Dear Organlearners,
Leo Minnigh <L.D.Minnigh@library.tudelft.nl> writes:
> But now apartheid within your own organisation. Are there sections or
> departments which are boycotted? Maybe not officially, and should we speak
> of ignoring. And in a more detailed scale: are there colleagues and fellow
> workers who are ignored?
>
> The results of apartheid could still be observed very nearby in your own
> environment. I hope that the lessons of South Africa and the eyes which
> are opened by At will help us te recognise the effects of apartheid and
> ways to heal the wounds.
Greetings Leo,
I wish there was a prize called the "Pasteur Prize". Then I would
have certainly nominated you for that prize. Why? Louis Pasteur noted
that a person could only observe those things for which the person
was prepared objectively through self-mastering to observe.
I know from your contibutions to creativity listservers that you are
extremely sensitive to flow -- "panta rhei", all flow.
Charles Boycott, first victim in Ireland (1880), observed that a
system could be destroyed by ostracism, i.e the banning of
interaction such as the exchange of goods. Now, 100 years later and
in terms of the seven essentialities, we may understand that a
system's creativty could be destroyed by impairing the essentiality
"being-becoming", ie. liveness.
It is easy to confuse boycott with an impairing of wholeness or
sureness ("identity") whereas it is primarily an inpairing of
"becoming" (liveness). Boycotts are like strangling or starving to
death. A Learning Organisation cannot emerge or be maintained when
boycotts are the order of the day. Two of the five disciplines
necessary to understand a LO, namely "shared vision" and "team
learning", will definitely fail.
Working through your contribution I came under the impression that we
should not think of only horizontal boycotts, but also think of
vertical boycotts in an organisation. How often do workers boycott a
manager or do a manager boycott the workers -- the one bearing the
other as a necessary evil?
When I think of organisations, I do not stop at large corporations,
but even think of democracies -- voters boycotting the leaders of
government or vice versa. Think of all the news bulletins only this
year about negative issues concerning national leaders all over the
globe: Africa, America, Asia, Europe, etc. How much of these negative
issues have resulted from a boycotting of information or spending of
taxes?
Even our ecclesiastic organisations are not free of boycotts. I was
reading this weekend again about Desiree Erasmus and Gottfried
Leibniz. I became deeply under the impression how both of them, first
Erasmus and later Leibniz, lamented the boycott (break) in dialogue
(flow of information) between the Catholic and Protestant churches.
But as a result of their efforts to repair the dialogue they were
excommunicated by both sides!
Leo, hopefully you and I will not be excommunicated too. Thank you
for showing us that in our system thinking we have to think of
boycotts (impairing flows) if we want to deal with hurt. Do Boycotts
really stop the hurt?
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>