Problems such as fragmentation, competition, and reactivity are deeply rooted in our culture. They are not just mistakes we repeat over and over again; they spring directly from our history. The triumph of reductionism and mechanistic thinking has given rise to a number of conditions under which they are no longer desirable.
Humanity has achieved unimaginable feats by controlling its physical and social environment. We have come a long way since the days when our ancestors had to defend themselves against other animals, work continuously to secure food, and survive in extreme climatic conditions. We have learned to create safer homes, increased our food supply, discovered powerful sources of energy, and provided ourselves with a level of material well-being once reserved only for monarchs. In doing so, we have continually adapted and changed our environment for our own benefit, to the point that today we are at the beginning of modifying the genetic code to program the development of the species.
But this progress has not been without consequences. The same abilities of separation, analysis, and control that gave us the power to shape our environment are producing an ecological and social crisis in the external world and a psychological and spiritual crisis in our internal world. Both crises stem from our success in separating ourselves from this vast factory of life. When we begin to understand the origin of the problems, we begin to see that the "existential crisis" of late 20th-century philosophy and the "environmental crisis" of late 20th-century ecology are inseparable, caused by the evolution of fragmented worldviews, social structures, lifestyles, technology, and human beings.
History has two aspects: one evolutionary and one cultural. The first has to do with behavioral patterns established in the human organism over millions of years. The second has to do with deep cultural beliefs that probably began with the agricultural revolution.
Throughout our history as a species, the primitive threats to our survival came from sudden and dramatic events: wild beasts, avalanches, earthquakes, attacks by rival tribes. Today, the main attacks on our survival are slow, gradual, and progressive (environmental destruction, the arms race, increasing world hunger, the decline of national educational systems and their family and community structures).
We are poorly prepared for a world of slow-moving threats. Our nervous system is focused on external, dramatic events. A sound or a tiny change in our field of vision immediately puts us on alert. Our adrenaline increases our readiness and strength. In extreme cases, our nervous system produces a state of shock that filters out physical pain signals so we can continue reasoning and making decisions. The irony is that all these capacities become potentially counterproductive in a world of gradually emerging systemic crises. All our instincts are primed to wait for gradual changes to escalate into crises, when it is generally too late to take effective action.
More than that, these threats were external; their causes were beyond our control. Today's main threats are endogenous, co-results of our own actions. There is no external enemy to blame. As Pogo says, "We have met the enemy, and it is ourselves." The causes lie in collective behaviors and unintended side effects of individually meaningful actions. There is no blame, no culprits, only the need to think differently.
This conflict between the nature of our most important problems and our instinctive ways of thinking and acting is no less catastrophic in organizations. Most threats to the survival and vitality of organizations develop slowly and have no external causes. The problems at General Motors and IBM, for example, did not appear overnight. Arrogance, isolation, and rigidity developed over decades of success. At IBM, even as symptoms of decline became more and more apparent, sustained profits from core products predisposed managers and investors to ignore mounting signs of difficulty. Only when a crushing crisis (record losses) occurred was there sufficient alarm to warrant taking significant action.
Our evolutionary programming predisposes us to external cues and reactivity. Overlapping this is the culture of fragmentation and competition, and together, they hold us captive. But our capacity can be unleashed if we begin to understand that our cultural history is a single historical path, a trail that could have led to a different present. The first step in exposing the illusion of "naturalness" in our current way of thinking is to meditate on its genealogy. As David Bohm said, "Beginning with the agricultural revolution, and continuing through the industrial revolution, increasing fragmentation in the social order has produced a progressive fragmentation in our thinking."
There is growing evidence that many pre-agricultural societies were not dominated by fragmentation or competition. This evidence is controversial because it contradicts the established orthodoxy that views ancient societies as having always been like us, but "less civilized."
