What Do We Mean by Organizational Learning?
There are, of course, many commentaries
and books written on exactly this subject; so, I do not consider mine to be
definitive in any way. But, I want to
address seven subjects that have been on my mind me regarding the field:
1.
The exhausting thrill of multiple perspectives
2.
A simple model of learning
3.
The centrality of feedback and the forces that
oppose it
4.
The power of vision and hope
5.
The complexity introduced by various units of
analysis
6.
Whole system sight
7.
Post-materialism and the future of Organizational
Learning
The Exhausting Thrill of Multiple
Perspectives
It is a gross understatement to describe
organizational learning is an interdisciplinary field.
When I file my yearly tax return, my
accountant regularly complains about the items I include as business expenses
that enhance my practice:
 |
| Neo and Trinity |
MS: Well, it’s got a lot of great stuff about futurism which is always great to talk about with clients. It presents an incredible hero myth in the person of Neo and his crew, which is key to understanding what it takes to be a leader. It’s got betrayal because one of the team members doesn’t get his needs met, which points up the need for better recruitment processes and the criticality of getting to know your teammates. I could go on.
CPA: Okay, okay. But Keanu Reeves, I mean, come on!
MS: Actually, he’s quite good in the
role, and both he and Carrie-Anne Moss kill in leather!
The way I look at it, virtually
anything and everything is grist for the mill of organizational learning. OL is
a field of boundless curiosity about socio-technical systems. The hard
sciences, the social sciences, management science, the “dismal science” of
economics, the humanities, architecture, urban planning, ethnic studies, poly
sci, philosophy….you got an “-ology”,
there’s a role for it to play in that beautiful and somewhat
chaotic field of OL!
And that is totally as it should be!
Let 3,863,452 flowers bloom! The disciplines that contribute to the
understanding of how and what those human systems called organizations learn
are probably as multifaceted as the human project itself. Even though there are
a number of commonalities and essential patterns to organizational life, (e.g.,
gathering inputs, through-putting input, and outputting product and services),
there have been all kinds of systems over the course of human history, and they
have done a heck of a lot of different things.
 |
| Lee Bolman |
 |
| Peter Senge |
Specialization does
present a problem to the field, however. It is relatively easy to find plenty
to do in a relatively small cubbyhole and end up thinking that you’ve
found the magic key to the kingdom of deep understanding of everything. Nobody since Leonardo has gotten to take that
big a bite of the Tree of Knowledge.
Thought leaders like Peter Senge, Lee Bolman and Terry Deal have done a
big favor to the field by classifying various sorts of inquiries into
categories that help us orient our research and our work as practitioners. Reframing
Organizations, The Fifth Discipline and The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook are
something guides that everyone should pack before lighting out into the OL
territory. Without a map of the whole, it’s pretty easy to
get lost in the particulars. (You might
want to bring a copy of Peter Drucker’s Management along too.)
A Simple Model of Learning
Given the number of tributaries feeding
into the sea of organizational learning, it does seem to me that those of us
attempting to set a course ought to be able to describe what we mean by OL in
pretty straightforward terms.
The framework developed by Don Schön
and Chris Argyris in their masterwork, Organizational Learning: A Theory of
Action Perspective, has served me well.
They looked at learning as an perpetual cycle of action.
Þ Invent
an experiment that might respond to the need that’s been discovered.
Þ Produce
and test the experiment in circumstances where it will have results.
 |
| Chris Argyris |
Þ Completing
the loop, generalization leads to new discoveries.
There are wheels within wheels in this
learning cycle. The more one engages in each of these practices the better one
gets at it.
 |
| Don Schön |
Organizational learning in Argyris and
Schön’s framework, results from people
skilled in “collaborative inquiry”, i.e., the ability
to know less and listen more especially when dealing with emotional stressful
topics surrounded by ambiguity.
Collaborative inquiry comes from consistent and intentional attention to
the Discover —> Invent —> Produce —> Generalize
learning cycle. The more widely this
competency is distributed among the actors in a system, the greater the
organizational learning.
