Replying to LO27170 --
Dear Organlearners,
Richard Seel <richard@richard-seel.demon.co.uk> writes:
>The first step on the road to 'getting it' seems to be
>that they come to the above conclusion: we, as leaders
>or managers, need to become gardeners - - to nourish,
>fertilise, prune, weed, care for, allow growth to happen, etc...
>
>Yet I always challenge this. For it seems to me to still be
>'old paradigm' thinking, albeit with a more organic flavour.
>The gardener is outside the garden system - or at least
>at a higher logical level than the garden. The gardener
>operates upon the garden, for good or ill (there is a whole
>strand here about the imposition of culture upon nature
>which I will not go into here...).
>
>But leaders and managers in an organisation are not
>outside the system, nor at a higher logical level than
>others in the organisation. *That* is one of the great
>fallacies of the mechanical view. It also seems to be a
>fallacy of much so-called systems thinking.
>
>We are literally 'all in it together' and one of the great
>lessons we have to learn is how to stop behaving as if
>we were outside the system and learn to work *with*
>the system in appropriate ways.
Greetings dear Richard,
I agree deeply with your last two paragaphs. This is what wholeness is
about.
But as for the first two paragraphs, not all gardeners are like that. For
example, there are gardeners who, when a new township is set out in some
wild area which already looks like a garden, leaves it as much as possible
intact, even when burning with desire to change the garden. There are also
other gardeners who become almost like plants when caring for them. They
talk to them, caress them, smell every part of them (and not only the
flowers) and even listen to the sounds which they make when the wind blows
past them.
It seems to me that even in gardeners there is one of two paradigms
operating. They are:
* XYZ management from the outside
* deep management within
>That is the challenge I struggle with in my work and the
>challenge which many on this list also struggle with.
How true. Some struggle with the X, others with the Y and a few with the
Z. But who will take up the challenge to struggle with all for what X, Y
and Z may stand for?
With care and 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
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