Dear Organlearners,
John Zavacki <jzavacki@greenapple.com> writes:
>Although we work in an engineering context, we are all learning
>to be generalists, that is, teachers, coaches, mentors. My own
>frame of reference is W. Edwards Deming's System of Profound
>Knowledge, augmented by the Vth Discipline and Stephen Covey's
>view of Principle-Centered Leadership. Deming, Covey, Senge,
>and all of their disciples are ultimately readable. There are no
>bifurcated emergences with overtones of digestion.
Greetings John,
I will focus on the "creative course of time" so that hopefully, we
can get a perspective on the learning which is taking place on this
list.
Before I began participating in the learning diaologue on this list,
Mike McMaster used to contribute much to it on complexity theory and
what it has to say for organisations. He also used the words
bifurcation and emergence. Sometimes fellow learners complained about
the obfuscation involved. At some I joined the dialogue and also began
to use these words. On some occassions he praised me on what I have
written, perhaps thankful for another swallow to help make the summer.
I usually smiled wryly, thinking by myself: "Wait until I go into
higher gears (increase the M value). The Digestor is still working
favourably towards your digestive learning. But what will happen to
you when you encounter words like essentialities, free energy and
digestion? Will you be able to make the required emergent learning, or
will you cause your own immergences when perceiving that you might
become a prey?" Unfortunately, Mike left the LO-dialogue so that I
will never know for sure.
>There are changes in behavior and level of knowledge. The
>greatest challenge in any leadership role is the understanding
>of these changes.
(27 Apr 1999, John Zavacki, LO-list)
Like Mike did to me, I now have to praise John for writing such a
crystal clear piece of wisdom. I strongly encourage fellow learners to
make a note of it for future reference purposes. It is often in our
moments of GREAT FRUSTRATION that the BRILLIANT touch of the GENIUS
appear. The FRUSTRATION signals entropy production. The GREAT refers
to the edge of chaos where bifurcations happen. The BRILLIANT
symbolises the level of perfection in the emergence resulting from the
bifurcation. The GENIUS is nobody else than John, Rick, anyone of you
and me, ordinary people from all walks of life.
John has give us above the seed (kernel) on which the crystal of
leadership grows digestively. I do not know of anyone else who has
done it with such poetic beauty.
>When we share our knowledge, our observations, our fears,
>and our joys, we are both learning and teaching. When we do
>this in the context of a community, albeit a factory, church,
>university, or military unit, we are learning as an organization.
Yes. As for myself, I rather want to be an eternal learner than a
temporary teacher. I have often said so. Teaching is, for me, only one
other of many ways of learning. This I experienced with immense
dispair in May 1972. Since then it has become one of my guiding
crystal seeds.
>Dr. Deming taught me to teach in the language of the audience.
>In this arena, however, I fear I have no competence. There has
>become a new language. It is to me, a language of obfuscation,
>reminiscent of the academic world in which people wrote about
>"suicide and skepticism", "thinking about thinking", and other
>illogical extensions of the basic truths of art and science designed
>to perpetuate the intellectual myth.
>
>I will be off to think with boy scouts, engineers, accountants, and
>the odd computer scientist now. I've said my own two cents worth
>and won't be spending more intellectual capital on this
>metatheoretical flight through mind.
If I still remember correctly, Dr Deming was trained as a physicist.
What has physics to do with it? During my own post graduate training
(1966-67) as a physicist I was treated with the exact terminology of
phsyics. I thought it had to be like that. But on the quiet I read
what great physicists like Planck and Einstein had to say in their
"off-beat musings". I found it rather wierd that they insisted on the
following piece of advice: The highest value of a discovery in science
lies in its explaining to ordinary people in their day-to-day
language. But since beginning teaching in 1972, I began to experience
something of what they meant.