The point: it is useful to see learning as a
cyclical process. To paraphrase an old dictum, even if practice in learning doesn’t
make perfect, paying close attention to your practice moves actors and
organizations in that direction. Gregory
Bateson referred to this sort of learning from practice as
“deutero-learning”. By that he meant learning what the
context is within which one is acting so that one is able to act in an
increasingly more effective fashion. Bateson uses a trained porpoise that comes
to understand his wider context as an example. At first, the porpoise learns
that responding to a whistle in a water tank will result in getting fed a fish.
But, then, the porpoise discovers that there is no whistle, and flaps his tail
in annoyance and a bit of confusion.
And, lo and behold, this results in getting fed. Then, the porpoise
comes to see that neither responding to a whistle nor flapping a tail will
necessarily result in getting fed, but other, new behaviors will. And,
ultimately, the porpoise realizes that it’s not a specific behavior that will
result in getting fed but behavior that neither the trainer nor the audience
has ever seen before that results in the reward. Innovation is rewarded. The porpoise has “learned to learn”.
Children go through deutero-learning within
the context of their family. They learn
what the culture of the family is and what it expects of them. In some families, the children are supposed to
be funny, and the more inventive the humor is supposed to be in a family, the
more a child is likely to become a comedian or to suffer insecurity because he
or she didn’t pass the family’s test. In other families, children are expected to
be physically adventurous, and, if they’re not, they’re disdained. In some, the context that must be understood
is about religiosity. And so on.[1]
Organizations face a similar sort of contextual learning challenge, and the more they become a recognizable brand, the greater the learning requirements:
In each of these instances (and in
countless others) the context demands that the organization understand and
respond to requirements that may be ambiguous, hard to determine, and rapidly
changing.
Organizations and systems of all sorts
must contend with contextual requirements as well. The United States advertises itself as the “land
of the free and the home of the brave.” Inspiring words that leave the country
susceptible to derision whenever it doesn’t live up to its
high sounding principles. China’s
Communist Party presents itself as the “vanguard of the proletariat”,
but it looks pretty ridiculous when the top 1% of the vanguard turn out to be exceedingly corrupt. The bigger the game a system wants to play,
the harder the hill it has to climb.
Argyris and Schön encourage systems
to play big games, but point out that the less a system knows about itself, the
less it studies itself, the more vulnerable it becomes to losing its way. A
family may think of itself as deeply loving, but if it doesn’t
notice the occasions where family members aren’t very generous or
courteous with each other, it can end up moving farther and farther away from
its ambitions for itself. Ditto for any
and every other unit of social system analysis (team, division, organization,
industry, community, etc.)
Double Loop learning is an
antidote to being on automatic as a system.
Such learning requires the constant consideration of the why a system is
doing what it’s doing and
reflection on how well it’s
doing it. Here’s a graphic from LeadershipNow.com on the topic:
Single-loop learning is common.
Objectives are set and they are met or missed. Lots of common strategies
designed to improve results derive from single-loop learning. Prices are cut, expenses are cut; marketing
and R&D budgets are increased, etc..
Double-loop learning is much rarer. It
entails attention to contexts and how they are changing. For example,
globalization and the resistance to it are two of the strongest forces coursing
around the planet today. Cultures are slamming into each other. Assumptions
about how the world work and how it ought to work are under great stress. A
great deal is up for grabs. The double-loop learning agenda is full, and, yet,
it is hard to do -- both because there is so much to learn and because systems practiced
in learning are so uncommon.
Organizational
learning is double loop learning.
The Centrality of Feedback to Double Loop
Learning
An Action/Feedback cycle is the key element
distinguishing single and double loop learning but this kind of learning seems
to be relatively rare. What are the forces opposing it? To answer this, we need
to observe and analyze two feedback features of every human system: structure
and agency.
