Yes, but does LO work? LO19054

Mark Feenstra (mark@strategiclearning.co.nz)
Wed, 2 Sep 1998 12:01:13 +1200

Replying to LO19046 --

Replying to LO 19046 --

Quoting Luis J. Colorado's posting,

>I'm still looking for a way to measure performance in a Learning
>Organization. I think it's a very elusive issue, because, as you said,
>quantitative metrics like the stock market may be misleading. Thinking in an
>LO as a live organism, failing and learning from those errors, a short term
>measure like the stock market performance in the last months may be
>misleading. Going further, the time period needed to have a significant
>metric should be at very least the time needed by the LO to learn and act
>accordingly to the accumulated knowledge. As it would be unreasonable to
>rank any organization for the last day's stock value, it makes no sense to
>rate a LO for a too short period of time.

IMO time may not be enough to make the case effectively.

The question arises in my mind as to whether the LO phenomenon represents
a transitional form of organisation that has emerged as a bridge between
the modernist materialist world view and post post modernist living
systems world view.

If this is so then the application of modernist metrics will never
adequately justify supporting the emergence of this transitional
organizational form. This is demonstrated in the fact the our modernist
financial markets ignore all dimensions of the performance of
organizations except those that concern modernist materialist assumptions
about the interests of "owners". It may be that when we have a set of
metrics that account for the ongoing impact of organizational forms on all
stakeholders (i.e. social and non-human) then the relative merits of forms
of organization that enable learning will be better able to be assessed
relative to other forms of organization.

My guess is that if we ever arrive at a point when such comparisons are
able to be made it will only be because enough of us choose to value such
metrics long before they appear in the Wall Street Journal. I find the
alternative difficult to face...

Warm regards

Mark Feenstra

-- 

"Mark Feenstra" <mark@strategiclearning.co.nz>

Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>