The great mystic Thomas Merton wrote of the magnificent Monte Alban culture, which flourished in southwestern Mexico from around 500 BC to 500 AD, that “there is no evidence of militarism or warfare. Self-realization in this context implies not so much the self-consciousness of the isolated subject facing a multitude of objects as the disposition of a network of relationships where each has a place in the mesh. Individual identity was the intersection of the mesh to which they belonged.”
Joseph Campbell spoke of the ancient Indo-European myth of the Goddess, which “teaches compassion for all living beings. In this way, one can truly appreciate the sanctity of the earth itself, for it is the body of the Goddess.” Recent advances in archaeological research suggest that the Goddess myth predominated in Central Europe in late Paleolithic and early Neolithic cultures. These cultures were neither male-dominated nor war-loving. Men and women shared power and were based on a recognition of their oneness with nature.
Classical Greece and the emerging Christian era, with its subsequent official Constantinianization, mark a crossroads that leads us directly to the contemporary Western scientific and religious vision.
In ancient Greece, the world was a "cosmos," not an inert environment governed by the abstract laws of physics. The Earth was the space where gods and mortals shared their passion, wisdom, and folly. The Greeks walked with the gods. But classical Greek thought laid the foundations for scientific vision, the vision that later placed man as an external observer of the world. Two thousand years later, building on Aristotelian categories, Descartes proposed a rigorous differentiation between subject and object, observer and observed, humankind and nature.
If classical Greece provided the foundations for justifying the gap between Man and nature, the Catholic Church institutionalized the difference between man and God. According to Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton, the gap lies at the heart of the Church's foundations; in fact, it was the strategy used to differentiate the sect that eventually became the Church from other early Christian sects that had very different interpretations of Jesus' teachings. "What we currently call Christianity represents only a small selection of specific resources, chosen from dozens." These resources, in light of the research promoted since the Second Vatican Council, reveal their fallacy and their consequent departure from the original proposal of Jesus of Nazareth and the life experience of the first communities.
In particular, a recently discovered “Gnostic Gospel,” outlawed as heretical by the early church, was based on the belief in the human capacity for direct knowledge, or gnosis. “To know oneself at the deepest level is simultaneously to know God; that is the secret of gnosis,” says Pagels. “Abandon the search for God,” wrote the Gnostic teacher Monoimus, “seek him by taking yourself as your starting point. If you carefully investigate these facts, you will be able to find him within yourself.” In contrast, beginning in the second century, the architects of the early church established a very different vision: the church as the intermediary between humankind and God. According to Pagels, “God became accessible to humanity only through the church.”
In this way, the seeds of the fragmentation evident today were sown. Its fruits have grown steadily. “The belief that man is separate from nature,” wrote Krishnamurti, “evolved from the idea that nature is a resource for his benefit. Nature became a reservoir.” We became the rulers of the world, licensed to exploit it. We stopped living among objects and began living with available things just waiting to be used. “Because we do not love the earth or the things of the earth except to use them, we have lost much of our touch with life.”
A Galilean change
The analytic model assigns a primary status to the parts and assumes they exist independently of the whole. This view generates deep inconsistencies that underlie many of our social crises and organizational problems. Its flaws are not superficial but structural: David Bohm argues that the business of “putting the parts together” is especially futile when operating from a belief in the primacy of the parts, “like trying to reassemble the parts of a shattered mirror.” Worse still, the analytic model fails to accept their contingent status. It adopts the aspect of necessity and demands universal validation. As Bohm said, “Thought creates the world and then says, ‘I didn’t do this.’”
Faced with this reality of separation and fragmentation, we want to expose the limits of this analysis and develop an alternative paradigm that can help recover the memory of the whole.
We argue that we can use three elements to change our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. Just as Galileo proposed that the Earth was not the center of the universe, we propose that the parts, the ego, and reality are not the center of a more meaningful way of life. Each reflects a fragmented view of the world we have accepted. Each needs to be reexamined.
