LOs and Metanoia - Two Conceptions of LO's LO27164

From: Artur F. Silva (artsilva@mail.eunet.pt)
Date: 08/20/01


Linked to LO25939

Dear Lo-learners

Please see below my next post of the series on "LOs and Metanoia". This
post concludes Part II of the series. As I will be on holiday from
tomorrow to the 1st September, my next post will be sent after that date.

Regards

Artur
----------------

A Search for LO's and Metanoia

Part II - Two Conceptions of LO's

II.3 Some Comments to the Two Conceptions

In the two previous posts I have presented the conceptions of LOs of Arie
de Geus and Peter Senge. In this post I will comment on those models and
reflect on a recent interview with Peter Senge.

De Geus's 'Learning Companies'

The Model of Learning Companies from de Geus has some interesting
characteristics:

 1 It's based on real companies that have been able to survive and adapt
for a long time (in some cases for centuries) in a changing competitive
environment. Saying that they are "Learning Companies" is not an a priori
statement, nor is there any normative or prescriptive standing; it's only
a recognition of something that existed before, an a posteriori,
descriptive position.

De Geus is taking a modest position; he has not invented LC's; they have
existed for centuries; have been analyzed in a collective study of Shell
and he has only articulated the findings of the Shell Study about longer
living companies and has made an interpretation of this study.

 2 He doesn't claim that he has any solution to offer (training,
consultancy, etc) for a company to become a LO; the four main
characteristics he identifies in "Learning Companies" are not disciplines
that can be learned and or practiced. They seem to be "emerging
properties" of some companies, in the same sense that one can say, for
instance, that mobility is a property of most animals. But we can not try
to teach mobility to a tree and wait to see her becoming an animal.

 3 According to de Geus one can say that "learning companies" are OPEN to
the environment and able to adapt to an ecology, are cohesive and have a
sense of persona, are tolerant to experiments and are conservative in
finance. He doesn't claim that a company can become a learning company by
emulating these characteristics. He doesn't even try to analyze the
reasons or causes for LC's to have those characteristics.

 4 Please note that when I say this I am not criticizing de Geus, on the
contrary. Modesty is a characteristic of good research, independently of
whether the research is being done by a practitioner or by an academic.
The fact that de Geus makes no claims about what he doesn't know for sure
positive. In a sense, he doesn't close the search about LO's. Other people
can now depart from where he arrived and continue the research to try to
understand the points he has not analyzed. If he had presented some
characteristics has being the "definitive explanation" or the "main
causes" research could be closed (instead of opened) and the concerned
community could become more interested in applying a self-proclaimed
theory, instead of continuing to intervene and reflect on the
interventions and maybe create the theory itself.

 5 The more closest that de Geus gets to giving an "interpretation" is to
say that companies are "living beings" but he doesn't explain why some of
them are long living, nor are the above characteristics any sort of
explanation, but only a description. It may very well be that a completely
different reason (or set of reasons) is responsible for some companies
being able to learn, adapt or survive and are as a consequence having the
4 characteristics he describes, or even others the Shell Study has not
been able to uncover.

 6 From that interpretation maybe we have a clue on how to pursue the
effort of research on and working with organizations. What if we looked to
companies more like biologists and less like managers, trainers,
consultants, or "change agents"? If de Geus is right the way for an
organization to bypass its learning disabilities and approach the ideal of
a LO would eventually be to develop (how?) the characteristics of those
companies that have proven to be "learning companies" by the fact that hey
have learned, adapted and survived for centuries. And eventually to
emulate the self-organization of a "living being".

 7 That will not be my approach however. I think the "living being"
metaphor is much more powerful than to see a company like a machine. But
it is powerful because it is a metaphor, not to be taken as "reality".
When we think of a company like a "living being", we can't loose the
perspective that the "cells" and "organs" are in our case "human beings"
working in "intentional human organizations". To reduce the study of
organizations to mechanics is a major sign of reductionism; but to reduce
the study of companies or societies to the study of biology can also be a
form of reductionism... Can't we find some insight from the studies of
society (sociology, mainly) and from the studies of "intentional human
action" (Action Science, for instance)? We shall see...

