I would like to thank At for his patience and the non-defensive tone of
his responses to the queries I raised - I found them very helpful and made
me spin off in a number of directions about the potential applications of
this thinking in another global learning community I have been working
with a number of people to set up...
I still have some questions and comments ...
>It will come back to us if
>* the string forms a closed loop and
>* the wholeness of the system is not impaired.
>If the wholeness has been impaired, then even a closed loop
>will not ensure that bread thrown on the waters, will come back
>to us after many days.
I am not sure if this matches my experience - somehow things seem to come
to me from other loops?? and open loops link to other open loops?? is this
possible - do we have to 'close' the loop when we are working with
commensual sybiosis to be confident things will come back to us?
I suppose the question might be around how much is freely given - one of
the ideas some colleagues/partners and I have been toying with is that
'freely given' works if we have the time and energy to provide it and if
the reciever is ready to wait or recieve it in the form we currently have
it available etc.. if the reciever has a desperate need for it and is
requesting our immediate attention to it or asking us to specifically
devote time and creative energy to it then this might require some form of
compensative arrangement???
>But I also think that we tacitly acknowledge that the wholeness (mentione
>above) may indeed be impaired. This is a primary source of us becoming
>uncomfortable.
I am not sure if this is the source of my discomfort when I am on the
recieving end - although it may be and I am not understanding what you
have said. My discomfort is sometimes around the 'feeling' of
indebtedness and a sense of my inability to repay someone. Is this the
same as the wholeness being impaired...
I liked the description of the nature of the collective orientation - one
of the design principles we work with in RTSC is to 'create community'
which I sense links to this notion of identity and the ability to be able
to self-reference in a way whch creates a larger self than the individual
self to reference to?? So we design in ways which do not reuire people to
change their identity in order to participate - this comes from a belief
that processes which require people to deny their reality which ultimately
produce unsustainable outcomes and little (if any) learning...
> the so-called silent
>majority - a problem which plague modern society.
I can relate to this mainly because I struggle with the nature of
participation in society and the ways in which is is both permitted and
rejected. The nature of participation and designs which support it are
the frontier I like to participate in (and am in the back-pack of!!) Yet
wonder about it in the context of the list - when is silence so and when
is it listening? and how do we know on the list - knowing there are people
reading every day seems to me to be part of the dynamic that is the
list...
> Only when I make something useful for the benefit of
>all in exchange for the useful things made available to me, I will also
>change for the better of society.
How do you see this working in the context of this list - I am still not
sure I get it? Is it supposed to be mutual - in the list context would
that be I get something from the list which helps me and so I give
something back to the list which helps it (the list or the people I had
stuff from??) Or is it commensual - I get soemthing from the list and I
use it for the general benefit of the develop of LO and organisational
learning in a range of contexts?? (how would we know this was happening??)
> By this I mean
>that if I am a member of the back-pack and I make use of what is made
>available to me by the frontier in such a manner that it is detrimental to
>the frontier, then I have become a parasite.
I found this very helpful - so if people used the things they got from the
LO list for their own benefit but it resulted in LO and possibly the list
being decredited or harmed we would be in the arena of parasital
symbiosis?? This seems to me to be what has happened to the work of a
number of people ... Taylor, Deming etc often sounded bitter about the way
in which their work had been used ......
Many thanks for a stimulating dialogue...
Julie Beedon
VISTA Consulting - for a better future
julie@vistabee.win-uk.net
--Julie Beedon <julie@vistabee.win-uk.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>