1. The primacy of Totality
The analytical perspective includes a three-part process:
a) breaking a system into its component parts;
b) study each part in isolation, and
c) arrive at an understanding of the whole from an understanding of the parts.
The implicit assumption is that the system is a sum of weakly interacting parts in a linear fashion. In this notion of a system, one can restrict attention to the parts and trust that optimizing each will achieve the optimization of the whole. This view is very common in the management practice of organizations of all kinds.
Decomposition is a time-tested way of dealing with complex problems, but it has significant limitations in a world of tight connections and nonlinear feedbacks. The defining characteristic of a system is that it cannot be understood as a function of its isolated parts. First, because the system's behavior depends not on what each part does but on how each part interacts with the rest.
Second, to understand a system, we need to understand how it fits into the larger system of which it is a part. To use Ackoff's example, we would never understand why standard cars seat four or five people if we looked at the physical properties of their parts. To understand car design, we need to see how it fits into a society of families traveling together.
Third, and most importantly, what we call parts need not be taken as primary. In fact, how we define parts is fundamentally a product of perspective and purpose, not something naturally intrinsic to the "real thing" we are looking at.
Rather than being objective, what we call parts is highly subjective. No type of category is inherent to a system. Nothing is intrinsically right or wrong.
Rather than thinking of a world of parts that form wholes, we begin by recognizing that we live in a world of wholes within wholes. Rather than trying to put parts together to form a whole, we recognize that the world is already a whole.
At the same time, the systems view recognizes that distinctions allow the observer to draw operational worlds. The totality may be more fundamental, but it is unmanageable. For example, the division of labor allows societies to achieve levels of material well-being that would otherwise be impossible.
But once workers become workers and supervisors become supervisors, rigidity sets in. To restore fluidity, the capacity to learn and change, we need to remember the contingent nature of the distinctions in which we are trapped. We must once again confront totality and reflect on what it means. Martin Buber said: “Just as a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words, nor a statue of lines (each must pull to become a unity in the multiplicity), so it is with the human being whom I call YOU. I can abstract from him the color of his hair or the sound of his speech or the style of his charm; I can do this again and again; but immediately he is no longer my YOU.”
2. The communal nature of being
Newtonian physicists were astonished to discover that in the nucleus of the atom, at the center of matter, there is... nothing, no thing, pure energy. This discovery revolutionized physics, ushering in the age of quantum physics.
In the same sense, we are surprised to discover that at the core of the person, at the core of being, there is… nothing, pure energy. When we investigate the most fundamental basis of our being, we find a web of interrelationships. When someone asks us about ourselves, we talk about family, work, academic level, favorite sport, etc. In all of this, where is our being? The answer is nowhere, because being is not a thing, but, as Jarome Brunner said, “a point of view that unifies the flow of experience within a coherent narrative,” a narrative that strives to connect with others and thus enrich itself.
We normally think of the individual as having a primordial origin and that this uniqueness is given to each person independently of the cultural or group practices in which they evolve. But, as Clifford Geertz says, "There is no such thing as human nature independent of culture."
When we forget the social environment in which we live as persons, we achieve a spurious security and stability. We identify our ego with our being. We take the contingent traits of our character and include them within our substantive personality. Thus, we assign primary value to our ego (part) and view the community (whole) as secondary. We see community as a network of contractual purposes in symbolic and economic exchange. We think of encounters with others as transactions that can add to or subtract from the ego's multiple possessions.
But the constitution of being occurs only in community. Community allows for certain ways of being and represses expressions of individualism, and some patterns of behavior (what we commonly call acting foolishly or inappropriately) express our common origin and reveal much more than our intrinsic predispositions.
A systems view of life suggests that the self is never "complete" and is always in the process of transformation. As long as we don't treat the other as a disposable object, as long as we see the other as a legitimate human being with whom we can learn and change (a YOU), we connect in a passionate interaction that can open up new possibilities for our being.
