stories from
March/April 1998
Assessing Learning:
The First SoL Forum
Peter M. Senge
In January, SoL members held a two-day gathering at The New England Center in
Durham, NH, to launch a new research project: "Assessing to Learn and Learning to
Assess." The gathering led to the birth of SoL's first forum. SoL Common recently
spoke with Peter Senge about the role of forums at SoL and about the assessment
forum in particular.
S.C. Can you talk a bit about how forums work, and how they're connected with research projects at SoL?
Peter Well, one thing that SoL members are interested in is sharing and learning from one another. It's what the consultants are interested in; it's what the company people are interested in; and, hopefully, we'll find that this makes sense to the research members as well.
In effect, a forum is a place for conversation, a place for people who are interested in a common subject to come together. SoL forums will have both face-to-face and electronically mediated spaces. A SoL project is a project linked to a SoL forum. When you think about it, it starts to really make sense. The projects that will grow out of those first two days up in New Hampshire will be different from what they would have been if that forum didn't exist. Providing a conversational space and keeping it alive on a continuous basis on the Web page ought to act as a critical orienting device for the projects. The forums, in essence, provide the rudders for the projects.
S.C. It seems that when a forum is laced with both people who have reflected deeply on a subject and people who have a lot of world experience, the conversation rises to a different level.
Peter That's exactly true. When you can get thoughtful practitioners and out-of-the-box thinkers together on an important topic, then you have something really special. Assessment is obviously important. But there's a little more to it than meets the eye. We're never going to have a "learning thermometer" that says, "Your learning rate is X." As Bill O'Brien has pointed out, there are lots of real, thorny reasons for that. Within the SoL membership, we have some of the most thoughtful people in the world focusing on leadership and management. To be able to bring together this caliber of people around important questions is what makes the forum. Often, these people's ideas dovetail naturally. For example, at the January meeting, Tom [Johnson] talked about how, during the twentieth century, we started believing that we could measure our organizations without really understanding what's going on in them. Bill O'Brien's comments about the frustrations of leading organizational change tied in closely with Tom's points. People like Tom and Bill are impressive not only because of who they are but also because of what they've done. For the last five years, Tom has been studying Toyota and other companies who do things very differently. One of the key points coming from this work is that we need to distinguish between assessment for learning and assessment for evaluation. A forum can help people explore these sorts of distinctions.
A few things came out of this first forum that I think are really going to be useful. One is an awareness that the word assessment is problematic because it's often used as a synonym for evaluation. Nowadays, almost all the "assessment" that people are doing is actually for evaluation. Somebody says, after the fact, "How was this money spent?" As Tom pointed out, nature's assessing is done on the spot, in real time?ot retrospectively. That's assessment for learning. That's what Toyota does. It isn't that Toyota doesn't measure anything, but everything they measure is intended to help people continually understand how the system flows. Toyota has developed the ability to embed this "knowledge" in their manufacturing workers. As a result of this capacity, the Toyota production system is world famous.
One simple vision for the SoL assessment project would be to build our capacity for assessing for learning. Until we get better at this, assessing for evaluation will continue to dominate.
S.C. Can you talk a little bit about ideas for research funding?
Peter Daniel Kim had a simple proposal. Since researchers want to get funding for what they want to do, and people in SoL want to see the research get done, why not have SoL act as a broker of sorts, connecting researchers to the larger SoL community? SoL would help the researcher create a well-crafted proposal and would then open a research fund, an account into which people could make contributions. The proposal would then be broadly circulated to all parts of the SoL community via the Web site and SoL Common.
Assessing Learning:
Nine Frustrations
Bill O'Brien
At the recent gathering on SoL's new Assessment Forum, Bill O'Brien, retired CEO of Hanover Insurance Company, opened the session with a short talk about the challenges facing leaders in virtually all organizations. Below are nine frustrations that Bill shared, gleaned from his years of running organizations.
1. As a result of the ebbs and tides of normal business cycles, it can take at least 5 to 10 years to discern how a business is doing.
