I will give... LO30374

From: AM de Lange (amdelange@postino.up.ac.za)
Date: 07/14/03


Replying to LO30362 --

Dear Organlearners,

Andrew Campbell < ACampnona@aol.com > wrote:

>Game playing is a fundamental ;-) sustainer of human creativity.
>I will give a prize, maybe of an original work of art...maybe a
>Picasso, maybe not ;-) to the first person who on the public LO
>can tell me who wrote this passage quoted below. The 'game'
>emerges from recent discussions about current issues surrounding,
>roughly, LO, New KM and complexity (aka New) sciences.
>Mmmmmm ;-)
>
>"...the problems which lead to original discoveries are precisely
>those which cannot be resolved by any familiar rule of the game,
>because the matrices applied in the past to problems of a similar
>nature have been rendered inadequate by new features
(snip)

Greetings dear Andrew,

I am not sure. If my suspicion is correct, then that person is famous for
having identified certain problems and then having solved them in a manner
requiring new ways of thinking. This person also said that if someone has
not done it before the age of thirty, he/she would most probably not do it
in the rest of his/her life. I think that this person tried to stress that
the child's creativity should remain in the adult.

Your "game" is one which already Whitehead has commented upon long ago. He
said that using any natural language to express our thoughts will always
lead into uncertainties. It is because people often attribute different
meanings to the same word. I see only one way out of this mess using
natural languages. It is to have a dialogue so as to make sure at least
what these different meanings are and perhaps to have a common meaning
emerge from that dialogue.

Last Saturday a rugby game was played between the South African Springboks
and the Australian Wallabies. Unlike several previous matches against
different countries of which the Springboks lost many, they won this game.
Why? They played a GAME rather than played a match. They did exactly what
Whitehead once advised many years ago. Do not think and talk too much in
advance, but rather act as soon as possible and then think and talk
afterwards. It worked superbly.

>Dear At,
>
>Your learning is great, your mind a veritable cavern of such
>wisdom as spouted above...I think you might know the
>answer ;-) so, dear friend, please desist from public discourse
>on this (send me private answer if you wish;-) and...and...
>please...do have a go LO...

I have answered by embroidering on your riddle. It does two things:
 * I do not lose face should i be wrong
 * It helps fellow learners to understand the thinking of the person whom
i have in mind.

Andrew, my learning only amounts to many years of doing it -- nothing
more. Since as a kid i had the passion to explore the unkown and to ponder
over the obvious. If i can give parents any advice, it is not to quench
the exploring and pondering in their children, but rather to back them up
as far as possible, even when they as parents would not have dared it
themselves.

As for wisdom, i think it is better for me to recognise it among other
people than claiming to have it myself. I have been brought up as a kid
that wisdom is to fear God. This statement comes from the Bible (Proverbs,
i think). It is only much, much later when i discovered the positive
version of this statement -- wisdom is to love God and whoever/whatever
God loves. Yet i cannot sustain it by a direct quotation as in the former
case. And i do not feel sorry about it. This is the difference between
information and knowledge. It is easy to quote from any source of
information, but knowledge comes by following the path of learning
whatever it takes.

I had a strange thought while writing the above. How much of the child's
creativity has to be set free once again in an Ordinary Organisation (OO)
so that it can emerge into a Learning Organisation (LO)?

Andrew, i hope that some fellow learners will take up your challenge.

With care and best wishes

-- 

At de Lange <amdelange@postino.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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