I very much agree with T.J. Elliott and Chau Nguyen and appreciate their
courage in bringing up a "process" issue in the midst of all the more
comfortable, (as well as useful) content. To use Chau's analogy, holding
up the starving heart when the brain is stuffed to overflowing, takes some
guts.
I just signed onto this list a few weeks ago, hoping to extend the
fellowship of the System Thinking Conference and in search of virtual
communities who live their principles. By responding to Chau's concerns
this list community can take a step towards becoming a
"double-loop'learning community itself. The issues he raises:
> Most org, when it starts
> to expand, it expands the size but ignores the spirit. As a result, you
> have an imbalance structure for living org. I sincerely believe that my
> feeling is not uncommon. I believe that many people feel the same way
> in
> big corporation, especially those people who started with a company when
> it was small, and stick around to watch it grows big. In the growing
> process, somehow we lost the sense of original, the pride of membership,
> the proud of being part of something special. Those are the kind of
> feeling that creates breakthrough in performance.
are profound ones and T.J. follows on by wisely observing
> They have a great deal to do with the medium in my opinion. If one can
> see
> another's eyes, watch their hands gesture, coax a smile from them or
> have
> one elicited yourself, then I think you have an easier pathway to the
> soul. I do not know the answer to this dilemma. I am trying to build a
> cooperative knowledge base around issues of online facilitation with
> colleagues at Knowledge Ecology Network and this is an issue that arises
>
> again.
I had begun my participation on the list with great hopes, but found most
postings of limited use -- not because they are not useful, they represent
a wonderful amount of knowledge -- but often they were not in my direct
field so I experienced them, as Chau said, as more like reading a journal.
I experienced less sense of community in the way that I had hoped for. My
answer was to set a mail filter up for this list's postings and only check
it occasionally. It was only after reading Chau's post that I realised
that the sheer number of postings and a relatively linear perspective on
the topic were combining to drain me of my enthusiasm to participate. I,
too, wonder if others have felt this.
David Isaacs (who does great work with Juanita Brown regarding the ablity
of conversation to be our primary knowledge container) talks about the
importance of "system thinking" (note the absence of the "s" at the end of
the system). By having a conversation about how size and topic and tone
impacts our desire to participate in this conversation, we could be a
great example of a "system" -- this conversational group as a system --
thinking about itself.
>From my own consulting practice, I have come to agree with T.J.'s
observations that the medium of email filters out much of the richness of
face-to-face conversation. On email, all we have is each others words
(Don't communication scholars say words comprise less that 30% of the
message in face to face conversation?). It is sort of like drinking the
skim milk of conversation.
I am an organizational psychologist and a watercolor painter. I have a
passion to pull more of the right brain into our organizational lives, and
also into the online communites that emerge from these organizations. I
think most organizations have a culture which systematically shoot
themselves in the foot by rejecting or undervalueing the visual, the
kinesthestic, the musical, the emotional -- all of the intelligences we
have that are not linear, verbal and analytic. Great people working in
this arena are Mike and Lynn Bebb from New Zealand. Their workshop at
Systems Thinking made a couple of good points... I quote from their
workshop slides:
> In Order for Our Organizations to be Truly Visionary, they need to :
>
> Engage both head (clarity) and heart (commitment)
> Develop commitment though on-going sharing of the vision -- not
> selling
>
> Why Writing Visions Goes Wrong
>
> Acieves clarity at the expense of commitment (head at the expense
> of hear)
> Vision Statments must be simplisting, involving compromise amongst
> those writing, and trivializing the spirit of the vision.
> Visions are reduced to slogans, which fail to stumlate further
> dialouge.
> The Vision Statement cannot represent the fullness of the dialuge
> that went into its production.
In their workshops, they have each person draw what their vision is,
artistic inhibitions not withstanding. The drawing becomes a stepping
stone to the story that they tell. The story with the picture then is the
right brained vessel to carry the vision to other people.
I came to my current consulting work (a synthesis of organizational
psychology and art!?) from ten years in diversity training. That decade
left me with a profound conclusion:
Upon close examination, the systematic exclusion of "Diverse" people from
meaningful contribution to organizational life is only superficially based
on race, age, gender, language, etc.. If we got beyond those barriers,
(hard enough, admittedly!) there was an even deeper barrier of rejecting
people because of a different way of thinking. Left brain thinking styles
have a long track record and great deal of power in many of our
organizations, and they often feel uncomfortable with right brain
processes or channels of communication.
This is also, I think, the reason that so many of us find our jobs so
spritually empoverished. As David Whyte says, "Work, paradoxically, does
not ask enough of us, yet exhausts the narrow parts of us we do bring to
its door." Chau's last paragraph taps into a far larger issue than the
linear quality of this list. It is a striking soliloquy voicing the
despair and self-doubt that many, many people experience at their jobs.
I'm not sure why i write... maybe because i'm a very emotional person,
because i like to wear my feeling where everyone can see it? or simply
because i just wanted to find a way to get the attention of you all? or
maybe because it is late Friday afternoon, and I have been working long
hour the whole week and I need to be mad at something or someone? Or
maybe because I am mentally challenged but don't know it?
There is a legion of people whose talents are lost to the organization
because they cannot bring their mind to tasks where their spirits are not
welcome.
Hope these thoughts are helpful to the community of learners that is
emerging on this list. I would like to hear from more people, to get a
sense of whether my thoughts are a mainstream or minority.
Marilee Taussig
The Ruth Institute
mtaussig@dawn-treader.com
610-892-7278
--Marilee Taussig <mtaussig@netreach.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>