In his comments on _The Fountainhead_ (LO17031) Rick Karash wrote:
>What's the relevance to Org Learning? To me, there's a real subtlety here,
>a dilemma. Individual and collective aspiration are important for org
>learning. (Personal Mastery, the enrollment concept, view of leadership
>doing work they really care about.) Yet, it is unsatisfying to me when it
>is used solely in pursuit of selfish narrow purposes, not in service of
>something larger.
I share Rick's dilemma. When I first went to a workshop covering Personal
Mastery I left with an impression the instructors had trivilized this
discipline a little by saying this was a technique (to generate forward
movement through the tension between our personal vision and the current
reality) we could use to get or create "whatever we most wanted." Just say
"I want..." etc, etc.
Maybe so, but digging more into what's been written about Personal Mastery
shows there's potentially more to it than a way to achieve narrow, selfish
purposes. Charlotte Roberts in _The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook_
eloquently writes about moving first from a reactive (being tossed about
by all that's happening) to a creative orientation (making the future you
want happen). But she doesn't stop there. She then describes what she
labels an "interdependent orientation" which gives you a way to connect
your wants with some larger purpose that you can be an expression of. See
more details on pp. 226-230.
Robert Fritz, the intellectual father of this discipline, has also
explored these ideas. In the final chapter of _The Path of Least
Resistance_ he says that while learning how to master cause and effect is
important, there are even more basic forces at play in creativity. He
talks about these leading to "transcendent structures," ways your actions
can be in sync with broader societal longings and your life become more
unified.
Sadly (to me, at least) Fritz's later book that applies the principles of
structural tension to organizations, _Corporate Tides_ , doesn't deal with
these broader issues. Applied to corporations, they would provide a good
basis to better understand business ethics and how strategy could emerge
from company's overall purpose.
It might be useful when working with Personal Mastery to keep in mind its
ability to take us beyond getting what we most want to getting a deeper
understanding of just what that is.
Bob Tomasko
RMTomasko@aol.com
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