Mark W. McElroy wrote:
>I would not be the first person to say that in spite of my admiration for
>the work done by Peter Senge and other proponents of learning
>organizations, that what we all find most frustrating in these adventures
>is not knowing exactly what to do about it on Monday morning. Every one
>of us on this listserv wants to know how to do it! What we all desperately
>need and want is an executable model. Give me a blueprint, a strategy, a
>learning organization's operators manual, anything, but tell me/us how to
>get there from here!
For me a learning organisation is something that can not be "made" or
"constructed" or "designed", but it needs to grow. Growing needs time,
growing can be inhibited and growing can fail. One way to fail is, to try
to make it happen too fast.
Stressing this time-requirement is common to the teachers on learning
organisation which I admire most:
Peter Senge talking about the time to develop a discipline - this was the
reason why he chose disciplin and not tool or blueprint and thats why the
fieldbook is a fieldbook and not an operators manual.
Arie de Geus in his Living Company said that he was inspired by a study on
the ages of companies - a few seem to have all time in universe and most
others "die" within a few decades.
At de Lange discribes learning as a sequence of emergences of new oder at
the edge of chaos and digestions close to equilibrium. Free energy needs
to build up (digestion) and is being consumed by means of entropy
production (heading towards the edge of chaos where emergences - growth -
or immergences - failure - may occur). Both, emergence and digestion needs
its specific time.
Monday morning: I remember very well that Monday morning, when my eldest
son came to school two years ago. He thought that he would get the ability
to read from there. No idea of the years he is going to spend at school,
no idea of the discipline he will have to acquire and hopefully learn to
value high enough to support his learning throughout his whole life. He
had to go through some frustration when he had to learn that the Monday
morning hope didn't fulfill and that daily homework has to be done. Its
only we as parents who can smile because we know. I guess that this is
common knowledge for all complex adaptive systems. Is this knowledge
reflected also in complex adaptive systems theory?
>Human organizations are
>complex adaptive systems (nonlinear, rule-driven, agent-based,
>learning/adaptive systems). For the past thirty years, the
>functioning of
>knowledge and cognition in such systems has been studied intensively
>under the label of complex adaptive systems theory.
Leading a learning organisation requires more of a gardener than an
engineer. May be I am wrong - I don't know much about complex adaptive
systems apart from being one myself - but already the term complex
adaptive systems sounds like a topic to study in order to be able to give
the results to engineers who then can make/construct/design it.
For me the crucial question is: Do we know enough about the required time
frames and how do we acknowledge this necessary condition in our
management decisions - in a world where managers are not paid for being
patient but where being destructive can be rewarded highly?
Liebe Gruesse
Winfried
--"Winfried Dressler" <winfried.dressler@voith.de>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>