Rol comments:
>When you ask "What is the role of learning in whatever end state or
>condition we are trying to achieve and/or maintain," Marilyn offered one
>possible role which I think has potential. What do you think? Your
>opinion that learning is a means rather than an end is a very important
>one, and I am curious what others here think. I agree with you here, but
>much of what has been said in this forum seems to speak of learning as an
>end in itself.
I was working recently with a colleague who's opinion I value quite
highly. As we were helping the client define organizational learning, she
and I got into a philosophical quandry. She does quite a bit of work in
the arena of "high performance teams." I spend a lot of my time working
under the rubrick of "organizational learning." Our problem became trying
to agree on the appropriate frame. As Rol queries, is organizational
learning a methodology or a description of an outcome (i.e., a "Learning
Organization.")? I, as well as a number of my colleagues (including Tony
DiBella, who has joined this thread), am fairly festidious in avoiding
'nominalizing' organizational learning by using the term Learning
Organization.
Not surprisingly, my colleague saw OL as a methodology that was part, but
only part, of the formula for creating a high performance team. I could
(if I had wanted to) make the argument that the "high performance team" is
a snap shot of a team that is in the process of creating its own future.
It's all rather Escherian.
Marilyn Darling
Signet Consulting Group
mdarling@warren.med.harvard.edu
--mdarling@warren.med.harvard.edu
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>