2. We need to better understand lag time between cause and effect, and to build more realistic expectations about how long it can take for an investment to pay off.
3. There's a war raging between the short term and the long term. Because companies are their own "scorekeepers," they feel intense pressure to beef up short-term results. Many CEOs find it hard to communicate the idea of long-term payoffs to their boards.
4. Seventy percent of the problems afflicting organizations stem from lack of virtue rather than knowledge. We desperately need to reinstate virtue.
5. Self-scoring may be more temptation than managers can handle.
6. We often fail to see that leanness, while lowering comfort levels in the short run, raises security in the long run. We need to embed leanness as a basic virtue.
7. We try too hard to quantify things that shouldn't be quantified, such as openness.
8. All too often, we succumb to the lure of fads.
9. We must encourage a "legacy mentality" at the top. Mature executives focus more on what they're leaving for the next generation than on what their own performance "score" is.
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Interview
H. Thomas Johnson
At the January gathering on the SoL Assessment Forum, Tom Johnson offered some key questions that can help organizations assess their learning.
H. Thomas Johnson is the Retzlaff Chair in Quality Management at Portland State University's School of Business Administration. He has authored and coauthored several books on management accounting, including the revolutionary 1992 book Relevance Regained: From Top-Down Control to Bottom-Up Empowerment (New York: The Free Press). He has come to believe that management accounting, a subject that he had pursued and practiced for over 30 years, could no longer provide useful tools for management. He has said that instead of managing by results, instead of driving people with quantitative financial targets, it's time for people in business to shift their attention to how they organize work and to how they relate to each other as human beings.
S.C. Can you help our readers?onsultants, researchers, people in corporations?o think about the question of how we know we're learning?
Tom My thought is that we know we are learning when we begin acting in ways that are more in harmony with how nature works, and less according to mechanistic patterns of behavior. This notion?"How does nature work?"?s pivotal. On the other side of the coin is, "How do we think? What is it about the way we think that runs at right angles to the way natural systems work?"
I think we can see the whole universe, from the moment of the Big Bang, as a living system. It's making itself visible in ever-diversifying ways, in a constant budget of matter, and using a constant budget of energy that's been there since the beginning. Several researchers have had similar insights about evolution. Evolution is not just what we're seeing here on this earth. On earth, organic life is a profoundly sophisticated example of what we see in the universe. Life on this planet is characterized by a radical interdependence of everything, and the whole thing seems to be driving toward ever-increasing diversity. There are three universal laws?nterdependence, autopoiesis, and diversity?nd they're all unfolding in a universe characterized by endless creation and destruction. Modern science has given us a full picture that confirms these principles?hich are actually quite ancient.
The questions to ask are, "How does what we do differ from this scenario?" and "How does organizational behavior run counter to nature and risk the destruction of our own well-being?" We have to come to terms with the fact that we're engaged in certain self-destructive practices. My thought is that we humans are inherently driven to communicate in terms of abstractions, language being the earliest example. We are constantly creating in our minds a vision of the world that really isn't out there. We've fallen into the habit of seeing things in very definite terms, as linear patterns of growth, and as disconnected. It all started when we first planted seeds and put a fence around animals. By doing these things, we showed our belief that we can produce more than nature itself can. About three hundred years ago, we pushed our powers of abstraction to a new height with the measurement processes that Galileo brought to the table.
This whole process has been accelerated and amplified by being commercialized through our businesses. Now we live in a society dominated by economic activity carried out under the assumption that everything in the universe is independent of everything else. In our view, independent objects react only to external force, which we think we can control. We also see the name of the game in terms of quantified variables, accumulation, and growth?nd there is no such thing in nature.
We humans are an example of the universe finally stopping for a moment, looking within itself, and bringing a new epistemological viewpoint to the table. When we started to commercialize the pursuit of technological products, we started to affect the system we're in. Paul Hawken has a nice way of putting it. He said that human beings live in the midst of two systems. There's the system that was there before we ever came along (life, and the way nature works) and the economic system we've created. Paul says that the two systems have never really communicated, and that they work according to entirely different principles
S.C. So what can people in business do to get these two systems into better alignment?
