> John wrote
> > Is the organization a "thing?"
>
> I started off by wondering what you meant by a "thing"? Mugs,
> computers,
> these are things I can touch, see etc. Emotions are "things" I can
> experience. I guess in a way everything we are aware of is a "thing"
> in
> some form or other.
>
> By this ultra-simplistic logic, an organization is indeed a "thing",
> question is, what type of a "thing" is it????
I am aware that we live in a materialistic society. The Western culture
emphasized solid, material objects, and frequently "objectifies"
non-material items, like you have in saying, "emotions are 'things'". The
very word "emotion" has epistemological error contained within it, by
giving it substance it does not have. Emotions are Energy in Motion
(E-motion). Emotions certainly are not "things," they are "happenings."
Maturana insists we change our "languaging" to indicate the dynamic,
non-material nature of many words, like he has changed "emotion" to
"emotioning." He insists we change many nouns to verbs. This is the
"substance" of my argument.
It seems to me we are getting caught up in this type of epistemological
error when we call the place we work an organization. The word
"organization" implies a static structure, with rigid relationships and
solid boundaries. It seems to me the question, "can organization learn,"
also contains the same type of epistemological error. When I think of "the
organization," I think mostly of the people who work there, who are all
(or mostly) alive, vibrant, dynamic, and are not the same from one moment
to the next. There are other aspects of the organization I also think of,
which are material objects, like the buildings, the products, and the
paper on which are held the rules, regulations, experiences, hopes,
dreams, and such AT ONE MOMENT in the organization's history. Those
objects do not learn, they are changed, by the people of the
"organization" in their daily activity.
Our "organizing" in the past has been focused largely on producing
material goods. I believe the folks who use the term "the learning
organization" intend to change the ways we behave at work. I also believe
that the epistemological error found in the question "can organizations
learn" can be corrected by changing the noun "organization" to the verb
"organizing." We can, in our organizing, learn. While we are organizing,
we can focus on learning. We can learn, while we organize. etc.
Can people learn while they are organizing? The question seems trivial.
Yet we can increase our rate learning, which is non-trivial, and we can
change the focus of our organizing to emphasize learning, which is an
extremely difficult, "emotion" fraught, even a risky endeavor.
-- John Crutcher John.crutcher@pss.boeing.comLearning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>