[Host's Note: It's perfectly fine to respond to an older msg from the
archive... This is in response to a msg from 12/97. The archive is at
http://www.learning-org.com ...Rick]
The tenet "Seek first to understand," has always worked well for me in my
relations with others.
I've been reading and stewing on At's posts off and on since he began on
this list. Last February my young daughters were playing with the screen
saver on the computer I use and put a happy birthday message there, which
the day afterwards seemed less appropriate, so I changed the words to "To
learn is to create." Every morning and several times during the day I see
the message scrolling across an otherwise black screen. I began to
experiment with that idea -- to learn is to create -- and the adjoints,
funny enough, were happiness and delight.
Soon after I decided to pick up my pace with regard to understanding At,
thus to reread his posts, while trying to do creating-learning and
learning-creating. Not long after that we learned here on the list that
he had experienced health problems. Recently I sent a personal message to
At, wishing him well, and to let him know that I looked forward to his
full recovery whereupon, I told him, I would be eager to engage him with
questions on the learning-org listserve. Yesterday he replied to me,
"Please fire them." My concern for his health continues ... but I offer
up my willingness to commute and learn partly in hope that it will have
positive adjoints to At's health.
I hope others of you who have enjoyed At's posts will consider joining me
in stepped-up learning collaboration. Maybe, too, Winfried, Leo, Doc,
Jon, and so many others who are way ahead of me would consider easing At's
burden to clarify, midwife, and/or ask the right question?
Regardless, into the cyber-blue, here's firing away.
In December 1997 At wrote:
One of the question is whether organizational learning and individual
learning is the same thing. If I would answer that question it would be a
simple no. However, although they are different, scapegoating is a common
symptom when neither of them happens.
Trying to work with At's learning and creativity theory, I would imagine
that organizational learning and individual learning are in some ways
different, and some ways the same.
While both cases would share similar mechanical qualities -- the seven
essentialities -- and both cases would share similar dynamical process --
digestion, embodiment, chaos of becoming, bifurcation, emergence or
immergence -- I would expect organizational learning to be more complex.
Thus, I would expect organizational learning cycles in general to take
more linear time than individual learning cycles.
I would expect organization-wide revolutionary emergences to involve much
higher rates of entropy production. In the USA, I suppose the
revolutionary war and the American civil war (which, as I remember,
claimed around 650,000 lives in roughly five linear years) would be
examples of bifurcations leading to emergences; both still maturing (I
suppose) with lots of ragged edges (immergences) in vortex/spiral
patterns (tracking essentialities over time and ?).
I doubt that an ubuntu index ever would have been very high nationwide in
the USA, though. The trail of tears in all its branches, iterations,
reverberations, and reflections, continues to this day.
I see both individual and organizational scapegoating (and blaming,
labeling, stereotyping) used both as excuse (minimizing, rationalizing,
denying, and shifting the burden) and as pretext (opportunistic
scapegoating, predator/prey). Blame induces me to think of impaired
wholeness. Labeling induces me to think of impaired sureness.
Stereotyping induces me to think both of impaired (being) and impairing
(becoming) wholeness, sureness, spareness, openness, liveness,
fruitfulness, and otherness. These are certainly signs of impaired
learning ability. Limited paradigm, too, I would think.
I expect scapegoating increases the rate of entropy production while
simultaneously impairing essentialities. Entropy occurs when, say, we
transform our body's energy to words. The force? Emotional potential, a
quality. The flux? Words, a quantity. At a national level the force
might be an executive decision. The flux might be agency, diplomatic, or
military mobilization.
??
Grins and best wishes,
Dan Chay
chay@alaska.net
--Heidi and Dan Chay <chay@alaska.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>