Roxanne:
I read your ideas for the bus drivers dilemmas (copied below) and thought
"What a great approach to intervening in a social system". I was
particularly caught by your suggestions because I teach intervention
techniques in a Masters Program in Applied Social Science at Concordia
University in Montreal. I am constantly looking for ways of encouraging
them to think in more inclusive terms about all the players in the systems
we work with. Your suggested approaches to intervention do this nicely -
and certainly broaden the possible "solution space" to the issues.
I will be working with a group of 14 new Masters students this fall on
understanding philosophy and practice of social system intervention.
So...the very first thing that they will see as we move to talk about the
subject is the question that was suggested to you and the answers that you
put out - after they work on their own responses to the bus driver's
dilemma, of course. Your thoughtful responses suggest a true respect for
all the elements of the system which make up the "field" of the issue. If
we could get more interveners thinking like this, be they honcho
consultants or bus drivers or police people (to mention a few of the
groups of people struggling with systems intervention that have been
mentioned in our Net conversations over the last few weeks), it would be
fascinating to see what the results might lead to.
Thanks for taking the time to write out your suggestions. I'll let you
know what the participants in our class come up with.
Warm regards,
Michael Miles
Associate Professor
Department of Applied Social Science
Concordia University
"The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have
done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level as
they were created." - Albert Einstein, 1946
--mmiles@magi.com (Mike Miles)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>