JOE_PODOLSKY@HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com wrote:
>
> One evening few weeks ago, my wife Hudi, representing a non-profit agency
> that she works with, met with a volunteer committee of another agency to
> talk about an event that the two agencies were going to do together. She
> came back babbling about the inefficiency of the committee. It took, she
> said, two hours to do 15 minutes of work because the people went off on
> tangents and gossiped.
>
> As we talked about it, however, we realized that, in this case, and
> probably in many others, "efficiently reaching business results" are not
> what's important to the volunteers. What's more important is the process
> of getting those results. They get their "pay" in the activity itself,
> the social interaction of the committee, in the role they play on the
> committee, and in the friendships that come from their work. The
> "business results" are secondary to those (very informal, poorly
> structured) processes.
A wonderful post Joe and I guess I should say Hudi as well.
Just a note from my side of the fence. It is a truism in the creative
arts that the doors into originality are oftened entered through the wrong
answer. Chaotic processes if I understand the idea, are holistic, i.e.
involve the whole person as well as the whole question. Straight beams
often are keyholes into rooms that possess too much to be safe with just
the information provided by the singular vision of the whole.
Directed processes are on the other hand derivitive and obvious. They
follow a well laid down map. Most business, must by nature of the need
for profit, function within the latter, but if you are in a business with
little physical capital and flying on the information, that is a different
matter completely. That is closer to the total intellectual capital of a
Fine Arts production company. I believe that we have a lot to share.
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera of New York
mcore@idt.net
--Ray Evans Harrell <mcore@IDT.NET>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>