3. Language as a generative practice
In our daily sense of the world, we see reality as "out there" and ourselves as observers as "in here." Our Western tradition compels us to "figure out" how nature works in order to achieve what we want. But what if what is presented to us as "reality" is inseparable from language and action? What if our crisis is, at least in part, a crisis of perception and meaning, flourishing from a perspective of naive realism? What if observation itself is the beginning of fragmentation?
The alternative to naive realism is not solipsism, the view that nothing exists "out there" and consequently nothing to be learned or valued. The alternative we propose is to recognize the generative role of traditions of observation and shared meaning in a community. We invent structures and distinctions to organize the unmanageable flow of the other's life. Organization allows us to operate effectively, but it cannot become a reassuring barrier to exploration and creativity. The less efficient a model of the world becomes for us, the more it recedes in our experience until it becomes transparent. The more successful the model's strategy, the more the "map" of reality becomes reality itself. The danger of success is that the thinking behind it becomes entrenched and ignores the necessary context for its effectiveness. When a model loses its "situation" and generalizes its validity to universal categories, sooner or later it stagnates our ability to engage freely with the world and others.
The map is not the territory, but we can only guide ourselves with maps. As cartographers, we are far from neutral. Our perceptual apparatus, with its biological, personal, and cultural filters, is actively involved in the construction of that map. So, where is the territory that grounds the map?
The issue goes deeper than recognizing that the map is not the territory. We must face the possibility of not having access, through our culture, to anything like a territory. We only have provisional maps, permanently open to revision and re-creation.
This may sound nihilistic. If there is no "final resting place" for values, why choose one system over another? Why is democracy better than totalitarianism? Why is something better than something else? The solution to the nihilistic dilemma comes from a principle of self-reflection: these contexts that dispense with their precarious nature, these contexts that invite us to review and recreate them, are inherently better than those that hide their precarious nature and fight against any revisionist attempt. The best constructions for explaining and organizing the world will imitate life itself. They will be in a continuous state of becoming.
When we fail to recognize this principle, we lose the ability to understand others. We become rigid. We lose the ability to learn. We lose the child within us, who lives in wonder and understands what Einstein meant when he said that the most beautiful experience in the world is "the experience of the mysterious."
Operating principles
Each one was born from a question, and in many ways, the questions themselves can be the key to moving forward. Questions like, "What do we mean when we talk about a Learning Organization?"
There is no such thing as a Learning Organization
Like “Total Quality Management” and “Business Process Reengineering,” “Learning Organization” has become the latest buzzword. Just as there is no such thing as a “smart guy,” there is no such thing as a “Learning Organization.”
Learning Organization is a category we create in language. Like all linguistic creations, this category is a double-edged sword that can be fostered or silenced. The difference lies in whether we view language as a set of labels that describe a pre-existing reality, or as a medium in which we can articulate new models for living together.
When we talk about a Learning Organization, we are not describing an external phenomenon or labeling an independent reality. We are articulating a vision that encompasses the observer and the observed in a common system. We are taking a stand for a vision, to create a type of organization in which we truly want to work and that can evolve into a world of increasing independence and change. It is not what the vision IS but what the vision DOES that matters.
What, then, are the types of changes we are seeking to encourage in this quest for a Learning Organization vision?
We believe that a Learning Organization must be based on three foundations:
1) a culture based on transcendent human values of love, wonder, humility and compassion;
2) a set of practices for generative dialogue and coordinated practice; and
3) the ability to see and work with the flow of life as a system.
In Learning Organizations, cultural norms challenge our business traditions. Acceptance of the other as a legitimate existence, a YOU (our sense of love), replaces the traditional tendency toward homogeneity. The ever-surprising manifestations of the world present us with opportunities to grow (wonder), as opposed to frustrating failures for which someone must be blamed. People understand that life is not compressible, that no model is an operational simplification always ready to be improved (humility). And when they encounter behaviors they neither understand nor forgive, they are willing to appreciate that these forces and perspectives are, in some sense, as valid as the perspectives and forces that influence their own behaviors (compassion).
