I agree that system dynamics provides a wonderful tool to address
organizational level learning. I agree this tool (and a primary focus of
the LO community) has been on "involving people in solving problems
systemically". And, I agree that when people effectively engage in such
collective activity they are "living organizational learning".
My experience suggests, however, the LO community does not focus as much
attention on: 1) how organizations learn at the organizational level or 2)
how to effectively design and change these organizational level learning
mechanisms (organizational governance). To help delineate the individual
and organizational level learning mechanisms I suggested the following
extreme question: "How can organizations increase their capacity to
effectively adapt to environmental changes with out requiring specific
individuals to learn anything?".
Some find this question "meaningless. How could adaptiveness happen
without [individual] learning?"
I believe organizations can adapt at the organizational level without the
learning of individuals in the organization or even being aware of what
the organization "has learned". After all, both the System Dynamics and
the Quality technologies were initially developed to help uncover the
underlying system structures that caused us to falsely attribute to
individuals the blame for what were systemic failures.
My "extreme question" turns the problem around: How can we create system
structures that engender outcomes we value without relying on specific
individual learning of those in the system. (Or, How do we create
organizational governance mechanisms that will engender more effective
outcomes, even with no increase in our capacity for individual learning.)
I am not aware of much serious, sustained LO community work in this arena
but I'd love to hear of it.
This formulation of the organizational learning question may make some
feel uncomfortable. While the LO community may value exposing "the
system" as the root cause of what appeared to be individual failures
(freeing individuals from undeserved blame), there may be less community
energy to design organizations with structures that nurtured effective
outcomes independent of the specific individuals within the organization
(denying individuals ineffective accountability?).
Doug Merchant
On Career Sabbatical
--"Douglas Merchant" <dougm@eclipse.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>