Tom Well, if I saw a company that was operating more according to life systems, I would begin to see patterns of interdependence, regeneration, recycling, self-emergence, and diversity. I see that in Toyota in many ways. They seem to have created a way of thinking that resembles the way nature works. They use living- system language about metabolic processes, immune systems, and communication systems that act like central nervous systems, and so forth. Everything I see going on inside the Toyota production system manifests those properties, and I say, "My God, no wonder this is working the way it is!"
Scania, the truck maker, is another example. They make virtually fingerprint trucks? different one for every customer. Their design engineering system in many ways replicates evolution itself. They produce an infinitely diverse variety of different trucks to meet different customer demands?nd that is the key characteristic of evolution. It's this idea of the constant budget of matter and energy being transformed constantly to meet different needs.
S.C. Is it just a coincidence that these two examples are both vehicle manufacturing?
Tom Probably. I actually think that if we were to carry the message I'm talking about to its fullest extent, we would find these companies discovering ways to help customers do away with the need for these sorts of products. If you look down the road thirty, forty years, it seems that we have to contemplate how we can help human beings redesign urban space so that we reduce the demand for automotive transportation. And where do we find more or better trained engineers than in the automobile industry? To me, that's the question for those guys.
S.C. How do you sustain the particular path of inquiry that you're on and still maintain enough proximity to business people to give them answers they can do something with? Do you find sometimes that you've moved so far from the questions they're in that it's hard to speak to them?
Tom Sometimes, but we've got to address these questions if we're going to pass on a meaningful world to children and grandchildren. I'm in touch with a number of companies, mostly in Europe, who like to talk about these things. I sense that there is a longer term belief that somehow doing things differently will not only make these companies profitable in the long run, but will also make a better world. I don't get much of that dealing with American companies, except for the Toyota facility in Kentucky. Those Americans are the ones who can suggest the way to a sustainable future. These men were hired by Toyota in the late nineteen eighties away from General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford, and have become completely different human beings in a period of ten years. They want to talk about that transformation, and they see it in the young people who work for them. It brings tears to your eyes sometimes to talk to these young kids?hey truly have joy in the workplace.
S.C. These ideas are very provocative. Are you going to stay involved with this?
Tom I'm planning to, especially now that I've had this encounter. I think this group is more mindful of the message I've come to. Meeting people like Joe Jaworski and learning about the transformation Peter's thinking has gone through in the last few years, I feel very comfortable with it. I think this is a group that hears what I'm saying.
Recommended Reading and Other Resources:
Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson (Ballantine Books, 1990)
The Web of Life, Fritjof Capra (Anchor Books, 1996)
Rivethead, Ben Hamper (Warner Books, 1992)
The Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken (Harper Business, 1994)
Ishmael, Daniel Quinn (Bantam Books, 1995)
The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge (Doubleday, 1990)
MindWalk (videotape) (Pennsylvania Amer. Assoc., 1993)
Meet the SoL Staff!
SoL Common recently invited the SoL staff to introduce themselves, and to share
their visions of what would make 1998 an ideal year.
Yana Ageeva, Web Site Maintenance I'd like to see people using the Web site to
exchange the latest ideas, learn about upcoming SoL events, and find ways to
reach each other. |
Stephen Buckley, Information Technologies and Communications
The thing that would
make 1998 a great year for me would be to have SoL members using a variety of
different communications mechanisms to contact each other. I see SoL as being the
weaver of relationships through media like the newsletter and email lists. It's
the serendipitous interactions that really build relationships. The council has
identified communications as one of the most important things for SoL members to
understand what other people are doing, how it relates to what they're doing, and
forming relationships. Learning is a social exercise, not something that people
do in isolation. A lot of discovery and invention comes when a group of people
who are curious about something get together. |
Nadine Chase, Member Services I hope that in 1998, there will be many projects
being conducted by SoL members and an increase in SoL's global presence. |
Jeff Clanon, Community Development What would make 1998 an
ideal year? First, focus and clarity around our research agenda, and more
participation by consultant and research members. I'd also like to see an
infrastructure in place that lets us greatly expand our educational capability.
