I'm part of a group of faculty, staff and admin at Kwantlen College (a
public 4-year community college in Surrey, B.C. - near Vancouver) who are
trying to introduce CQI tools and learning organization approaches and
concepts to our college. Our group of 18 first came together as the
College's admin-appointed delegates to a 4-day workshop on Total Quality
Learning given by David Langdon in Seattle in Feb '94. The College was
moved to pursue quality issues as a result of a self-study that indicated
(a) we were seen as a good, but not excellent, institution, and (b) we
didn't have a useful operational definition of quality.
Some of us have read The Fifth Discipline, some have the Fieldbook, most
have attended one or two teleconferences in which Senge has been the main
presenter. I'll be sharing good stuff from this forum with the others.
We're coming to understand, as we've tried to implement QI tools and
techniques, that they aren't effective without the foundation or
meta-skills outlined by Senge and others. We also suspect that we've lots
to learn from the fields of interpersonal communication and group
processes. I know we've got huge amounts to learn about systems theory
and systems thinking.
Personally: I graduated from MIT in 1970 with a BSc in Mgmt, focussing on
social psych (worked with Dave Kolb, advised by Tom Allen; lived at Sig
Ep with John Kotter and Rich Boyatsis (class of '69) and lots of other
good folks), but then went into teaching math and physics in community
colleges. Kept distant track of systems work (one of my roommates, Chuck
Wayne, was working with Forrester's group) through Limits to Growth and
wonderfully more recently through Beyond the Limits. Now managing a set
of programs at Kwantlen. Know there must be some way to apply those
models to post-secondary education in a region, but don't know how myself
- hope to learn lots more; also wonder if currency trading and its
economic effects on countries have been modelled? But also very committed
to the softer four disciplines, breaking down the hierarchical processes
in the College and elsewhere, etc.
Looking for insights, help, learning, moral support, and so on. Thanks
for being here.