a student's perspective LO7367

William J. Hobler, Jr. (bhobler@cpcug.org)
Fri, 10 May 1996 11:54:53 -0400

Replying to LO7320 --

>From: JOHNWFIELD@aol.com
John, you wrote

>The ultimate missing link in all of this attempt to see the "whole system"
>is the absence of any easel that can display it. Until real
>estate is dedicated just to well-sequenced, comprehensive, graphic
>portrayals of up-to-date organizational logic, nobody is going to see the
>system in adequate terms. Promote the corporate observatorium.

Isn't the corporate observatorium contained in the beliefs of the people
in the corporation? Beliefs in terms of the ladder of inference, the
beliefs upon which corporate people take action (hence the corporation
takes action).

I submit that the easel upon which to 'picture' the complexity of a
corporation is not attainable outside of the collective minds of people
for several reasons;

1. There are too many dimensions involved. Our best representation systems
are limited to one or two dimensions beyond the technology involved. On
a piece of paper three dimensions seems the limit. On a computer screen
we can add the dimension of time.
2. There is too much information that must be assimilated too quickly. The
number of relationships that must be made among all of the dimensions of
the information quickly out runs the capabilities of our biggest (fastest)
computers and people.

In spite of sounding radical, I think it is relatively easy to establish
the community of collective minds in corporations. It is what learning
organizations are about. Now don't jump all over me for the easy part.
You see when Rol Fessenden commented earlier about deciding when
government and business to collaborate or compete for the betterment of
our society I think he put the real problem on the table. I quote him
"How do we know when to do, which and how do we learn to collaborate?"

Should we "Promote society's observatorium?"

Perhaps John, we should work on the corporation first and tackle society
later.

-- 

A leader is best when people barely know he exists. Of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, "We did this ourselves."

Bill Hobler bhobler@cpcug.org

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>