I have to take issue with the notion that "what's the value of learning?"
is an "inauthentic question." (I'm paraphrasing, I hope correctly...) To
begin with, the original posting, which the host retitled "Fruits of
Learning," had to do with trying to tie organizational learning
initiatives to, among other things, competitive advantage, time-to-market,
etc. The point was not to ask, in a broad-brush way, about the value of
learning, but to demonstrate, on a case-by-case basis, the ways, if any,
in which collaborative learning has made a difference.
Second (and talking about empirical evidence), many people who should know
better have already started to ask what's the next big "thing" after
organizational learning. They (who include, among others, a senior vice
president at a major Boston-area consulting firm; key line executives at
one of the largest financial services organizations in the country and at
one of the top consumer products companies in the country) ask because the
results are not self-evident, because the documentation has been slender
at best, because it has -- in too many places -- the smug whiff of the
evangelical and the precious.
Third, Phillip Capper, in LO 1520, identified some of the documentation
now taking place in New Zealand and Australia; similarly, I was recently
made aware (again) of similar documentation put together by the
Organizational Learning Center at MIT (cf. the study of GS Technologies).
The Institute for Research on Learning in Palo Alto has also been
documenting its interventions with Xerox and NYNEX, among others. The
Productivity Partnership is researching, consulting in, and creating
social and technological architecture for what it calls "continuous
workplace learning," all of which is to be heavily documented. I strongly
suspect these (and other) endeavors do _not_ comprise a set of answers to
which there are no questions -- or inauthentic questions.
Finally, Michael says that "...the question, at this level, is trivial
because it's so easily demonstrated if there is a committed audience for
the results." That "if" is hardly a throw-away, regardless of how it may
want to hide in the skirts of that sentence. Whose committed audience?
Where is it? Who's in it? Committed to what? How do we know?
More questions, I guess. Which I'd just as soon pursue in order to keep
myself honest while attempting to rescue organizational learning -- a
notion of profound importance to me -- from the danger of drowning in a
kind of bromidic self-righteousness.
See you 'round the quad.
-- Ron Mallis 12 Chestnut Street Boston, MA 02108 617-723-8362 ron2785@eworld.com