A few Talmudic footnotes to some comments by Simon Buckingham:
>I certainly can- I would dump or modify all or any of my ideas if it
>turned out not be true. Just to say that I seek not no organizations but
>simply a different form of organizations- dynamic and voluntary rather
>than static and forced. That's learning after all- continually assessing
>actual outcomes compared with expected outcomes and modifying. Einstein
>has the greatest at this- he continually reassessed his past work and
>that of others as he developed his ideas more widely and deeply. And even
>he ended up stubbornly ignoring and rejecting new paths such as quantum
>physics.
Your ideas, it seems to me, are not able to be discussed as "true" or
"false"--that is, there is no real way to verify them empirically: they
will either be judged useful or not useful, or , better, sometimes useful,
sometimes a hindrance.
All organizations (again, it seems to me) are already all of the
above:they are always both static and forced, dynamic and voluntary. (A
few exceptions, of course, like prisons.)
What those of us who were "forced" to endure formal philosophy ended up
grudgingly learning from such as Hegel is that what we first learn to see
as opposites, such as "heads" and "tails" are better seen as two sides of
the same coin.(Were we "really" forced? Depends on what "forced" means.)
The organization of traffic that includes traffic lights has both
voluntary and forced aspects: the laws wants to compel me to stop on red,
and most of us applaud that. On occasion it is wiser for me to decide to
run the light to avoid an accident, but most of us agree that this form or
organization ought not to be based on voluntary compliance.
Organizations, then, need to have all of the seemingly heads and tails
aspects language describes with such terms as "static" and "dynamic."
Again, these are not really contraries or contradictories, but two sides
of a necessary balance.
Another way of using the same language would be to suggest that a
"healthy" organization (another limited metaphor) is static when it
should be static and dynamic when it should be dynamic.
Language favors and privileges , invariably, one of the two terms in such
dichotomies. That is, language seems to insist that it is better to be
"dynamic" than "static", better to be "voluntary" than "forced."
By choosing to use such terms one can predict the point of view, the
philosophy, the practice from the very choice of language.
Or so thinks
Steve Eskow
Dr. Steve Eskow
President, The Electronic University Network
288 Stone Island Road
Enterprise, Florida 32725
Phone: 407-321-8770 Fax: 407-321-4681
email: dreskow@aol.com
--"Dr. Steve Eskow" <dreskow@magicnet.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>