At 11:21 AM 4/22/98 -0700, you wrote:
>Rick, Rol, Rob and Doc et. al,
> We stand at the dawn of the 21st Century, with an
>immense opportunity to provide all who would be part or our organizational
>experience the opportunity to be more involved with their lives, to make a
>difference, and to really be part of something special. The Learning
>organization provides a philosophical perspective to organizations which
>lays the ground work for this to occur. However, setting the learning
>organization into a context where the hierarchy is absolute and supreme,
>because this is what the opinion or declaration of what strong leadership
>is all about, is like trying to run an Apple Program on a exclusively
>Windows Based Machine.
>
>CL provides a shift of mind wherein, leadership in about what people do
>together. CL and the learning organization are like two batteries in two
>battery flashlight, they are mutually supportive and the power source for
>the organization of the future.
Here's some food for thought in that vein:
Leadership is the basic human process of creating, maintaining, and
evolving meanings in a collective context. Leadership is the communal
counterpart of the deeply personal process of understanding ourselves and
our place in the world. Leadership connects individuals to larger
contexts such as groups, organizations, communities, nations, and
societies. In its many forms and ways of working, leadership holds humans
together by providing interpretive structures and enduring values.
Leadership is meaning making in collective experience.
Being human is a process of meaning making. This assumption is based on
the idea, as stated by Robert Kegan, that "organisms organize, and what
the human organism organizes is meaning". A human organizes meaning in
the process of understanding. To be human is to organize meaning in the
evolution of personal and social systems such as personal identity and
social culture. Meaning in this sense is a coherent framework for
interpreting, predicting, and controlling experience.
Think about a business organization. Leadership in such an organization
will arise from the creation, nurturing, and evolution of its various
systems of accountability, decision making, policy, and so forth. These
systems allow people to interpret and make predictions about their
behavior in the organization. People know how their work is related to
other work and to the work of the business overall. Along with these
forms of meaning there are various interpretations constantly being
offered about performance, products, markets, working conditions, people,
and more. These interpretations are an additional way for people in the
organization to make sense of their experience things are going well or
poorly, the organization is accomplishing its mission or not, there are
problems or opportunities on the horizon, and so forth. There are also
stories about how the organization came into being, the early days, dreams
of the founders, that connect people in the organization to a line of
intention or cause and effect. And frequently there is dialogue in which
differing views become reconciled through synthesis or compromise and
other meaning structures (systems, explanations, narratives) are evolved
toward newer forms.
Most of the literature on leadership is prescriptive, and deals with what
leaders should do to be effective, rather than dealing with what
leadership fundamentally is. This literature is loud and clear in
prescribing goal setting and the corollary functions of purpose, mission,
and vision as tools of the effective leader (e.g., Kouzes & Posner, 1987).
One question is, how fundamental is the articulation of goals, purpose,
mission, or vision to the work of leadership?
It is an open question as to whether a collective experience can occur
without any goals or purpose. Probably not. However, the important point
is that goals are part of the fabric of the meanings being made within the
collective. They often emerge from the processes that cohere the
collective, rather than always being the driver of those processes. Goals
are a form of meaning making, but not a superior form, or a more
fundamental form.
Sometimes a fixation on goals as a superior form of meaning gets in the
way of leadership. Within any organization, or group, or team, there are
ongoing collective experiences, and ongoing meanings, and by extension,
ongoing implicit or explicit goals and purposes. Additional efforts at
leadership have to deal with these prior meanings, or else attempt to tear
down and rebuild the collective under a whole new structure of coherence.
When leaders take up goal setting as a superior form of meaning making,
they risk the latter. Too often, leaders focus on imposing a vision
without attempting to understand, accommodate, and assimilate forms of
collective experience. The risk is that any imposed vision will not graft
to this growing body that is, will not respect its cohering structures but
will die as a foreign element, or worse, kill the body itself.
Communicating a vision should involve listening to the meaning that is
already there, as much as creating new structures of meaning.
For example, a manager may glean from reading and observing and learning
that a good leader has a stirring vision and is decisive and action
oriented. It doesn't matter where our manager got these ideas. He or she
is likely to act on them, believing them to be the keys to leadership. If
our manager believes that a vision and decisiveness and orienting toward
action constitute leadership, he or she may play out this presumed role of
leader without actually leading that is, without actually creating,
nurturing, or evolving structures of meaning within the appropriate
collective experience. At best the effect is benign ineffective
leadership in an unimportant setting. At worst, such virtual leadership
may do great harm in a setting where meaning making is badly needed.
Thus, well intentioned prescriptions for leadership based on observations
of leadership behavior may badly miss the point of what is really going on
and fuel the ever present human proclivity for self promotion, ambition,
and the need for power.
The corrective for this situation, would be to discover the competencies
of meaning making, the skills, as it were, of creating, nurturing, and
evolving structures of meaning in collective experience. Perhaps these
are significantly different from leadership skills and competencies now
being taught and might lead to a larger number of more effective leaders
being developed.
What is the role of collective experience in the lives of people? If
the development of personal structures of meaning are key components of
personal growth, is the development of meaning in collective contexts also
a part of human growth and development? Is leadership about more than
achieving goals and solving problems? Might it also be about the
maturation of individuals and the adaptation of the species?
Finally, something else to consider: Carl Weick has suggested that the
primary purpose of the organization is sense making.
--Richard Scherberger <rshrbrgr@lvnworth.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>