Mark Feenstra wrote:
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.
I have been reading some comments about the problem of metrics applied to
LO. I have just been reading the book "The Wisdom of Teams", by Jon R.
Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith. I was interested in this book because
teams are just small organizations, and I read it because I hoped I would
find some insights useful to study LO.
I actually find an interesting insight. They found that effective teams
not only learn, but they have brilliant and outstanding performances, but,
more important, the produced results _pretty quickly_. One of the main
problems of LO metrics is the span of time (up to 10 years). However,
Katzenbach and Smith found effective teams learn, are good and quick
performers, so they are not difficult to be measured.
How and why are these effective teams so effective? _Because those teams
were created to solve tough problems_, they where not created just for the
sake of it. Thus, the best teams were created to solve problems, not just
to create teams.
What if we are creating learning organizations just for the sake of it?
Maybe it isn't strange at all that our LO are so difficult to measure...
they were not created to solve specifics problems, so, how can we know if
they were successful?
I've read a lot of postings saying that "we want to build a LO in a xxxx
(school, industry, facility, etc.)". But, what for? If LO don't have a
clear, well defined, reachable but demanding purpose, it will be very
hard to apply any metric.
--Luis Colorado <LuisColorado@ndp.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>