PEGASUS N05: "Unlearning": The Effect of Dynamic Complexity.. LO19221

John Dicus (jdicus@ourfuture.com)
Sun, 13 Sep 1998 04:07:31 -0400

Following Rick's lead to invite discussion and thoughts on upcoming
Pegasus Conference sessions:

I will be facilitating an Experiential Session that simply demonstrates
the effect of causal loop feedback delay on shared Mental Models -- and
hence on the ability of a team or community to learn.

It would be helpful for me to hear of your real life situations where
you've encountered delayed causal loop feedback, leading to confusion and
unintended consequences.

The session will make use of an new enhancement for The Electric Maze that
incorporates programmable feedback delay in the "alarm" signal. In
working with teams in the study of Systems Thinking (and Systems
Dynamics), we have shown that the introduction of the feedback delay into
the team learning field on the Maze leads to a rapid accumulation of false
assumptions. This in turn impedes generative dialogue, which in turn
begins to degrade useful individual and shared Mental Models.

We use the term UnLearning to mean the loss of useful learning that would
have served the team well had they not decided to abandon it in the face
of confusion. It is a "going backwards" on the learning curve.

In one group, we introduced the delay and then asked team members to tell
us what was happening. Ten people quickly generated about 20 explanations
for what they were experiencing on the Electric Maze learning field. Of
the 20 explanations, only one related to a suspected a time lag in causal
loop feedback. It appears that many people expect intricate forms of
"static" complexity, but don't suspect dynamic complexity as readily.

The debriefing consisted of asking questions such as:

1) What would happen if 10 team members all operated under a single false
shared assumption?

2) What would happen if 10 team members operated under ten different
unshared false assumptions?

3) How can teams learn when dynamic complexity (even the simplest forms
such as delayed and filtered feedback) are present?

4) How does the dynamic response of an organizational system effect the
increasing learning performance of a team?

The encouraging thing about this learning scenario is that it is easily
transportable into any workshop or learning session. And it graphically
teaches the effects of Dynamic Complexity without buzzwords or the need
for complicated terminology. We've just released a LearnWare title for
the Electric Maze that provides hardware upgrades and designed
facilitation scenarios. The LearnWare is called "Closing The Loop"
because it enables teams to close the causal learning loops in the face of
Dynamic Complexity.

If you're going to be at the STIA conference this coming week, come and
join us for our experiential/experimental session on Thursday evening. It
would be nice to put some faces with familiar names and writings.

Warm regards,

John Dicus

-- 

John Dicus | CornerStone Consulting Associates -- Bringing Systems To Life (Systems Thinking) Oct 25-28 -- 2761 Stiegler Road, Valley City, OH 44280 800-773-8017 | 330-725-2728 (2729 fax) http://www.ourfuture.com | mailto:jdicus@ourfuture.com

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