 8 To conclude the analysis on de Geus's LC one must say that as he
doesn't propose any prescription to an organization to become a LO it's
impossible (or meaningless) to try to see if companies that try to
approach the "principles" really become LO's. In this de Geus's LC is the
kind of book frequently written by practitioners, based on their life
experiences -- it is not so vague and imprecise as the texts from "gurus",
but it has not the kind of rigor one would expect from research namely it
is not "falsifiable" (one cannot apply the principles and see if the
expected consequences happen).

 9 But, exactly because of that, maybe one can use de Geus's
"characteristics" of LC's for a different purpose. To check if those
characteristics do indeed appear in the experiences that try to create
LO's by the use of more prescriptive conceptions.

Senge's Learning Organizations

 10 Contrary to de Geus, Senge articulates and explains the 5 disciplines
and states that if an organization will learn and practice them, that
organization will became (or at least enter into the process of becoming)
a LO. In this sense, Senge's conception of a LO is an "a priori" and
prescriptive conception, and it has a major characteristic of good
research: it can be, at least in principle, "falsiable".

 11 - Senge's 5 disciplines fall, in my opinion, into three different
classes:

 a) a first category includes "Personal Mastery" and "Team Building" that
can be called "practical disciplines" they can be learned through
practice;
 b) a second category is "Systems Thinking". Systems Thinking is a more
"theoretical discipline" that can be learned, like physics, studying the
theory and then practicing it.
 c) a third category includes "Mental Models" and "Shared Vision". Both,
like paradigms or beliefs are constructs one creates to explain a certain
number of phenomena. "Mental Models" are not a discipline changing mental
models in a way that helps us to better understand the world (and to adapt
to a changing world) can be the discipline. And the same is true about
"shared values" either a democratic or an authoritarian society, a
learning / living company or a short living one have "shared values". What
type of values are shared and how do the shared values and models do
change (or not) over time that is the question. The problem then is how to
create shared values and shared mental models that allow an organization
to permanently learn and adapt. Indeed the two disciplines are
interrelated the true problem for an organization is to learn how the
shared mental models change (or not) overtime is the question.

Comparison of the two Models

 12 We can compare de Geus's LC with Senge's LO from many different
perspectives. First we can compare the a posteriori descriptive conception
of the first to the a priori prescriptive conception of the second. In
what concerns good research a prescriptive conception has many advantages.
Both the author and others can try to implement the "prescriptions" and
see if the results confirm the expectations or not. I will refer in a
moment to an analysis of this type done by Senge, himself. But I also
think that this should be an important subject of reflection for other
practitioners, including us, the subscribers of the lo-list.

 13 But we can also compare the two conceptions in relation to the
"disciplines" that are present in both. We can find the following:

a) de Geus refers many times in many different contexts to the
    importance of changing "Shared Mental Models" (that includes
    values). On one side, shared mental models are an important
    component of a company "persona", on the other side, changing
    and adapting Mental Models is, for de Geus, the essential feature
    of institutional learning, the capacity to change and adapt to a
    changing world.

b) de Geus doesn't refer explicitly to "Team Building", but teams are
     always present in his texts and the learning by the management
     team is considered essential. De Geus never refers to "Personal
     Mastery", but the concept is easily integrated in the spirit of LC's.

c) In what concerns Systems Thinking, de Geus does refer to systems
    dynamics, but mainly as a tool to facilitate the explicit modeling of
    (implicit) mental models. The idea that Systems Thinking is the
    discipline that integrates the others is not present in the de
    Geus texts I have referenced, as far as I could understand.

Comments on Systems Thinking

 14 This last question points to another type of analysis one shall apply
to any theory or conception the attempt to theoretically analyze its
constructs and its internal logic. My main problem with the analysis of
the theoretical consistency of Senge's conception is related to the role
of Systems Theory. Please note that the following are only doubts and
concerns, not criticisms:

 a) first, I can't see any external evidence (based on external reality)
nor any internal evidence, of where Senge got the idea that Systems
Thinking is the "integrating discipline" of LO's. Clearly, many of the
LC's that de Geus described have been in existence in a time where systems
thinking was not in good currency (but when, eventually, there was a
clearer perspective of the "wholes").

 b) second, I am not sure if one can always make a clear distinction
between "mechanist thinking" and "systems thinking" the difference being
so profound as to allow us to talk about a "paradigm shift". Indeed, when
we analyze Beer's models of the firm, Ashby attempts to apply the
principles of thinking about "mechanical systems" to biological,
organizational or social systems and even in Senge's comparison of a LO to
the DC3 one can doubt about what is a system, if there are not
IRREDUCTIBLE QUALITATIVE DIFFERENCES between "mechanical systems" and
"living systems", including organizational and social ones.