Then, after having discovered empirically in 1982-83 that entropy
production also occurs in the world of mind, I suddenly had to deal
with this advice on all four the levels of my own knowledge
(experential, tacit, formal and sapient). These scientists, each
having initiated a paradigm shift, meant far much more than what this
simple sentence of advice on the higest value of a scientific
discovery seems to say. They actually refered to the participation in
the saltotoric changes of the consciousness of humankind as a whole.
In other words, the issue does not involve some humans like John,
Rick, you and me and the consciousness of each of us. It concerns the
development (evolution) of humankind, physically and spiritually. Thus
we should not stare at the days and the months in which we live, but
should also observe human artifacts through the centuries and
millenia -- our own century and millenium as well as all the others.
>My own frame of reference is W. Edwards Deming's System
>of Profound Knowledge, augmented by the Vth Discipline and
>Stephen Covey's view of Principle-Centered Leadership.
>Deming, Covey, Senge, and all of their disciples are ultimately
>readable
Allow me to remind you that I am much aware of my own limitations. See
for example
Essentiality - "quantity-limit" (spareness) LO20541
<http://www.learning-org.com/99.02/0009.html>
How I envy the "information warehouses" such as libraries and internet
sources avialable to many of you.
I have to cut my own internet browsing to the bone. I am too
embarrassed to even mention the internet budget for our university as
a whole. The other articulated information which I have to work with,
comes mainly from libraries in Pretoria and Johannesburg (65 km from
Pretoria.) Consider, for example, the library of my own university.
You may read about the history of this university at
<http://www.up.ac.za/history/reerste.html>
Please read it in the context of the history of the province of
Transvaal. Before 1902, it was known as the Zuid Afrikaansche
Republiek. Then came the terrible Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902) in which
the Brittish forces destroyed the ZAR and OVS (Oranje Vrij Staat) into
desolated wasteland. In this war 26 000 Boer women and children as
well as 14 000 Bantu (black) people died in Brittish concentration
camps. The only "sin" of the black people was that they could speak
the language of the Boers, namely Afrikaans. At that stage this
language did not even had the emergence to an accepted written form.
Then think of WWI, great droughts and the Depression, finally WWII and
its aftermath before you begin to think of the era of apartheid
(1948-1992) and all the sanctions leveled against South Africa. Think
of how many books and journals a library could have bought with so
many holes to cover up.
It is from such an articulated information environment which I have to
operate. I do not make excuses for myself, although I ask for the
understanding of the predicament of all my colleagues, white, brown
and black. I myself suspected that when I began my roaming in academy
in 1968, jumping off the band wagon of traditional science, that
things would not go so smoothly as for others. But when the surface
became rough and the rapids churning, I managed to provide for my own
escapes to the desserts of Southern Africa. There nothing is
articulated or artificial. Thus I managed to survive, thanks to a
family who tried to understand me. I am also very well aware that I
cannot compete when judged in terms of the information environments
available in other parts of the world. I can only live with my own
limitations and make the best of it. Fortunately, I now also know how
futile judgements are for learning. But used as tools for destruction,
judgements are among the best -- better even than nuclear bombs.
John, I now want to connect to the following which you wrote:
>One of the improvement areas my peers chose for me was
>in the area of language and its use. I am often overly
>technical, and tend to ramble. This is, indeed, a truth.
Except for one point, it also applies to me. First I make my own
choices. Then my peers choose for me. I have to live with both.
Are we still focussing on the "creative course of time"? Let us
observe the language which I am using. I have often explained that
English is not my mother tongue and that I seldom have the opportunity
to speak it. But I have to write in it, nowadays far more than in my
own mother tongue.
One of the technical words which I have used on this list more than
all fellow learners put together, is that hideous technical word
"entropy". In the Primer on Entropy I have shown how closely the term
entropy is related to a concept with the name "temperature". I have
not, by far, used the word "temperature" as much as the word
"entropy". But let us contemplate this word and what the "creative
course of time" did to it.
