Dear Subscribers,
When I originally wrote a message some weeks back asking "is developing
Compassion and a sense of Beauty the essence of developing a Learning
Organisation", I had no idea it would start such a thread of rhetorical
debate! Especially those discussions involving religious contentions.
In my original message I proposed that many OD interventions may prove to
be less than satisfactory in achieving the qualities of a learning
organization because OD practitioners may not be placing enough emphasis
upon developing these "Soul" like qualities which Senge suggested are the
essence of the learning organization. Moreover, when Senge was questioned
as to where he came up with most of his LO concepts, he replied that he
conceived many of the ideas during his regular practice of meditation.
Whatever one's concept of God may be, an all powerful figure with a white
beard in heaven ruling over us all; an intricate, sustaining force that
binds and sustains us perpetually, it seems clear to me that all the
religious teachings, East and West, have pointed out that there are those
who talk about God and there are those who experience him/her. The
experience, it seems, lies not in stirring up the mind with intellectual
chatter, but rather in stilling it in order to allow our latent human soul
qualities to be expressed unhindered. One cannot, I believe, communicate
to another the experience of compassion or of beauty any more that one can
convey to a blind man/woman the wonderful qualities of the sun. S/he may
grasp something intellectually and conceptually but in the end s/he hasn't
seen the sun. I am convinced that every human-being is inherently able to
experience compassion for life around him/her and the beauty of it all,
but it's the experience that really counts, the conceptual understanding
of it, merely a stepping-stone on the way.
Perhaps then, as I suggested in my earlier message, the emphasis on OD
interventions might well profit from the OD practitioners developing the
experience of these wonderful qualities themselves by whatever means.
Although, in my experience, effective measures in achieving this usually
involve a quiet mind, a peaceful body and humility.
David Lyle-Carter <davidlyle@hotmail.com>
Institute of Inner-Teamwork
Hamburg, Germany.
--"david lyle-carter" <davidlyle@hotmail.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>