 c) I think that it is based on these types of considerations that
Checkland (and others) distinguish between "hard systems" and "soft
systems". The problem is that the principles and (mental) models gained in
the hard systems frequently invade the soft systems thinking, even with
people who make a distinction between the two approaches.

 d) the limited mechanical perspective of many "systems thinking"
approaches has also been criticized by those who have proposed a "complex
systems approach". It is clear that today's "mechanical systems" are much
more complex that the systems one could think about in the 50's. They are
really "complex natural systems". But is the concept also applicable to
"organizational systems" or "social systems", or shall we say that the
complexity of the social construction of reality done by humans is
irreducible to any "systems thinking", even a complex one?

 e) Another perspective comes from the "chaos theory". The criticism made
in the early days to Prigogine by his fellow scientists was that the
situations worth researching where the ones near to equilibrium. What
happens in situations that are far from equilibrium was not interesting
nor worth researching. And indeed the main point of chaos theory is
related to the emergent properties that appear in situations far from
equilibrium.

Systems theory is good at studying systems that are close to equilibrium
or that evolve through systemical consequences of a prevailing system
(like in the beer game, for instance). But how can we apply archetypes or
system dynamics in relation with system where new qualitatively different
properties emerge, the emerging properties defining a new system or, at
least, a new state of the system where the old properties don't apply any
more?

Are we in need of a "quantum theory" of organizations? Or of a "state
systems change" theory? Are the "system diagrams" of any help in what
concerns changing from one system to a different one? Can system dynamics
help us to understand metanoia? Or is it useful only in "non metanoic"
situations?

 f) In my own field of practice the "system analysis" perspective of
Information Systems it coming under more and more criticism. Many
practitioners claim that what is need is not a system analysis (or system
flow diagramming), that never completely incorporates the human and
organizational dimensions, but some sort of "system synthesis" (or
holistic perspective). Systems diagramming seems very useful to understand
"system dynamics", but "dynamics" is only a part of the "mechanics" of
systems. It is not the adequate tool to model the new organizational
systems that frequently are the final objective of implementing new
technological systems.

 g) Until we are able to radically criticize the Positivist Technical
Rationality, and the way of thinking about the relationship between parts
and wholes that Descartes introduced, I am afraid that all our attempts to
practice "systems thinking" will bring through the window the mechanical
thinking we thought we had sent out through the door.

 h) Habermas proposed the need for a "Critical Systems Theory", but I
wonder if what we must criticize in the first place is indeed the whole
idea of the use of "systems" in organizational and social settings
especially when we are concerned with profound change.

 i) Please note that I consider Systems Thinking a very useful and
important tool; my doubts are if it is (or not) adequate to understand
organizational systems, namely when they are in profound transformation,
and it can (or not) be considered the "integrating discipline" of LOs.

Empirical Evidence on LO's

 15 Let me go back to how Senge's disciplines have been applied and what
results have been obtained. I am not able to follow all the discussions on
this list. But I sometimes read mails from fellow learners asking for
cases or examples where the LO's have been created or exist. The answers I
read have always been vague or theoretical. But maybe I haven't read the
right ones.

If the LO concepts and disciplines are, as I think, prescriptive ones, the
main point to prove they are correct would be to know REAL CASES where the
disciplines have been applied and to analyze the results. If there are
posts in the archives with such experiences I would be very much obliged
if someone would be so kind to send me the references. And if any one of
you have other results he or she wants (and can) share it would be great.

 16 I have noticed that in "The Dance of Change" (DC) there is a slightly
different approach to LO's. Some difficulties (or challenges) to change
have been stressed. Some new approaches (like Communities of Practice)
have been identified. But, unfortunately, an analysis of previous
applications and their results IS NOT included. To try to answer that
question I had to rely on other sources.

 17 After the publication of DC, Senge has been interviewed by the
magazine Fast Company (issue 24, pg. 178, available online at the URL
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/24/senge.html). The title of the article
is "Learning for a Change".

In the introduction the interviewer (Alan Webber) refers to "The Fifth
Discipline" (FD) and to the Learning Organization worldwide movement and
comments: "that movement hit a few speed bumps. People who adopted the
themes and practices of "The Fifth Discipline" sometimes found themselves
frustrated by the challenge of bringing about effective change and
sometimes found themselves out of work for trying" and that "initiating
and sustaining change is more daunting than the optimistic presentation
that was offered in FD had suggested". But these are the opinions of the
interviewer, and must be used with caution. It's perhaps better to rely on
Senge's own answers.

