I've always felt a major stylistic divide between professors who have all
the answers and professors who elicit creative thought. The students seem
to take sides also. I was laboring under Ackoff's answer style, and it
was always a great relief to have a visitor from the other camp who could
draw Ackoff into dialogue. We students couldn't seem to get past the
answers. Schon and Beer were the most memorable of these visitors.
My intellectual development tracked with Schon well before and well after
those sessions in grad school. As a kid, I read a lot of books on
creativity, and only later discovered Schon's very good work on this
topic. I was a futurist when Beyond the Stable State came out. It was
fantastically rich in method and cases for understanding the direction of
socio-economics. Recently I reread the book on learning organizations and
got the impression that, as the field has "developed", the main
accomplishment has been to create formulas for transmission of a few
insights, and many of the insights of Schon and others have been lost.
The Reflective Practitioner changed my life. Schon puts his finger on
practical knowledge and shows how to get it and how to use it. This turns
out to be a good foundation for the reform of professional education, but
I haven't noticed any groundswell. It could be because the book is
evocative, for those who are willing to think along with the author and
work through materials that that aren't fully formulated. The sequel book
was programmatic, which Schon seemed to take on as a chore just to show
that he could do it. But I think he and professors with a similar style
excel at setting up their students to take the next step. He did a great
deal to prepare the next generation, and now it is up to us, his team
through time.
--Kent Myers Alexandria, VA myersk@us.net
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>