Structure refers to the policies,
procedures, protocols and institutions that facilitate feedback. Many
organizations that systematically collect data for quality improvement and
process analysis have some of the ingredients for good feedback activities
already in place. The entire quality movement is designed and intended to
produce organizational learning. But, in
the context of Wall Street’s
attention to quarterly earnings and the glare of media attention on organizations
that are in motion, frequently there isn’t enough time to analyze mountains of information,
understand their meaning, assess the implications and implement change.
For example, let’s take the issue of privacy and social media:
Facebook, Google, Instagram and other
outlets have repeatedly upset privacy advocates. Hell, Facebook was
created as a result of Zuckerberg’s
deliberate violation of the privacy of a woman who rejected his advances. All of these organizations are engaged in
probes and corrective measures regarding privacy. Google wants to provide us with street views
of every corner of the planet, no matter how remote, but it agrees to
blur out the faces of every person that might appear in its footage (subsequent
to a bunch of lawsuits). The National Security Agency and other
intelligence organs in the US and elsewhere want access to information that
Facebook, Apple and other networks keep private, but the companies are
fighting tooth and nail to keep governments from gaining access that they are
or will be using for targeting advertising to their users. The situation is in flux. And yet, there is
an absence of thoughtful conversation at a mass communications level on the
dilemmas surrounding privacy. Yes, elites are engaged in these conversations at
academic centers and in thoughtful media convesations, but the billion plus
people who are using Facebook aren’t
actually engaged in a dialog about what privacy ought to look like in the 21st
century.
At present, there are no structures
that can facilitate reflection in an intentional fashion. Of course, the “market” is a structure, and it’s enough for a lot of folks, but its not really set up to generate learning such as this. The
market is dominated by what is exciting, popular and profitable at the moment,
regardless of whether it’s
a good idea from a longer-term perspective.
Structures that support such learning
are difficult to imagine. Putting the
topic in a double-loop learning context, what privacy is, where is came from
and where it is going are examples of underlying assumptions that aren't really
being explored. Whether Robert Durst murdered a bunch of people and what price
he’ll pay for it if he
did, that is being thoroughly explored.
What act of insanity will be committed next by ISIS, that is
being investigated. The opinion of
anyone and everyone on the teams that will be part of the Sweet Sixteen, that
is the focus of a massive communication structure. Is Hillary Clinton too old to be President, this
inquiring minds want to know, but what is going to happen to privacy…too complicated.
Agency has to do with the
choices made by organizations (and the individuals and groups that act as their
representatives) regarding the content of feedback channels and how feedback is
expressed.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of data to
demonstrate that most of us tighten up and protect ourselves in emotionally
tense feedback situations. Argyris
described this communications posture as a network of automatic defensive
routines that happen beneath the level of full self-awareness. While this is
not the setting to go into great detail regarding Argyris’ view of interpersonal and
organizational dynamics, a quote from Strategy, Change and Defensive Routines provides
a look into his critical perception of many, if not most, organizational
communication processes:
We are programmed to deal with other’s or organizational defensive
routines by bypassing them and acting as if we are not. The others tend to collude because the
bypassing behavior is usually seen as being thoughtful and civilized; no one
will be embarrassed. The collusion is
reinforced by the culture of the organization as well as the larger culture in
which the organization exists. That is,
one set of defensive loops reinforces each other.
The next set of defensive loops is
related to the professionals who are supposed to help clients overcome the
defensive routines. Management
consultants (internal or external) often use the same bypass routines when they
deal with threat. Thus, professionals
collude in creating another defensive loop.
In other words, most of us don’t like to get bad news, and a
lot of us don’t like
delivering it either. We hide critical
information because we’ve
been highly trained to experience that as painful, impolite, inappropriate,
and/or immature.
This is a profound dilemma:
organizational learning requires feedback and the discussion of valid data, but
doing so evokes defensiveness and polarization that makes organizational
learning difficult or impossible. So,
what we get are half-measures where a little learning happens, but everyone
agrees it’s “not nearly as rich as it would
have been if only so-and-so would be willing to listen to some honest feedback.”