Finally, it would be great to see SoL operating truly as a learning organization
ourselves. For me the most satisfying part of the work has been the increasing
congruence between what we're espousing and what we're practicing on a daily
basis. It's very energizing. |
Isabella Desir, Reception(As SoL Common went to press, Isabella had just been hired.) |
Alex Dolan, Group Conference Services (At the time of this interview, Alex had
been at SoL for just two weeks.) One of the things that drew me to SoL was the
fact that it's a new industry that I was interested in getting involved in. As
for what I'd like to see happen in 1998, it's hard to say. I'm still getting a
grasp on what SoL's all about! |
J. J. Harris, Finance I look
forward to seeing the SoL staff coming together more, getting to know each other,
and understanding each other's roles. |
Angela Lipinski, Group and
Conference Services For 1998, I would like each member of the SoL staff to be
cross-trained at each other's jobs, so we can support each other. I want SoL to
be a place where you enjoy coming to work each day? place of achievements, a
place of fun. When we do the core courses, I try to make sure that we incorporate
fun into everything. I'd love to have a social event for all the SoL members?
gathering that would actually include families. |
Jean Macdonald, Assistant to Peter Senge I love the networking in this role, the
connections. It's important to me that people feel taken care of. If they can't
talk with Peter, I give them a Web site, another telephone number, another name,
a book to read. That's Peter's attitude; he's very inclusive, and I feel a
responsibility to offer that to people who call or stop by. What's the best
scenario for this year? I'd like to see everyone on the SoL staff feeling open
and at ease with one another. We're drawing people like moths to a flame, and we
need a larger infrastructure to be sure that these people are getting what they
need. The SoL members and colleagues are very excited about this work and they
want to make a difference and to do something in the business world in which the
bottom line is not money. To me, SoL has a spiritual component, a healing
component, and a huge people component. |
Jane Punchard, Finance and Human Resources By the end of 1998, I think we'll have
really made progress on the research agenda?hat's an integral part of our
mission. And from an operational standpoint, I believe we'll be working more
efficiently. We'll also have a managing director in place, someone who's got the
vision and can get out there and talk with SoL members. We've got these visions
that are tall orders; we need to have someone to bring them to life. There are
multiple people who have pieces of the puzzle, but we need somebody to bring it
all together and help with focusing and prioritizing. |
Arielle Sumits, Networking and Electronic Lists The move from the Center for
Organizational Learning to SoL has opened up the organization. We now have a
group of players who are constantly changing, and that tends to keep the
communication alive. I'd like to see more exploration of the theory behind how
technology relates to organizational learning and the formation of virtual
community. To me, the possibilities seem really endless and fascinating. |
Vicki Tweiten, Member Services My hope for 1998 is that we have a managing
director on board and that SoL International will have a successful launch. I
believe this will put us "on the map." As a SoL staff member, I hope to see SoL
continue its growth as a team that is always learning, reflecting, and "walking
our talk" as we "live" at the heart of SoL.
|
1998 SoL Calendar
- April 1-2 Liaison Meeting (Harvard Club, Boston, MA)
- April 16 Peter Senge, Public Seminar on Organizational Learning (Fairmont Hotel, Chicago, IL)
- May 4-8 Core Course (Renaissance Bedford Hotel, Bedford, MA) Facilitators: Daniel Kim, Beth Jandernoa
- May 20-22 Foundation For Leadership (location TBD)
- June 2-4 Systems Thinking Workshop (Renaissance Bedford Hotel, Bedford, MA) Facilitator: Michael Goodman
- June 10 Becoming a Learning Historian, Champion's Workshop (location TBD)
- June 11-2 Becoming a Learning Historian: Session 1 (Renaissance Bedford Hotel, Bedford, MA)
- June 23-25 Annual Members' Meeting (Amherst College, Amherst, MA)
- June 30 Peter Senge, Public Seminar on Organizational Learning (location TBD, Detroit, MI)
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