Dear friends,
I was excited to read Steve's observation on our tendencies to use
analogies, and found it helpful for my own work. I will try to keep an eye
on when I am using them, and what my underlying motivation is. I recently
finished reading George Soros' Crisis of Global Capitalism and was very
interested in his thesis, why insights from natural sciences can not be
applied to social sciences. For those of you who don't know the book, (or
- I guess - his earlier writings, which I don't know,) he claims that
social events have thinking participants and that the thinking
participants themselves have so much part in creating the social reality,
that any models from other areas of life cannot be used to successfully
predict or explain human social events.(I guess he is extrapolating from
his influence on the world economy ;-)) So many of the participants on
this string have impressed me with their philosophical depth, that I would
like to hear more about this from others.
I also follow with great interest other aspects of the discussion "can
orgs. learn". I use a model in my work (Mindell's Processwork), that has
less of an analytical and more of a phenomenological approach. In this, it
seems that we observe that organisations can learn beyond individual
learning. Let me say a couple of basic details about the work and share
some of its outcome and conclusions. I hope for the thoughts and input of
those, that have an interest in similar questions?
One of the ways we work is, that in the course of facilitating a group or
organisation of any size, we try to observe what roles come up
spontaneously and are being expressed, and what roles are "being talked
about", avoided or indirectly referred to. Here is an example: in the
recent discussion about small group participation, somebody mentioned, if
I remember correctly the possibility of creating the client/customer role
in a team where there is a reoccurring issue of participation, and use
this role as part of the facilitation of the problem. In our paradigm, we
would notice, that the customer role is present to begin with (meaning
part of the "measurable" reality of the organisation) but in this case
not being spontaneously created by the team. We would try to raise the
team's awareness to that fact and observe what happens. Let's for the sake
of the example make up the situation, that someone would jokingly say "we
don't care about customers" or someone would say remorsefully, " we get
so excited about working out problems that we forget the customer" we
would believe that those are also roles that are present but not being
expressed directly, they are not "measurable" in the same way. (By
"measurable" I mean that the majority of a group has consensus, that an
element forms part of what they call "reality"). We would now try to bring
them out in the open and find out with everybody's help how these roles
"think" and "speak". Obviously, by having these roles out in the open, the
participants can actively reflect on them and make conscious choices about
them, etc. If the work is being sustained beyond that immediate event,
meaning if we can get deeper into the cultural, economic, emotional, etc
connotations of these possible changes, these roles frequently change over
a period of several months. The new roles become part of the organisation,
they now direct and influence the members in a similar way like the old
ones did, but of course with a different content. They don't seem to have
to be conscious to the individual participant, once they have become part
of the "culture", like the beginning roles were really not conscious
either. In some cases working with the same organisation again a few years
later down the road, we observe, that the participants might have changed,
but the organisation has kept the changed roles. This learning is no
longer conscious to the new participants, meaning it is not "owned" as
learning, and therefore cannot be used as consciously as learning that you
identify with. But however, the organisation has learned. The new members
who will join later will assimilate this learning differently, some by
having their own individual learning process that will run through the
same awareness process like the organisation did, (wow, this is different
from where I was before, what is happening here?), some will pick it up by
adapting to the new situation over time. (Ah well, each organisation is
different, I will get used to this one, too) Of course many organisations
change with the Zeitgeist in a similar fashion, without having really much
of a learning process themselves, but more like copying what they see
others doing.
Greetings
Max
Max Schupbach, Ph.D.
2049 NW Hoyt Street # 3,PORTLAND,OR,97209
Phone/Fax USA 503 223 6548
www.max-jytte.com email: max@max-jytte.com
--"Max Schupbach" <max@max-jytte.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>