Alternatively, we get escalating polarization as folks who
disagree with each other dig in and (sometimes literally) throw grenades at
their opponents.
Bottom line, structure and agency
combine to yield low learning in a multiplicity of situations…
Þ
from frozen O-rings that many Morton-Thiokol
engineers knew were a big problem before Challenger blew up
Þ
to an Iraqi invasion based on demonstrably false
information about uranium cake
Þ
to violent predators being released from prison
into society even though there is no doubt that they will harm others again
Þ
to parents continuing to deprecated their kids
even though that clearly constitutes bad parenting
Þ
to traffic jams that happen as regularly as
clockwork
Þ
to bankers repeatedly violating the same laws
against insider trading and facilitating tax evasion that they’ve already been fined for
several times previously.
| ! |
Maybe I should end this thought piece
right here and put my head in a plastic bag!
The Power of Vision and Hope
Fortunately, when I look at all of the
social and scientific innovation happening across the world and at all the
positive, generous and kind people doing all manner of projects, I am saved
from the swamp of
pessimism.
When a person or a collective of people
confront something or someone that they are truly passionate about, that they
truly believe in, they are willing to move past the boundaries created by
defensiveness and the limitations of existing communication structures and step
up to honesty and new opportunities. I
have seen this many times in my own life and in my observation of others.
There are a lot of people individually,
collectively and organizationally telling their truths. Sometimes the truths
people tell are in direct opposition to each other. In philosophy, these juxtaposed truths are
called antinomies, a contradiction between two apparently equally valid
principles or between inferences correctly drawn from such principles. For example, “Welfare state saves
millions of lives” versus “Welfare state
enslaves millions into a life of dependency.” Both positions have strong and
articulate adherents. When I listen closely and with something like an open
mind to each view, I get a headache!
But, that’s beside the point.
When people and organizations argue persuasively for and against a multitude of
ideas, products and services, they sway others, they incline others to do more
than they might have thought themselves capable of doing, more than they were
actually capable of doing.
Love, vision, idealism, and hope impel
and compel people and organizations to transcend the constraints of structure
and conformity. If the channels aren’t there to facilitate
communication on critical topics, people will build them, even in places like Israel and Palestine where acrimony and
suspicion are the rule rather than the exception. If you really believe in someone or some
institution, if you love someone, you’ll
take a hard lesson from him, her or it.
If you think that the product or service you’re working on will make a difference that matters, you’ll go through hell to see it
through. If you have to become simultaneously psychologically tougher and more
sensitive to have a relationship with another person, another group, another
organization, a new public to achieve a highly desired goal or state of being,
you can. You must.
Organizational Learning’s Unit of Analysis
A unit of analysis refers to the scope
of the system or organization that is supposed to be engaged in a learning
process. The more complex a system, the bigger its learning challenge. Its
vision must be highly compelling and its structures for integration have to
work very well.
Assume a simple system, a small
business employing 30 people supplying a fairly specific service, e.g., a
dental office in a bedroom community owned by two male dentists who are also
relatives. Its learning requirements are
neither trivial nor massive.
Here are a few of the learning needs
that such an organization might face:
•
Its personnel must be professional in both their
technical skills and in the quality of their interaction with patients.
•
Its tracking and record keeping systems must be
efficient.
•
Its leadership must assure quality communication
between hygienists, assistants and administrative staff members.
•
Attention must be paid to new clinical
developments and technological advances (e.g., the role remote monitoring and
the internet of everything will play in dentistry).
•
The community being served should be well
understood and the outreach campaign to establish and maintain relations with
that community should be well thought-through and maintained.
•
A succession plan involving the right parties
needs to be thought through.
•
The dynamics of each owner’s
family life will affect the enterprise and, therefore, need close
consideration.
Within the practice, there are several
potential units of analysis:
•
Each of the dentists: what is their curiosity
about themselves as clinicians and as a leader
of a practice/business?
