the arrow of time it
begins to see. The claim that this arrow of time is "only
phenomenological", or subjective, is therefore absurd. We are actually the
children of this evolution, not its progenitors."
Atop a far fractal tree of emergences is James Clerk Maxwell singing of "a
new kind;-) of knowledge."
We need (Prigogine 1976) 'events', that 'bring elements of radical
novelty' to assist new 'laws' emergent.
I personally reflect here&now upon those, choosing to face the blank
canvases, the immediate sub soils, but save the lovers of lawns so
over-cultivated for the control freaking fanatics of the croqueting
classes of middle England;-) (sic) Masonic(ical) or knot as the cases may
be for another day;-) and place;-) Prigogine quotes Richard Tarnas to set
himself able to write, "-perhaps it is not too bold to say that we are
closing in on the object of our passion." -"Mankind is at a turning
point...a new rationality...science no longer identified with certitude
and probability with ignorance." Doesn't that just look like an art of
philosophy? Mmmmm. Prigogine reflects upon Hawkins reading 'the mind of
God'. - Or - We\are observing the birth of a science that no longer
limited to idealized and simplified situations but reflects the complexity
of the real world, a science that views us and out creativity as part of a
fundamental trend present at all levels of nature."
Les Deux Sources, Bergson : "A great current of creative energy gushes
forth through matter, to obtain from it what it can. At most points it is
stopped; these stops are transmuted, in our eyes, into appearances of so
many living species, i.e., organisms in which our perception, being
essentially analytic and synthetic, distinguishes a multitude of elements
combining to fulfil a multitude of functions; but the process of
organization was only the stop itself, a simple act analogous to the
impress of a foot which instantaneously causes thousands of grains of sand
to contrive to form a pattern." The joining? The desire to see both/and
'discontinuous' and 'continuous' "being/becoming"
Back to 1754 (Rousseau) 'the passage from nature to culture...does this
sound at all familiar as a process of becoming/being in the phenomenology
of LO ..." the passage from nature to culture depended upon the
demographic increase, but the latter did not produce a direct effect, as a
natural cause. First it forced men to diversify there modes of livelihood
in order to exist in different environments and also to multiply their
relations with nature. But in order that this diversification and
multiplication might lead to technical and social transformations, they
had to become objects and means of human thought. -The relations which we
express by the words - big and little - strong and weak, fast and slow,
bold and fearless, and other such ideas as are occasioned by demands and
almost without thinking about them, eventually in man produced a kind of
reflection, or rather an automatic prudence which indicated the
precautions most necessary to safety."
May I dwell, now, in a moment and in my Angel Meadow? I will (Levi-Strauss
upon Bergson, upon Rousseau) reflect in my leisure that both (all) may
have gotten to the bottom of "exotic institutions ;-) by trying on
themselves modes of thought taken from elsewhere(anywhere) or simply
imagined ;-) (tiny but hearty inner laughter accompanies this lonely
pilgrim at the thought of such a sentence;-)...demonstrating that that
every human mind is a locus of virtual experience where what goes on in
men's minds, however remote they may be ;-) can be investigated."
'The first speech was all in poetry; reasoning was though of only long
afterwards.' Rousseau...for whom, in whom just as for Heidegger, man
dwells in his poetry in order to more properly dwell in his world.
A field of dreams. 'N' which ;-) though they (twins) are of the 'above'
they are 'relatively 'of the below'...the same distinction applies to
birds, certain species flying 'high' others 'low'. 'well' others 'less
well'. In their own sphere ;-), consequently, while remaining generally
'of the above'; birds may also be divided according to 'above' and
'below'. - The relation between twins and birds is not explained then by
dot dot dot ....but by mental logical relations. Twins are birds not
because they are confused with them or because they look like them, but
because twins in relation to other men, are 'as persons of the above' to
'person of the below' and in relation to birds, as 'birds of below' are to
'birds of the above'...thus they occupy as do birds an intermediary
position between supreme spirit and human beings.
Science is a dialogue, a dialogue between man and nature. Prigogine.
