The Architecture of Learning Organizations
Since The Fifth Discipline was published, perhaps the most often asked question has been, ''How do we get started in practicing the learning disciplines?" People ask, "Do We simply need to get together and talk about the book? Or is it a matter of developing the right training programs?"
While the disciplines are vital, they do not in themselves provide much guidance on how to begin the journey of building a learning organization. The deep learning cycle is difficult to initiate. Skills involving fundamental new ways of thinking and interacting take years to master.
New sensibilities and perceptions of our world are a by-product of long term growth and change. Deep beliefs and assumptions are not like light switches that can be turned on and off.
Imagine that we are standing in a beautiful open field. With the vision of building a new type of school- a school where children could continually develop their innate capabilities for learning. As architects, we would work with three critical elements. First. there would be materials needed in the construction. Second would be the tools with which we would design and eventually build the physical structure. Last would be our overarching ideas about how the school building should look, and how it could support the learning, we desired to occur. Ultimately, many people will be involved in bringing the vision of the new school to fruition. But without the work of skilled and committed architects, they can never begin. The architecture is the "shell" within which the real work of the school will eventually take place.
In the same way, the real work of building learning, organizations is the work of the deep learning cycle, and it is the province of all who engage in ongoing practice of the learning disciplines. But it takes place within a "shell," an architecture of guiding ideas, innovations in infrastructure, and theory, methods, and tools.
GUIDING IDEAS
''Good ideas drive out bad ideas,'' says former Hanover Insurance CEO Bill O'Brien. "The problem with most companies is that they have no good ideas. Instead, they are driven by ideas like: 'The name of the game is climbing the corporate ladder,' or 'Do whatever it takes to win personally.' Like a bad ecology, these ideas pollute the organizational climate and become self-reinforcing."
Fortunately, guiding ideas can be developed and articulated deliberately. Indeed this has long been a central function of genuine leadership. "We hold these truths to be self-evident . . ." With these simple words, the cornerstone ideas upon which the United States system of governance is based were articulated. Few acts of leadership have had greater impact.
Guiding ideas (or ''governing ideas", as O'Brien calls them) for learning organizations start with vision, values, and purpose: What the organization stands for and what its members seek to create. Every organization, whether it deliberately creates them or not, is governed according to some explicit principles. They are not necessarily benign. Perhaps the most pernicious guiding idea to penetrate to the heart of Western business management over the past thirty to fifty years is that the purpose of the enterprise is to maximize return of the shareholders investment. If people really come to believe this, then whatever ideas are articulated will, by definition of the organization's purpose, be subordinate to making money. Can there be little wonder that people in such organizations are uncommitted, that they view their jobs as mundane and uninspiring, and that they lack any deep sense of loyalty to the organization?
By contrast, management writer Ikujiro Nonaka describes the Japanese view that "A company is not a machine but a living organism, and, much like an individual, it can have a collective sense of identity and fundamental purpose. This is the organizational equivalent of self knowledge- a shared understanding of what the company stands for, where it's going, what kind of world it wants to live in, and, most importantly, how it intends to make that world a reality."
But many attempts to articulate guiding ideas in organizations result in bland "motherhood and apple pie mission" or vision statements. What, then, distinguishes powerful and meaningful vision statements from Pollyannaish drivel? The first distinguishing feature is philosophical depth. Before the Founding Fathers could agree on the ideas articulated in the Declaration of Independence they literally invested years in study and conversation. They studied the evolution of democratic thinking in the West, the history of democratic governance systems among Native Americans, and hermeneutic philosophy, as transmitted through the Masonic order. Benjamin Franklin served as a colonial envoy to the Iroquois nation; during a three-decade period he wrote and published a number of works on Iroquois government practices. Only after five or ten years of patient and challenging conversation could they declare that "We hold these truths to be self-evident," jointly authoring a statement of precepts to which they were literally willing to commit "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor." Contrast this history to the three-day retreats where management teams repair to author corporate mission or vision statements
To illustrate more serious efforts, consider the following statement by Bill O'Brien: "Our traditional organizations are designed to provide for the first three levels of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs- food, shelter, and belonging. Since these are now widely available to members of industrial society, these organizations do not provide anything particularly unique to command the loyalty and commitment of people. The ferment in management today will continue until organizations begin to address the higher order needs: self respect and self actualization."
In this statement, O'Brien articulates a larger context within which to consider the specifics of an organization's mission, vision, and values. He suggests that changes in the world offer a new opportunity for organizations to reach for higher aspirations. Regardless of whether you agree with his views, it is clear that they arise from considerable thought. They carry a sense of passionate conviction not captured in most mission statements. The fact that O'Brien and his colleagues at Hanover Insurance worked continually for twenty years to develop "a guiding philosophy" for the organization speaks eloquently for patience and perseverance.
The second distinguishing feature of powerful guiding ideas follows from the first- seeing the process as ongoing. Guiding ideas are not static. Their meaning, and sometimes their expression, evolve as people reflect and talk about them, and as they are applied to guide decisions and action. This, of course, is the central tenet of the discipline of building shared vision- that shared visions live in our ongoing conversations about what we seek together to create.
THREE KEY GUIDING IDEAS FOR LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS
Are there guiding ideas relevant for all efforts to build learning organizations? A five-day introductory program developed for the member companies of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning offers one perspective. The program is organized around three interrelated ideas which constitute the philosophical core of the systems perspective. All three of these ideas question bedrock tacit assumptions of the Western cultural tradition. Time will tell the merit of these as guiding ideas for a workable philosophy of management, but they seem to be pointing in the right direction.