 18 Unfortunately (and maybe due to the title of the new book he was
presenting) the interviewer questions don't try to understand if LO's have
been created or not, but if change has been obtained or not. Of course, an
organization can "change" and still not change in the direction of
becoming a LO; but we have to analyze the questions the interviewer asked
and the answers he obtained...

The 1st question was "What's your assessment of the performance of
large-scale change efforts over the past decade?" And Senge answers (in
part)
"My own experience at MIT and at the Society of Learning (Sol) has mostly
been with big companies. How much change have they actually accomplished?
If I stand back a considerable distance and ask, 'What's the score'" I
have to conclude that inertia is winning by a large margin. Of course,
there have been enough exceptions to that conclusion to indicate that
change is possible. I can identify 20 to 30 examples of significant
sustained change efforts in the SoL community. On the other side of the
ledger, there are many organizations that haven't gotten to first base
when it comes to real change and many others that have given up trying.
When I look at efforts to create change in big companies over the past 10
years, I have to say that there's enough evidence of success to say that
change is possible and enough evidence of failure to say that it isn't
likely. Both of those lessons are important."

Even if the names of those 20 to 30 companies can't be revealed it would
be useful to have some of them named and cases written for one or two.
Maybe some of you are insiders of some of those experiences and can get
permission to give an account of them.

Answering the question "So what is the deeper explanation for the failure
of corporate change efforts?", Senge answers: "At the deepest level, I
think that we're witnessing the shift from one age to another. The most
universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human
institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature. I've
been thinking about this shift for 25 years or more: we need to realize
that we're a part of nature, rather than separate from nature"

(...)

"Why are contemporary institutions so inhumane?" (...) "Whether you're
talking at the macro, the personal, or the institutional level, the
questions all points in the same direction: The real character of an age
is evident in how it conditions us to think, and how it conditions us to
act. The thinking and acting of the past 200 years nurtured in Europe,
accelerated in the United States, diffused throughout the world today is a
machine mind-set. That mind-set directly affects how we see organizations
and, therefore, how we think about creating change in those
organizations".

To the question: "What implications does a machine mind-set have for
companies that seek to undergo change?" Senge answers: "In the Machine
Age, the company itself became a machine -- a machine for making money.
That's a key point in Arie de Geus's book, 'The Living Company'.
Ironically, the word 'company' couldn't be more at odds with the idea of a
machine. 'Company' has roots that go back long before the Industrial Age.
In fact, it has the same root as the word 'companion': It means 'the
sharing of bread'"...

"But go back and consider all the evidence that says that most change
efforts aren't very successful. Here is our first plausible explanation:
Companies are actually living organisms, not machines. That might explain
why it's so difficult for us to succeed in our efforts to produce change.
Perhaps treating companies like machines keeps them from changing, or
makes changing them much more difficult. We keep bringing in mechanics
when what we need are gardeners. We keep trying to drive change when what
we need to do is cultivate change. Surprisingly, this mechanical mind-set
can afflict those who seek 'humane' changes through 'learning
organizations' just as much as it can afflict those who drive more
traditional changes, such as mergers and reorganizations".

To the question "Where, specially, does the mechanical approach go wrong
in effecting change?" Senge answered: "The easiest way to see this is to
look at our interpersonal relationships. In our ordinary experiences with
other people, we know that approaching each other in a machinelike way
gets us into trouble. We know that the process of changing a relationship
is a lot more complicated than the process of changing flat tire on your
car. It requires a willingness to change. It requires a sense of openness,
a sense of reciprocity, even a kind of vulnerability. You must be willing
to be influenced by the other person. You don't have to be willing to be
influenced by your damn car! A relationship with a machine is
fundamentally a different kind of relationship: It is perfectly
appropriate to feel that if it doesn't work, you should fix it. But we get
into real trouble whenever we try to 'fix' people. We know how to create
and nurture close friendships or family relationships. But when we enter
the realm of the organization, we're not sure which domain to invoke.
Should we evoke the domain of the machine? After all, much of our daily
life is about interacting with computers, tape recorders, automobiles, and
ATMs. Or should we evoke the domain of living systems because a lot of our
daily life is about interacting with family, friends, and colleagues?".

