My two experiences with this have been:
In the Army 22 years ago where the group I led was encouraged to "just
talk" with each other about how they did their jobs and what the purpose
was in order to share understanding and become as efficient as possible.
It worked like gang busters ('twas a young person in charge and he did not
understand what he had accidentally created). A couple of guys (soldiers)
cried and hugged me when I left. At the time I did not understand, but do
now.
20 years later, a group of us in my company got together voluntarily about
3 hours a week to study quality management from the applied and esoteric
sense. Since it is our job responsibility, we were attempting to develop a
cohesive and collective learning based on our diverse prior studies. It
was great while it lasted. We had fun together but had to break it up
after a year due to under appreciation from my boss - a person who did not
get good feelings about us writing a 25 page guideline, and having some
research reports to show people. It's sort of not our companies style to
read and write just for the sake of learning about how to get people to
work and learn better together.
Since I heard from Bob King at GOAL/QPC about Peter Senge's Fifth
Discipline, I've been reading and re-reading it. Great work of art and
discipline.
My overriding interest is in developing a strategy for getting Dow
Chemical "actively involved" in the disciplines. Anyone had any
experience with getting the Learning Organization started in a company
which is recognized within its own industry community as a technology
company?
I bought a new, very fast home PC with all the gadgets just to be able to
get onto Internet and get on to "majordomo" and "learning-org" after
hearing about it at the Systems Thinking in Action Conference.
I am excited about finally being able to network with people outside of my
own company.
Have a great day!!
Dave Buffenbarger
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Host's Note: Welcome Dave! I too just bought a new, super-fast PowerMac,
but I don't want to leave the impression that it takes a super computer
to participate in the learning-org list. I do most of my internet email
from a older Mac that is really a crawler by todays standards. I believe
most any computer with a fast modem will give good results for email.
...on the other hand, browsing the World-Wide-Web with Netscape or Mosaic
will take more horsepower.
-- Rick Karash, rkarash@world.std.com, host for learning-org
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