Today we, the ordinary people, speak of "temperature" as easily as
speaking of "water", "food", "book" and "AIDS". Twenty years ago the
acronym "AIDS" did not even exist! Yet, because of the importance of
"AIDS", we all use it without questioning a possible obfuscation. Many
people to whom I have spoken about "AIDS", do not even know what the
acronym stands for. But they all use the word left, right and centre
whether their lives depend on it or not. Likewise we speak of the
ambient temperature in the room or the temperature in the radiator of
the car without thinking twice about the word temperature.
But it was not always like that. Whereas it took "AIDS" less than
twenty years to become "naturalised", it took "temperature" more than
200 years. (Do you want to look for a candidate which will take less
then 2 years? Keep a lookout for "free energy" sometime in the next
century!) How was it with temperature?
Two thousands years ago the Romans used the word "tempero"=proportion.
They used it for chemical technologies like making glass or alloys
like brass. For example, Pliny recorded the "tempero" for making
glass, namely the proportion of quantities of sand, lime and wood ash.
Pliny never used, or even thought of using the word tempero (or
temperature for the same matter) to refer to the "intensity of fire"
needed to melt the mixture into glass. In fact, he did not even had a
Latin word for this intensity.
Then things got quieter and quieter at the Latin front. Eventually it
was spoken and written mostly by the clergy. It was in those days (450
AD) when the language "englisc" was born. Because it was so quiet on
the Latin front, nobody speaking "englisc" cared for using Latin
words. Another 600 years past by. Then the "englander" became aware
that the Franks (who called themselves "franc"=free) was taking
interest in them. Gradually they were introduced to the Frankish
version of Latin. The "englander" even learned from them the word
"candide"=white as a better word for the meaning "franc"=frank. The
"englander" made the latter meaning up themselves to refer to any
ingenious person like those people ("francs") coming from over the
Channel.
Meanwhile, many of their Saxon relatives who remained on the continent
when some of them and the Angles migrated to England, were living in
the saddest of conditions. Since the day of that migration, they lived
for 400 years as "sachsen", enjoying the luxury of their federation of
"gouwen" states. But the New Roman Empire under the leadership of
Pepine and then his son Charlemagne had to crush this last federation
of "freoman"=free people. Soon the Saxons began to use the name
"franc" for anything having a bad (acrid) taste. But what happened to
the word "tempero"? Nothing. The printing of books was not yet
invented.
The era which we now call Old English was coming to an end. It emerged
into what we now call Middle English (1100-1500). In it a system of
grammer began to develop to accomodate (through French) words of Latin
and Greek origin. It happened spontaneously and no one thought it to
be important. The upper layer of Romanic words on the stratum of
Anglo-Saxon words increased gradually. But finally something of great
importance happened -- Gutenberg invented the press (1450). Very soon
some people, fortunate to have been taught literacy, had many books to
read. The wealth of information from the old Roman and Greek and
through them even older civilisations was unlocked to them. Most of
this wealth were in Latin and Greek.
Suddenly ordinary English people speaking Middle English were flooded
with strange words. The upper layer of Romanic words on the stratum of
Anglo-Saxon words increased dramatically. Some were wondering what was
happening to their language, but the majority became very frightened.
They were in the middle of the emergence of a new version of their
language, one we call today (Modern) English. Even the word "tempero"
was revived, but now as "temperature". Elyot (1533) and Cromwell
(1536) began to use it as the "temperature"=proportions of good
qualities needed to make up a person of good character. Many people
began to use temperature for what we now might call "psychological
mixtures".
Literate people not only discovered the wealth of information coming
from the old civilisations, but also that they were amidst in a
knowledge revolution which we now call the Rennaisance. Who should
they read? Who would be the winner? Chaos was appearing on almost
every printed page on any recent topic. Eventually it was only the
motion of the stars which seemed to follow a fixed pattern. Why should
literate people read the work of Nicholas Copernicus who even want to
destroy that? So only few copies of his book got sold. But one copy
got finally into the hands of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) with the
roaming mind and the universe as his target. He became a member of the
first ever (in the world), but short lived, society for science
(Accademia dei Lincei. Italy, 1603). He was crazy about instruments
for observation. He improved the recently discovered telescope
(Lippershay, 1608).