Some other of Senge's answers (please note the comment on "systems
dynamics" in the first quotation and on "unlearning" in the second one):

 - "Looking at organizations, we find that one of the first things that
changed is how we define the term 'structure'. The Fifth Discipline
proposed a definition borrowed from system dynamics which looks at
structure in terms of feedback interactions within a system. Our new
definition of that term is 'a pattern of interdependency that we enact'.
Again, think about the relationships within a family, rather than those
within a company: People come to relate to each other in predictable ways,
which form a pattern that then defines the structure of relationships
norms, expectations, taken-for-granted habits of communicating. Those
patterns aren't fixed; they can change. And, more to the point, those
patterns aren't given. Ultimately, the structures that come into play in
our families are the result of the choices that we've made all along the
way. We 'enact' our families. All of this applies directly to our ideas
about leadership and, in particular, to the cult of the CEO-as-hero. In
fact, that cult is one pattern that makes it easier for us to maintain
change-averse institutions. When we enact the patterns of the CEO as hero,
we infantilize the organization: That kind of behavior keeps everyone else
in the company at a stage of development in which they can't accept their
own possibilities for creating change. Moreover, it keeps executives from
doing things that would genuinely contribute to creating significant
change. The cult of the hero-leader only creates a need for more
hero-leaders".

 - "Deep change comes only through real personal growth through learning
and unlearning. This is the kind of generative work that most executives
are precluded from doing by the mechanical mind-set and by the cult of the
hero-leader: The hero-leader is the one with 'the answers'. Most of the
other people in the organization cannot make deep changes, because they're
operating out of compliance, rather than out of commitment. Commitment
comes about only when people determine that you are asking them to do
something that they really care about. For that reason, if you create
compliance-oriented change, you'll get change -- but you'll preclude the
deeper processes that lead to commitment, and you'll prevent the emergence
of self-generated change".

 - "Most people would rather have fun at work. It may be obvious, but what
we've observed again and again is that personal enthusiasm is the initial
energizer of any change process. And that enthusiasm feeds on itself.
People don't necessarily want to 'have a vision' at work or to 'conduct
dialogue'. They want to be part of a team that's fun to work with and that
produces results they are proud of".

 19 Some conclusions from the previous analysis:

 a) Unfortunately there are not enough data to answer the question: "does
an organization that studies and practices the 5 Disciplines will it
become a LO?" Are all 5 needed? Do we need some more? Or a different
approach?

 b) It seems that some change has been obtained (20 to 30 companies) but
the majority of cases were failures.

 c) In the referenced interview Senge gives a different emphasis to at
least 3 questions:
 - the comparison of the mechanical view with the biological view,
explicitly attributed to de Geus;
 - the importance of "personal enthusiasm" that I will refer to later when
speaking about metanoia and about Owen's Open Space;
 - the change in the notion of structure, showing some limits of previous
systems thinking.

 d) I think this interview is very important; the idea of LO that I can
capture from it is much more "alive" than the one that I could capture
reading FD and FD-HB or even DC. In my opinion, this interview by Senge is
incorporating de Geus' concept of learning companies into the mainstream
conception of LOs.

 e) Due to that maybe we have now better conditions to discuss different
questions and perspectives, like for instance:
 - how can we create joy and self-organization in the workplace and open
the space within organizations?
 - can we learn something useful from the European reflection about
metanoia in other types of situations, namely the perspectives from
Alberoni?
 - if a positivist mechanical conception of organizations is still
dominant, what are the types of profoundly engrained Mental Models that
prevent people and organizations from change and how can we bypass them?

 20 Do you have any other perspectives that should be considered in this
effort to compliment LO disciplines and perspectives? Or any lessons from
experience you would like to add?

__________________________________________

References

Peter Senge, “The Fifth Discipline -- The Art and Practice of the Learning
Organization (FD), 1990 (UK edition, Century Business, 1993)

Peter Senge and others The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies
and Tools for Building a Learning Organization (FD-F), 1994, Boubleway

Peter Senge and others The Dance of Change -- The Challenges of
Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (DC), 1999 (UK edition,
Nicholas Breadley)

Peter Senge, Learning for a Change, in Fast Company, URL
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/24/senge.html

-- 

"Artur F. Silva" <artsilva@mail.eunet.pt>

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