•
The dentists as partners: how open are they with each other about
issues in the practice? How skilled are they at engaging in conversations that
open their partnership up to learning rather than polarization?
•
Each of the staff functions (i.e., hygienists,
assistants, administration): What are their expectations for their own
development as professionals
•
Each of the functions in their relationships
with the owners: How well do the players do at empathizing with the challenges
that each position in the system faces?
•
Each of the functions in their relationships
with one another: How well do they do at identifying inefficiencies and
inadequacies in their relations with each other and in fixing those problems
themselves
•
The interaction of all of the internal players
with patients
•
Various patient groupings (e.g., children,
teenagers, middle-aged adults, elderly)
•
The practice’s interaction with
its community or communities
Considering these units of analysis
from a double loop learning perspective, one might want to know: What is the
quality of learning happening in each of these domains and in the system as a
totality? What are the structures that
support learning? How much inquiry and openness is expressed in the conversations
between the players in the system? Is
the system as a totality united by an overarching vision of service and
professionalism that is actually manifested in practice through the
identification of gaps between the vision and present outcomes in a spirit of
joint inquiry?
This brief and incomplete excursion
into the world of dental practice is only meant to highlight the complexity of
what it means to establish a learning organization. Imagine the challenge of
achieving the ambition of double-loop learning in a huge system like a
multinational corporation, a state government, an international agency, etc..
Of course, the more complicated the
system, the stronger one would expect the mechanisms for organizational memory,
feedback and learning to be. Data
collection and processing protocols would probably be codified and routinized,
for example. Staff meetings and data
analysis sessions would be commonplace and regularly scheduled. Management consultants would be running
around improving systems and offering insightful suggestions.
But, ultimately, we are still looking
at human beings and their level of engagement with the systems they are part
of, their willingness and their ability to reflect together on past events and
future possibilities, their openness to the ideas and perspectives of others,
their curiosity about their internal processes and their behavior together,
etc.. So, the more complex the system, the larger the unit of analysis and the
more challenging the job of comprehending and/or improving the nature of
organizational learning. If one expects a system of 100,000 to operate as an
effective, focused learning entity, the job of assessing how it’s
doing is a daunting one.
Whole System Sight
Yet, very large systems do learn. Francis Fukuyama’s most recent book,
Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the
Globalization of Democracy, describes six interrelated elements of all
political systems that need to work together well in order for a state to be
successful, i.e., deliver high quality goods and services to its citizens and
residents who manifest their happiness in being part of a state by high levels
of social engagement. Very briefly, these are:
Fukuyama asserts that learning and
development have clearly occurred in the last three of these factors, State,
Rule of Law, and Democracy. Both in this
volume and its companion, The Origins of Political Order, Fukuyama
describes many, many centuries of experimentation that make a system mature or
immature and demonstrates how the strength or weakness of Economic Growth,
Social Mobilization and Ideas/Legitimacy impact the particular ways in which
the other elements unfold and vice-versa.
In other words, the elements of the system of political order interact
in ways that reinforce learning and productivity or chaos and poverty.
It’s beyond the scope
of this note to address the richness of Fukuyama’s argument (other
than to say that it’s a great book, in my opinion), but I
do want to note one point that he makes repeatedly about the development of the
State, which is relevant to the question of learning in highly complex systems. He makes it very clear that a professionally
trained and competent bureaucracy is critical to the success of states. The people who work at the IRS have to know
how to add and subtract! More seriously,
government and administrations of all sorts need to be based on meritocracy and
well-considered standards of practice.
This was absolutely not always the case
and, in
many places today, the qualifications of bureaucratic personnel remain
anything but professional. For example,
prior to the Progressive Era and innovations by the two Roosevelt presidents in
particular, the Federal bureaucracy in the United States was almost completely
a “clientistic” operation, i.e., political machines
promised people jobs in governmental departments in exchange for the delivery
of votes. This began to change in the US
in the late 1800s, in part because of the effectiveness of German
bureaucracy. The German state, which was
still significantly autocratic, delivered in ways that the US did not. The US
had to learn to change the operation of its Federal bureaucracies, which
happened as a result of extensive legislative analysis and debate. The decisions that improved the functioning
of the agencies of the American state strengthened both the Rule of Law and the
Democracies of both society, while supporting Economic Growth, Social
Mobilization, and Ideas/Legitimacy.
