Ray, thanks for your insightful comments. Being married to a musician and
having some amateur music experience in my background, I am very
interested in the synergy between what artists and businesspeople learn.
> I seem to remember Bertrand Russell talking a lot about this tendency for
> truth not to travel well from one group to another. So where are we?
I've noted something like this before, but your posting put it in a new
light. It now seems like a ladder of inference phenomenon at the macro
level. We all have our own values (the cultures in which we exist,
modified by our own uniqueness), and we derive actions from those values.
Sometimes those actions are pronouncements about what is right. Others
view (or hear) those actions and interpret them in light of their culture
and uniqueness. If there is conflict, those two parties may need to
understand each other at the level of values to comprehend how the actions
or pronouncements came to be.
I've used this idea in the past to explain why good processes in one
organization haven't worked in another. They were likely created in the
first based on values that aren't shared by people in the second. When
the second organization gets the process, it doesn't map to their needs or
experience.
If anyone has seen the St. Gallen (Switzerland) University (actually
Hochschule St. Gallen) theory of integrated management, it seems to speak
to this integration of values, organization and behavior, too.
Regards,
Bill
-- Bill Harris Hewlett-Packard Co. R&D Engineering Processes Lake Stevens Division domain: billh@lsid.hp.com M/S 330 phone: (425) 335-2200 8600 Soper Hill Road fax: (425) 335-2828 Everett, WA 98205-1298Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>