Replying to LO27802 --
Dear Organlearners,
Mark McElroy <mmcelroy@vermontel.net> writes:
>If ever we needed a testament to the value and
>importance of knowledge management and
>organizational learning, there it s right before us
>-- a heap of ashes and broken lives that we used to
>know as Enron. And there it is, right before us
>-- an extreme case of what conventional organizations
>do every day: allow small teams of elites to make plans
>on behalf of large populations of people even as they
>disenfranchise their constituents from the learning and
>decision making process that will bind them. How
>stupid can we get?
Greetings dear Mark,
Thank you very much for your most valuable contribution. When we bear in
mind that what these "elites" did, had been decided by a "board of
directors" who self got voted as directors for some fixed period, then
there is no marked difference from a democratic government, except for one
thing! A democratic government has a constitution which it has to adhere
to, whatever the decisions made by the legistive branch ("board of
directors") and acted upon by the executive branch ("elites").
Do you still remember our recent dialogue on "Democracy or Constitution"?
A democracy can have an explicit constitution in terms of a written
document like the USA or an implicit constitution in terms of a set of
customs in practice like the UK. A democracy without a constitution is on
a fatal course. It may never had a contitution, or it may neglect the
constitution. In both cases it is because of ignorance to the ROL (Rule Of
Law).
The ROL can be formulated as external information, but it has to be backed
up by the internal knowledge living in the minds of the nation. Without
this inner knowledge it is as if the constitution does not exist at all,
despite its articulation in words. This inner knowledge have to emerge by
learning authentically in an existing practice. However, exclude more and
more people from authentic learning and among other things they will
become ignorant of the ROL. Thus the elite and their directors can do as
they wish, even steering the nation or corporation into a solid object.
>But when a body of faith or practice (whether it be in
>religion or in business) systematically disenfranchises
>large chunks of its own population from its own
>process of organizational learning and decision making,
>an appreciable number of bad decisions and outcomes
>can be expected to follow.
(snip)
>Similarly, by excluding the vast majority of workers
>from learning and decision making processes at an
>organizational level, the practice of business will
>generally lead to bad decisions and bad outcomes more
>often. In fact, any organization or social system that
>systematically deprives itself of its members' learning and
>decision making contributions can expect to receive
>exactly what they deserve in return -- more bad
>outcomes more often.
Two thoughts crossed my mind which I want to write about. The first is
that what you wrote does not apply only to religious and business
organisations, but also to political (as I have explained above) and even
educational organisations. Is it possible in the latter when their very
job is to foster learning? Yes, when the educational organisation degrades
learning by selling it as rote learning (memorisation of information and
exact duplication of it). This has become so rampant that we now have to
speak of "authentic learning" to contrast it with "rote learning".
The second thought is that what you have described so vividly is the
outcome of "decreasing wholeness". Wholeness is not a property which can
be switched on or off. It is a property which can increase or decrease
step by step in a fractal manner. Senge identified wholeness as one of the
11 essences of a Learning Organisation. I see it also as one of the 7Es
(seven essentialities of creativity). When the wholeness of an individual
and an organisation increases step by step, creativity, learning as well
as all other higher sipiritual activities advance. But when wholeness
decreases, creative destructions in the future beckons.
>This business of restricting the authority to learn
>and make decisions in large organizations to small
>centralized groups, even as they deny their underlying
>constituents access to the process is a uniquely human
>foible. No other species seems predisposed (i.e., dumb
>enough) to behave this way. Even in the realm of social
>insects, we see decision making emanating from the
>bottom up, as it were. David Stark at Columbia University
>calls this 'heterarchies.' We still get socially coherent
>behaviors, but the organization benefits from the learning
>of its entire population, not just the artificially sanctioned
>leadership at the top.
Long ago I wrote that what Stark now calls "heterarchies", the South
African Eugene Marais called almost a century ago the "collective soul" of
every specimen in such a population of the learning species. He based his
insight on carefull studies of ant colonies and later confirmed it by
studying packs of baboons.
In other words, using the words of Marais, what these small centralised
groups in a human organisation do, is to destroy by their systematical
actions the "collective soul" of the organisation. It seems that they
succeed because the "collective soul" of the organisation is not enough to
prevent them doing it. Has humankind reached the point of no return? I do
not think so because for one thing, on this very list we have and active
dialogue how to prevent them from succeeding.
>How many more Enron's will it take for management,
>industry, and society in general to take knowledge
>management seriously -- a management discipline that
>seeks to enhance organizational learning by focusing on
>improving the rules for making rules? This is all very
>tangible, high value stuff.
I think that one reason why organisations fail in this is because their
members fail to make a distiction between knowledge which lives within
them and information which exists outside them. Another reason is that
their members fail to make a distiction between authentic learning and
rote learning. The rules for making rules can only be improved by
authentic learning. This involves tacit knowing as Polanyi once argued
breath takenly.
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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