Fukuyama is one of a large, but pretty
rarified, group of observers and commentators who think in whole system terms.
STRATFOR’s George Friedman with his geographically based view of
geo-politics is one. Jared Diamond’s comparison of learning processes in
longitudinal versus latitudinal continents is another. Marx is a significant figure in a fairly long
line of systems thinkers who map the evolution of economic systems by looking
at the forces that alter the locus of power between different classes of
actors. Peter Senge’s presentation of system archetypes
provides a very powerful analytical framework for looking at organizational
blind spots at a whole system level, such as the automatic tendency to over-invest
chronically in existing business lines while systematically ignoring new
developments.
The firm Anika Savage and I created,
Art of the Future has presented its own way of thinking about how whole systems
operate in our book Life Sustaining Organizations — A Design Guide, which concentrates on
the rigor and robustness of an organization’s approach to anticipating the future. Our thesis is that the more open-minded an
organization is about the diverse pathways to alternative futures, the better
job it will do at recruiting and keeping creative talent who will function well
in a range of scenarios. We have described a whole systems approach to
considering future possibilities and “interrogating” these possibilities for actions
to take in the present.
Barry Oshry, the designer of
simulations that have constituted a database for his research over the last 40+
years, offers another powerful way of seeing entire systems at both the
organizational and societal levels.
 |
| Barry Oshry |
According to Oshry, organizations can
be stripped down to a basic four-player model:
Oshry points out people existing in
each of these organizational positions face a particular set of vulnerabilities
and opportunities. Inattention to the
vulnerabilities is characteristic of organizations on automatic, which don’t do well over time. Understanding the vulnerabilities and paying
conscious attention to their management is characteristic of organizations that
value partnership and learning. It is a powerful and simple way to understand complex organizational dynamics.
Oshry’s whole systems thinking also includes a way of assessing the vulnerabilities and “robustness” of a system based its management of two dialectal axes[2]:  The Integration/Differentiation axis concerns the degree to which a system coheres around a set of principles or a mission versus the degree to which it is subdivided into different parts or power centers pursuing their own objectives.[3] The Individuation/Homogenization axis refers to the degree to which a system encourages self-expression at a multiplicity of levels versus the degree to which it requires uniformity in behavior.[4] These axes are like a gyroscope for systems: if any one node gets overweighted even slightly the whole system can start to destabilize and tip over. A robust system is one in which there is enough balance between these poles to tolerate a wide range of different behaviors and impulses without faltering. I’ve found it very useful to have this model of what a whole learning system should look like. |
Obviously, these comments about seeing
the whole system are impressionistic and meant only to highlight the importance
of holistic thinking for the advocate or assessor of organizational learning.
The agent of organizational learning needs to have a full repertoire of
frameworks for seeing whole systems. This is extremely helpful in assessing
whether an organization as a totality is learning, what kind of learning it’s doing and how it is
accomplishing it. There are so many perspectives to work with in this
field. Like I said, organizational
learning is exhausting fun!
What the Disappearance of the
Bottom Line Means for Organizational Learning
To achieve its full promise, I believe
that the field of organizational learning must embrace a post-materialist
vision of the future. What does that
mean and why do I say it is so? I
believe that humanity is standing on the edge of at least two great oceans of
change and mystery that must be seen and addressed for our species to
move forward. Both expanses of the
emerging future require us to give up certain mental models and defensive
patterns.
 |
| A Trash Mountain in Mumbai |
One concerns the dialectic between the
global environmental crisis and the need to adopt technologies that can
transcend our present limitations and to develop a deeper practice of
conservation on a global basis. Virtually every day innovations are being developed that could
revolutionize patterns of energy consumption, transportation, pollution, and
waste of resources. And, every day, most
things remain pretty much the same. New
technologies aren’t adopted. Most current models of the “good
life” continue to emphasize material success and consumerism. Those whose lives would be upended by
a shift away from the status quo understandably deny the need for change and remain in power in many if not most political
arenas.
