Doug Merchant captured one of the reasons I believe this too-long thread
caught my imagination when we wrote:
>Unfortunately, the current L-O community is so focused on the individual
>learner as to be culturally and perceptually impaired when it comes to
>organizational level learning. I suspect this impairment will limit the
>contributions from the L-O efforts and eventually the L-O movement will
>be displaced by a new HR/OD fad.
I am pragmatic about language. If we accept the idea that organizational
learning is "nothing more than" (reducible to, analyzable completely in
terms of) individual learning, we will act in certain ways -- ways that I,
like Doug, believe will limit what we can accomplish.
I submit that within organizations one finds much more than just
individual people. There are processes, infrastructure (the telephone
system and how it works, the computer network), physical objects (like
tools of various kinds, buildings), dynamic structure (who reports to
whom, who are on what teams, how decisions are made), etc. When I hop in
my car to drive somewhere, I do not choose a straight-line route and
follow it -- I take the roads that have been built. Those roads both
enhance and limit my ability to get places: enhance because they are
smooth and go nearly everywhere I want to drive, limit because they don't
always go in a straight line between my starting and ending points. It
doesn't make sense to try to analyze my path by analyzing nothing but my
actions, my goals, my individual choices without taking into account the
configuration of the roads. And it doesn't make sense to analyze an
organization by analyzing nothing but individuals.
Herbert Simon, in his monograph "Sciences of the Artificial," uses the
example of the path taken by an ant attempting to get back to its home.
Its path -- an erratic, almost random-looking one -- cannot be understood
from looking within the ant (assuming one could do so.) Within the ant
are simply a goal (to get home) and some capabilities (leg strength,
etc.), none of which help us much in understanding why the ant is taking
this particular path. No, to understand this particular path one must
look primarily at the environment outside the ant -- what terrain, what
obstructions lie in the ant's straight-line path toward home? Put
together an understanding of the "task environment" and the ant's few
relevant capabilities, then you'll understand why it turned left here
(obstruction too steep to crawl over), went right there (downhill slope),
etc.
--"John Gunkler" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>