David Lyle-Carter wrote a thought provoking post in LO14833. He pointed
out the "Zen-like" nature of Peter Senge's writings, reducing the
development of learning organizations to the "simplicity of developing
those inherent human qualities latent in all of us, which allow us to
experience a sense of compassion and beauty for the world around us."
David raised the issue of whether we were not paying enough attention to
these matters of soul in our organizational change efforts.
I was struck first by the intensity of the comments to David's post. In 2
days, 8 responses were posted (by Andrew Wong, Bruce Campbell, Lindsey P.
Jarrell, James Carrington, Barry Mallis, Donald Kerr, Terri Deems, and
Gary M. Scherling). I was touched by the simplicity of David's summary,
and by the similarity of comments - noting both the importance of personal
mastery and the difficulty of basing an organizational transformation its
spread.
A group of us had a similar experience while attending the core course
offered by the Society for organizational Learning. Yes, there was
substantial class time teaching the basics of systems thinking, the ladder
of inference, dialogue and other specific skills. But the schedule for
each day also dedicated a lot of time to deep reflection and dialogue
about this issue of soul. Beth Janderoa and Daniel Kim, our facilitators,
shared their experiences and their emotions regularly, modeling Personal
Mastery at all times. Reflective, authentic and always with us in the
present, they helped us all experience what it is like as we begin to
center ourselves, bringing our selves fully to the task at hand. My
colleagues and I discussed what we wanted to take back to the office most,
and unanimously, we wanted to bring back a sense of this soulful behavior.
We recognized that if we could bring ourselves to our tasks by being fully
present, centered and reflective, we would be doing the most we could to
promote learning in our team and our organization.
By the end of the week, I found all of my reflection and journal entries
focused on letting go of the view that the problem was "out there".
Increasingly, I accepted that I can control only my own behavior, and even
that is subject to unconscious desires and motives. I began to understand
that if I could improve a little at being (instead of doing), I could help
my group more than any amount of improving my doing. Mark Twain once
quipped that "Nothing so much needs reforming as other peoples habits."
Peter and the Core Course are pointing us in exactly the other direction -
nothing can help us achieve our LO goals as reflecting on our behavior,
bringing ourselves fully to the present, and learning to be authentic in
our interactions.
--Mike
Michael A. Gort Gort@mail.com (203) 637-9279
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>