Oh Ben, I love your inverted question.
"Could we use the way the Internet is designed to build a Learning Org?"
It started many comparisons in my mind.
- Sites on the internet get used and grow because they offer value in an
area of interest or need to a larger community. In a strong learning
organization resources would gather around such issues naturally, with
little effort. What structures and processes in organizations help support
that type of emergence? What have people seen or experienced in this
regard?
- I then thought of the recent conversation in Symbiosis in LO's. Almost
everybody encouraged the users of this list to share information freely,
trusting that it will benefit the whole community and therefore the
initial contributors (the leaders on a particular frontier of thinking).
The more areas I see that deeply spiritual belief held up as an ideal, the
more hope I have for change at a level unimaginable before.
- The internet maximizes free flow, accessibility of information..the
information rich environment you are looking for in a learning
organization.
BUT...........
Then I started to see the less positive, less hopeful issues.
- Remembering a 'Reality Check' someone provided a few months ago... If
the world were reduced to a representative microcosm of 100 people... 70
would be unable to read and no one would own a computer.
- So the challenge of devising truly accessible systems seems huge.
Vigdor and others...what are some powerful ideas out there about making
this a deeply democratic experience? How?
Thanks. Fran Alexander
(new address fjalex@ tmn. com)
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>