Galilei did all sorts of wierd things. He even challenged the almighty
Church by claiming once again, like Copernicus, that the sun was
indeed the centre of the solar system. Furthermore, unlike Copernicus,
he had the careful measurements of Johannes Kepler to back him up.
Some things he did were just crazy. He let two objects fall from the
leaning tower of Piza. Thus he was the first human to observe that not
only the stars, but also two disproportionate objects had uniform
motion. Hence the structure of his knowledge crumbled. The free energy
so released helped him to see things which nobody else had seen. He
made, among other things an apparatus from glass to measure the
"intensity of fire" of the air inside it. Yet the word "tempero" was
not even once used by him, as far as my sources tell me.
In 1562 Turner began to think of the Grecian mixture of air, soil,
water and fire. He began to use the word temperature to speak of the
"proportions" of them needed to produce something new. He rather got
it hot from behind for using the word temperature when speaking of
these four physical objects. It had to be used for mixtures of
spiritual entities. But eight years later, another "sinner" took up
the thread, a one Robert Boyle. He used an improved version of
Galilei's instrument by Fahrenheit. By then this instrument already
had a name, given by Van Etten (1624). Since Van Etten was very sure
that this was going to be an important instrument, he named it as
carefully as he can. He knew that somehow it measured something in
degrees related to "calour"=heat. Since he was not so sure that it was
heat itself, he rather selected the Greek word "thermai"=heat and thus
derived the name thermometer.
Boyle was beginning to think that hot and cold could be two extreme
cases of the same "thing". Thus the instrument called a thermometer
actually indicated the proportion of the mixture of hot and cold.
Boldy Boyle committed the "sin of obfuscation" by giving this
"proportion of hot and cold" the name "temperature". He began to think
about the temperature which could be measured by a thermometer. But he
was a wealthy aristrocrat whose speeches and writings were mostly
aimed at the Royal Society (RS) of London, the second scientific
society of the world (1662). (Remember that Einstein, nor even Newton
in that era, had produced their own great works.) From the RS the word
"temperature" diffused among the masses. Slowly they began to fought
the battle which would establish its final meaning, either the
spiritual meaning given by Elyot (1533) or the physical meaning given
by Boyle (1670).
What a battle it was. I can even "smell" fragments of the gory
obfuscations of this battle here in our libraries, far away in space
and time. After about a hundred years a cease fire seems to have been
arranged. The two meanings were to coexist peacefully. But in 1801
Hamilton began to do to thermometer what Boyle did to temperature. He
used thermometer in an abstract sense to refer to the degrees of
applicability of govermental laws. Luckily for him, people were
growing tired of the battle for temperature.
Meanwhile, another even far greater saga was developing. (Read my
Primer on Entropy). First the Law of Energy Conservation was
discovered. Soon afterwards the Law of Entropy Production was
discovered. The twin syndrome lifted its head once again. The great
Clark Maxwell decided to end it with his Theory of Heat (1871). As a
byproduct he settled once and for all the issue of what was the actual
relationship between the phsyical quantities heat and temperature. So
clear was the exposition of this genius that before the end of that
century, the spiritual meaning of temperature became obsolete. In its
place the word "temperament" sufficed. In less than 20 years a grave
battle of more than 200 years and an uneasy truce of almost 100 years
were left to die peacefully.
Most ordinary people now know only one meaning for the word
temperature, a meaning quite different to that of the word
temperament.
>I will be off to think with boy scouts, engineers, accountants,
>and the odd computer scientist now. I've said my own two
>cents worth and won't be spending more intellectual capital
>on this metatheoretical flight through mind.
Metatheory feeds on history to become theory. Theory feeds on practice
so that both can become art. What is more exciting than experiencing
an artist performing the art?
Thank you John for sharing your frustration with us.
As for me, I long to visit the Namib dessert once again. I hope to
share its Burnt Mountain with all of you soon.
Best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>