In a message dated 8/26/98 11:13:45 PM, Rol wrote:
>It may be in the handbook, but there were real examples. Unfortunately,
>the bulk of the examples were about sports teams, symphonies, dance
>groups, etc. Unfortunate not because these are not good examples.
>Unfortunate only because they share a critical trait that is not available
>in most profit or non-profit organizations, and that is that they all
>spend more time practicing than in executing (one could add military org
>here as well). Personally, I believe this is why they are such good
>examples of learning orgs. I don't understand how to transport that
>example to environments where practice is not practiced.
Rol,
You point to an important distinction between business and other
activities. But, I'd like to reframe what practice is. In your post, I
assume you refer to practice as doing something when there are no/less
consequences so that it is safer to learn and try new things to build
skills; we go "offline." In business, we don't get much time to practice
off-line, but every time we do anything, aren't we are practicing as well
as performing? It is our relationship to it, our interpretation that has
it be practice rather than execution. George Leonard makes the point that
every thing we do all the time is practice and we might want to take a
look at what we are practicing and thus reinforcing in our bodies and in
our lives.
Practice is for the sake of embodiment. The more we practice, the more we
reinforce those neuro pathways and have easier access to them in the
future. Thus, every action we take is reinforcing some neuro pathway, new
or old, so we are always in practice.
We mislead ourselves in our interpretation that there is no practice when
we are executing. When we perform an action this time, we are practicing
doing the same thing better next time. That is the power of Action
Learning.
There are some situations that require a level of expertise that no
mistakes are "permissible" such as a pilot or nuclear power plants, life
or death situations. But, my hunch is that most things aren't this
serious and that there is more tolerance in the system than we imagine for
our practice and thus mistakes. With awareness, we can and should be
learning from all our actions, not just what we normally think of as
practice when it doesn't count.
Another thought I've had around this thread is that org learning and its
sometimes philosophical nature might be less about "doing" per se and more
about who we are being that gives rise to our doing. When we shift our
thinking and then "put it in our bodies" through practice so that it
becomes automatic, we are changing both our being and our doing.
Margaret McIntyre
MargMcI@aol.com
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