At,
I've not been following this thread much, but I happened to look at your
message. This is perhaps a practical experience which supports your more
theoretical insights.
> Just as an individual may invoke Azazel when personal mastery fails, an
> organisation may also invoke Azazel when organisational leaning fails. I
It's interesting (to me) that I've just been formulating over the last few
weeks for myself that I am more likely to engage in defensive behaviors,
including blaming others or playing the victim, when I don't have a
strategy for dealing with the situation in which I find myself. That in
itself seems sufficient to explain my behavior in a number of cases.
> Not all individuals or organisations who fail to learn, invoke Azazel. I
> have made another observation, namely that those who learn from their
> failures, almost never invoke Azazel. But those who repeatedly fails to
> learn, invokes Azazel with a remarkable regularity. I eventually
Perhaps one thing that has been helping me is a focus on action learning
using a form that Bob Williams gave me (Bob: you're on this group,
right?). I do observe that I am getting better in some specific areas,
but in those where I still have significant gaps in my skills, I'm still
prone to moves towards defensiveness. For me, putting things down on
paper (perhaps in a journal, but I'm finding Bob's form more useful these
days) has been quite helpful.
Thanks for that last insight. Perhaps my focusing even more on learning
from my failures is a significant key to my moving further away from
defensive behavior and towards growth.
Thanks,
Bill
-- Bill Harris Hewlett-Packard Co. R&D Engineering Processes Lake Stevens Division domain: billh@lsid.hp.com M/S 330 phone: (425) 335-2200 8600 Soper Hill Road fax: (425) 335-2828 Everett, WA 98205-1298Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>