|
Before giving you our theory, let us review a couple of definitions.
First, what is a learning organization? Senge called it one "where
people continually expand their capacity to create the results they
truly desire..." etc.
In our less eloquent way, we think of the learning organization
as a place where people sit up, pay attention, talk freely about
what they learn. They do this because operational phenomena—values,
systems, policies, procedures—invite them to, reward them for
it. On the other hand, the low-life-expectancy sort of organization
expects employees to, in effect, sit down, shut up and hang on 'til
the ride is over. The real difference between the two is that in
the learning organization individual and collective learning amount
to a business within a business. The fruits of this learning enterprise—the
Gross Learning Product, if you will—lets the organization continuously
anticipate and adjust to changes in the environment. And without
the help of gazillion dollar re-engineering efforts, either.
Senge identified personal mastery as one of the five disciplines
of the learning organization. We think of it as the cornerstone.
You can't reach out and touch an organization because it is a ghostly
thing, an invisible repository of will and competence; organizations
exist in the thin ether of our actions and values. But there is
nothing abstract about the people who make them up. They dream,
worry, attend meetings, call on customers, phone home. You can weigh
them, poll them during elections, clock them at the mile. They're
real. It makes sense that when an organization learns, the locus
of that learning is the individual, and groups of individuals. That's
why we consider personal mastery the key.
We think personal mastery is another way of saying learning, but
we must be clear about the kind of learning we mean. It's not just
the accumulation of technical and functional information we're referring
to, but its wise and beneficial use. This is a monumental qualification,
of course, because it introduces the issues of self-knowledge and
personal values.
Here, we believe, is where you will find the answer to the riddle
of the learning organization, and the reason the learning organization
as a whole, functioning entity is still on the drawing board.
When he was an old man, one of the great civic leaders of the
20th century, an attorney named Ben Kizer, observed that, "The
last thing we learn about ourselves is our effect. " That's
what we're talking about. Personal mastery entails honing our effectiveness
in the world through brave self-observation. It also involves creating
a high tension energy field in one's life by facing the truth of
current reality and boldly envisioning something different, a future
of one's own choosing. The creative tension between these two poles
is where the juice of mastery comes from.
|