Who would have dreamed. Prigogine
Knowledge presupposes that the world affects us and our instruments, that
there is an interaction between knower and known. Prigogine
A late, very late, a too very late word of warning for every manager in
the future: The master who believes he understands his slaves because they
obey his orders would be blind. What can be controlled is never completely
real; what is real can never be completely controlled. No speculation, no
teaching has ever affirmed an equivalence between what is done and undone:
between a plant that sprouts, flowers and dies, and a plant that
resuscitates, grows younger and returns to its original seed; between a
man who grows older and learns, and one who becomes a child, then an
embryo, then a cell.
What a load of nothing, again;-) "Art is then the becoming and happening
of truth."
Heidegger here I take to mean becoming/being. Heidegger asks if then truth
(unconcealdness of beings) aletheia, arises out of a load of nothing? It
does, if. If we here think by this nothing the mere not of that which is,
...truth is rather never gathered up from objects that are present and
ordinary. Rather, the opening up of the Open, and the clearing of what is,
happens only as the openness is projected, sketched out, that makes its
advent in throwness. (Throwness- Geworfenheit from,Being in Time. Meaning
self as responsible self driving forward toward its own possibility of
becoming. Not the having of a plan ;-) or treasure map ;-) but having the
capacity for future projection occurring antecedently to all plans making
plans possible.
" All art is as the letting happen of the advent of truth of what is."
Hard systems men and women listen up, "(Poetry) is not an aimless
imagining of whimsicalities and not a mere flight of notions and fancies
into the realm of the unreal. What poetry, as illuminating projection,
unfolds of unconcealdness and projects ahead into the design of the figure
is the Open which it (poetry) lets happen and indeed in such a way that
only now, in the midst of beings, the Open brings beings to shine and ring
out."
Cut to current reality as per Peter Senge et al. (First introduced to
Peter Senge, senior lecturer at MIT and Chair of the Society for
Organizational Learning (SoL), at the first SoL Europe Conference,
Bordeaux, France, 1999, where Mette S. Husemoen presented, together with
Roger Klev, "The Nature of Living Knowledge," which is a research paper
co-authored by Mette S. Husemoen and C. Will Zhang, as part of SINTEF's
Strategic Institute Program (SIP) on Knowledge Management.snip)
The wisdom of 20th century physical science has established the primary
role of energy-fields in the physical world (Bohm and Hiley, 1993; Laszlo,
1995). Structural or energetic interconnectedness between living systems
and their physical environment has also been established in biology and
cognitive science (Maturana and Varela, 1980, 1987). However, the problem
of today's management practice is that "most of us have not seriously
cultivated the 'state of being' needed to work with fields" and "there is
nothing in our development as professionals that has aided this
cultivation" (Senge et al). Clearly, we need to develop our collective
capacity to work with the "subtle field of thought and emotions" (Senge et
al) through trans-cultural energy-field cultivation in order to facilitate
the production of empathetic, "superconductive," shared energy environment
(Bohm) in which deep organizational learning and profound change can be
initiated and sustained. In other words, our task is to develop
collective learning and "knowledge conversion" practices and techniques
for "building a 'field' of interaction" (Nonaka and Takeuchi) or
"knowledge enabling context" based on "active empathy" and care (von Krogh
et al).
Snip
In leadership, the most profound challenge has become "one of being 'in
front of a blank canvas,'" i.e. to develop the capacity for "precognition"
- sensing and actualizing "emergent potentials" (Scharmer, 2001). In
engineering design, the challenge is to develop "methods and processes of
bringing the mind into a holistic mode of enlightenment so that the vision
of practical solutions of the task given are in harmony with the
evolutionary processes of the world" (Boelskifte and Støren). The need of
linking the state of health and well-being with world ecology and
sustainable development has become increasingly urgent (Brundtland,
Ehrenfeld), while the cultivation of such a state through experiential
knowledge in interconnectedness, even though existing since ancient times,
has only been recognized recently by reflecting scientists and health
professionals (Bohm and Peat, 1987; Eisenberg, 1995; Porkert)
Sounds like a meadow of angels to me ;-) a limitless free good ;-)
Love,
Andrew
Angel Meadow
Oxford
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