There is a very real chance that we are
not only burning up the planet by over-consuming its resources and
underinvesting in paths forward, but we are also risking an endless sea of war
as millions of armed people are driven to the wall by poverty and hopelessness.
The maturity advised in 1 Corinthians
is relevant:
When I was a child, I spake as a child,
I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put
away childish things.
Our species and our planet are dealing
with a variety of pressing crises. It is the responsibility of organizational
learning as a field to embrace the challenge of these big, messy, wicked
problems. Of course, it is pleasant to
have nice things and a comfortable lifestyle, but organizational learning
professionals should resist the blandishments of material success for their own
sake, if they take us away from our roles as agents of inquiry and
learning. Too much of the energy of
organizational learning practitioners is devoted to supporting a
political-economic system that has no ultimate objective beyond making a small
group of people very rich and another larger group of people relatively
comfortable.[5] In my opinion, that kind of collusion with
the status quo misses the point of the field: we are supposed to see and work
with the new context, the wider whole. The times require, if not heroic action,
then at least a life lived, at least partially, in concert with the seriousness
of the era. The paths toward a sustainable future are clearly marked. We have
to be part of the leadership that starts walking down them.
While the first of the great challenges
requires learning in the face of resource limits and the need to invest in long-term
solutions, the second compels us to confront infinity. Both our planet and our
individual consciousnesses have become pilgrims in unfathomable and uncharted
oceans of the unknown. At a planetary
level, we have discovered that we are on Spaceship Earth and in the last fifty
years we have begun actively to probe the vastness of space and time that our
forbearers could only dream of or explore theoretically. At the level of our own being, physics is
demonstrating that our assumptions about the nature of reality itself are only
that, assumptions that are increasingly up for grabs. Certainly, there is and will be an
interaction between the discoveries that are occurring in inner and outer
space.
 |
| The Possibilities are Infinite |
It takes a highly developed degree of
curiosity, imagination and openness even to begin to think about engaging infinity
as a fact, not as a mental construct. The films Interstellar
and
Contact offer some sense of what it means to be the new person who can
see emerging new truths. I can only
begin to speculate on the consequences of what is emerging in the science of the
universe and the study of the self on the practice of organizational learning,
but I know that they are profound. They
require a future mind that unifies science and wonder.
A new era is unfolding, one that seems
to necessitate both retrenchment and expansion simultaneously. The discipline of organizational learning has
a great deal to offer those undertaking this adventure. The horizon is vast;
let us move toward it.
[1] For a fuller discussion of Bateson’s ideas on
levels of learning see his work directly in publications such as Steps toward and Ecology of the Mind or Guide to Emergent Learning by Marilyn
Darling, Heidi Sparkes Guber and Jillaine Smith.
[2] For a more detailed description of Oshry’s thinking
see his work directly, e.g., Seeing
Systems, or my “The Power of Position: A Diagnostic Model” in Organization
Development: A Jossey-Bass Reader, 2006.
[3] Think of General Electric’s Works Equation: “We have a relentless drive to invent things
that matter: innovations that build, power, move and help cure the world. We
make things that very few in the world can, but that everyone needs. This is a
source of pride. To our employees and customers, it defines GE.” versus
the fact that the company has been identified as the fourth largest corporate
producer of air pollution in
the United States and has been repeatedly fined and criticized for causing
environmental damage. Obviously, there
are occasions where the company isn’t working together as a unit in service of
its high-minded mission.
[4] Think of a creative arts high school in which one
might observe scores of individual fashion statements daily versus a parochial
school requiring a specific uniform.
[5] For a thorough, data-based assessment of trends in
inequality and their consequences, see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st
Century, Harvard University Press, 2014.
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