John Gunkler (jgunkler@sprintmail.com) writes:
>....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.
I love such simple analogies, John. This makes it absolutely clear to me
that the study of the systems and changing it is integral to such LO
pursuits. The key thing is to beware the use of personification.
In John's example, we do not often say the roads made me late. We accept
the roads as a given and adapt to them (but maybe not to the traffic on
them).
Similarly, we cannot say "the Market is up" when referring to the Dow
Jones. This is convenient shorthand which misleads for the more accurate
"more investors are buying than selling and that is driving the prices
up"!
FWIW...Keith
K. C. Cowan
Orion Technologies (Canada) Inc at http://www.GlobalDEN.com or 604-207-3809
--"Cowan, Keith" <kcowan@ORION.GLOBALDEN.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>