- The primacy of the whole suggests that relationships are, in a
genuine sense, more fundamental than things, and that wholes are primordial to
parts. We do not have to create interrelatedness The world is already
interrelated.
In the West, we tend to think the opposite. We tend to assume that parts are primary, existing somehow independent of the wholes within which they are constituted. In fact, how we define "parts" is highly subjective, a matter of perspective and purpose. There is no intrinsic set of categories, no innate way to define elements that is built into the nature of the ''real thing'' we are looking at. Consider a simple mechanical system, like an airplane. Is it made up of a fuselage, wings, tail, and cockpit? Of metal parts and plastic parts? Or of a right half and a left half? There are an infinite number of ways to partition the plane. The categories we invoke depend upon whether we are a designer, a parts supplier, or a passenger. But what makes an airplane an airplane cannot be found in the parts. A submarine also has a fuselage and a tail; a large crane in a steel mill has a cockpit; and a blimp has all three. The identity of the airplane exists only in the function and design of the whole. The parts of the plane are neither absolute nor "out there." Rather, they arise as we as observers interact with the phenomenon we are observing.
The primacy of the whole is even more compelling when we consider living systems. Dividing a cow in half does not make two small cows. A person might be said to be comprised of a head, a torso, and limbs; or of bones, muscles, skin, and blood; or of the brain, lungs, heart, liver, and stomach; or of a digestive system, circulatory system, respiratory system, and nervous system; or of many, many cells. No matter what distinctions we choose, we cannot grasp what it is to be human by looking at the parts.
In the realm of management and leadership, many people are conditioned to see our ''organizations" as things rather than as patterns of interaction. We look for solutions that will fix problems, as if they are external and can be fixed without ''fixing" that which is within us that led to their creation. Consequently, we ale inevitably drawn into an endless spiral of superficial quick fixes, worsening difficulties in the long run, and an ever-deepening sense of powerlessness. In organizations, articulating the primacy of the whole as a guiding idea may be the first step in helping people break this vicious cycle.
- The community nature of the self challenges us to see the
interrelatedness that exists in us. Just as we tend to see parts as primordial to
wholes, we tend to see the individual as primordial to the community in which the
individual is embedded "There is no such thing as human nature independent of
culture,'' says anthropologist Clifford Geertz.
When somebody asks us to talk about ourselves, we talk about family, work, things we care about and what we do for fun. But in all of this talk, where is our "self"? The answer is nowhere, because the self is not a thing. The self is, as my colleague Fred Kofman says, "a point of view that unifies the flow of experience into a coherent narrative- a narrative striving to connect with other narratives." Moreover, the narrative is deeply informed by our culture. The stories we construct to make sense of our experience, to give meaning to our actions and thoughts, are stories that we have learned to construct.
When we forget the community nature of the self, we identify ourself with our ego. We then assign a primordial value to the ego (part) and see the community (whole) as secondary. We see the community as nothing but a network of contractual commitments to symbolic and economic exchanges. Encounters with others become transactions that can add or subtract to the possessions of the ego.
The resulting loss is incalculable- isolation, loneliness, and loss of our "sense of place." We lose a sense of self which other cultures know very well. For example, in many indigenous cultures the essence of being a person is being in relationship to other people like the culture of ubuntu described on page 3 of the Fieldbook). In such cultures, our unquestionable "reality" of separation is not so "real". A culture where people greet one another with "I see you," and where speaking a person's name brings him or her into existence as a person, may seem "crazy'' to us. But it is perfectly consistent with a systems view of life, which suggests that the self is never "given" and is always in a process of transformation.
As a guiding idea for learning organizations, the community nature of the self opens the door to powerful and beneficial changes in our underlying values. When we do not take other people as objects for our use, but see them as fellow human beings with whom we can learn and change, we open new possibilities for being ourselves more fully.
The generative power of language illuminates the subtle interdependency operating whenever we interact with "reality" and implies a radical shift in how we see some of these changes coming about.
Werner Heisenberg shocked the world of classical physics in 1927 by claiming that when we measure the world we change it. With his uncertainty principle, Heisenberg gave "hard science" credibility to what philosophers had gradually come to understand over the preceding hundred years: that human beings cannot ever know what is "really real." We participate more deeply than we imagine in shaping the world that we perceive.
Philosophers have given the name "naive realism'' to the worldview which holds rigid positions like the primacy of the parts and the isolated nature of the self. This worldview takes reality as a given entity outside our perception, and sees language as the tool through which we describe this external reality "out there''. But as Heisenberg suggests, we have no actual way of ever knowing what is "out there.'' Whenever we articulate what we see, our language interacts with our direct experience. The "reality" we bring forth arises from this interaction.
The alternative to naive realism is recognizing the generative role of the traditions of observation and meaning shared by a community- and that these traditions are all that we ever have. When we are confronted by multiple interpretations of the "real world," the alternative to seeking to determine which is "right" is to admit multiple interpretations and seek those that are most useful for a particular purpose, knowing that there is no ultimately "correct" interpretation. The alternative to seeing language as describing an independent reality is to recognize the power of language that allows us to freshly interpret our experience- and might enable us to bring forth new realities.
When we forget the generative power of language, we quickly confuse our maps for the territory. We develop a level of certainty that robs us of the capacity for wonder, that stifles our ability to see new interpretations and new possibilities for action. Such are the roots of belief systems that become rigid, entrenched, and ultimately self-protective. When we forget the contingent nature of our understanding, who we are becomes our beliefs and views. This is why we defend against an attack on our beliefs as if it were an attack against ourselves. In a very real sense, it is.
