Another thought regarding the notion of "safe environment" and the role it
plays in organizational learning. As always, I hope this will be
considered a hypothesis at best. A friend recently defined the safe
environment as one in which members of the organization percieve that they
are encouraged and rewarded for communicating to others what they think,
feel, and intuitively know to be true about any given issue without fear
of ridicule, retribution, or embarassment. The significance for me in this
definition is that if individuals in an organization perceive it to be
unsafe by this definition they will not express their thoughts and ideas,
thus limiting the possibility for organizational learning. Their
hypotheses will not be offered to the group thus depriving it of
information. If, on the other hand they percieve it to be safe they will
share and explore these ideas with others and will ikely engage in
reflection and inquiry. In my consulting work (mainly in schools) I am
consistenly amazed and sometimes nearly depressed to learn how often
faculty acknowledge the environment in which they operate to be very
unsafe by this definition. My hypothesis is that until people perceive it
to be relative safe by this definition, little significant organizational
change, experimentation, or learning can occur. I think it is a
significant leadership task to assess perceptions of staff regarding the
safety issue prior to undertaking any significant change effort. If we are
not satisfied with what we learn then we should focus our efforts on
improving the "safety" of the place in order to enhance organizational and
personal insight and learning in the future.
--Bob Vander Wilt robert.vanderwilt@mankato.msus.edu http://vax1.mankato.msus.edu/~stilt/welcome.html
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>