Life in Organizations LO9507

Barry Mallis (bmallis@mail.markem.com)
27 Aug 1996 08:23:59 -0400

Reply to: RE>Life in Organizations LO9474

Bill provoked some reflection with his observations and questions back to Mike
about the system being "...'us', that is the people who are in the community
in question...". Bill suggests that we may be looking for system problems as
a "convenient, non-threatening answer" to problems which in the first cause
reside inside the individual.

I will understand him to mean that the problem comes from misplaced (or worse,
bad) intention acting on a system. The intention is all the individual's.

Bill makes me think of group dynamics versus individual behavior. We know the
topic well. We sense how a group can draw us in, changing our unique behavior
into something else, something not quite"our own". Our behavior "schools"
like fish (and in this analog I refer to more than school as in education).
While that behavior may protect (insulate) from real or perceived external
forces (ideas), it may also drive us en masse into the net. We may be caught,
frozen and canned for later consumption. We lose individual will or
intention, something which, I propose, may be distressingly different from
group will or intention generated by contact with a "system" (school).

We can probably assume that when working with models for group improvement by
reflection and active, participatory means, we consciously or unconsciously
consider the group thing. Our vast, well-documented and explicit experience
informs our understanding.

Do we sometimes mix the individual and the group in our thinking on this list,
so that we describe oil and water situations? There are, I sense,
considerable exercises which allow GROUP members to consider with heightened
sensitivity the presence and needs of the INDIVIDUAL, all for the sake of
better group dynamics. Lots of stuff in that category. We know some of it is
legitimate; it works.

Are we still unable to mix individual and group in the end? If we attached
electrodes to everyone in a group and studied the meters, the lengths of
print-out, blips on the screen, would we decipher groups still acting
differently from their individual components, and that some of our assumptions
about the relationship of "system" to "people" are misplaced, ill-conceived or
simply lacking altogether?

Best regards,

-- 
Barry Mallis
bmallis@markem.com
Total Quality Resource Manager
MARKEM Corporation
Keene, NH U.S.A.
www.markem.com
 

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