The Learning Organization is a space for generative dialogue and consensual action. In it, the functions of language are devices for connection, invention, and coordination. People can speak from their hearts and connect with others in the spirit of dialogue. Their dialogue weaves a present-day plot and connects them at the deepest level of being. When people speak and listen to others in this way, they create a field of alignment that generates tremendous power to invent new realities in conversation, and to transform those new realities into action.
In Learning Organizations, people continually question the systemic consequences of their actions, rather than focusing solely on local consequences. They can understand the interdependencies underlying each complex issue and act with perceptiveness and proactivity. They are patient in seeking greater understanding rather than seeking to suppress the symptoms of the problem, because they know this may be better temporarily but may result in greater problems in the future.
As a result of these capabilities, Learning Organizations are more generative and adaptive than traditional organizations. Because of their commitment, openness, and ability to deal with complexity, people find security not in stability but in the dynamic balance between grasping and letting go of beliefs, assumptions, and certainties. What they know takes second place to what they can learn, and simplistic answers are always less important than penetrating questions.
Servant leader
Developing these organizational capabilities will obviously require vision, patience, and courage. What is the nature of the leadership that will be required to progress?
Learning Organizations are built by communities of servant leaders. Leadership takes on a fundamental new meaning in Learning Organizations. In essence, leaders are the ones who build the new organization and its capabilities. They are the ones who lead the way, setting aside their managerial position and hierarchical authority. This leadership is inevitably collective.
Our conventional notions of leadership are steeped in myths of heroes, great individuals separated from their communities, who forge their paths based on determination and stubbornness. Since there is likely much more to admire in these people, we believe that our attachment to the individualistic notion of leadership may currently block the emergence of team leadership, and ultimately, organizations and societies that can lead themselves. While we wait for the great leader to save the day, we are stifling the capacity and power necessary to progress toward a Learning Organization.
As the myth of heroic leaders fades, a new myth of self-leading teams and communities emerges. In 1983, a group of people from around the world, called "The Gandhis of the World," met in the United States. They produced a beautiful articulation of this new leadership myth:
“Our time is increasingly characterized by the awakening of human power around the planet, expressing itself in popular movements, communities, and local organizations. This global force is a new kind of leadership capable of synthesizing the expressions of groups and organizing them for action. Leadership from and for the group, and from the lowest part of us, is the hope for change in our time.”
The emergence of collective leadership doesn't mean there are no "leadership positions" such as CEOs, managers, etc. Hierarchies are generally functional. But the confrontation between collective and hierarchical leadership does not pose a central dilemma for Learning Organizations. This dilemma cannot be reconciled by bringing in traditional notions of hierarchical leaders such as having people "in charge" or "under control." This then implies that "those below" are not under control.
Alternatively, the dilemma can be transformed into a source of energy and imagination through the idea of “servant leadership”—people who lead because they choose to serve one another and a greater purpose.
“Servant leadership” offers a unique blend of idealism and pragmatism. On one level, the concept is an ideal, appealing to deep beliefs in dignity, individual worth, and the democratic value that a leader's power flows from those they lead. But it is also highly practical. It has been proven time and again in military campaigns that the only leader soldiers will follow unconditionally when their lives are in danger is one who is both competent and committed to their well-being.
Learning arises from achievement and practice.
It was common in Native American cultures to choose sacred places for learning. Even today, in our organizations, learning is too important to be left to chance. It would be inappropriate to train and expect people to be willing to apply these new learnings and methods. Work will need to be redesigned so that the developed ideas can find their way.
We believe that a guide for redesigning work can be to create learning spaces or fields. The learning that occurs in sports teams occurs in a constant movement between practice and theory. It's impossible to imagine a champion soccer team that has never practiced. And that's what usually happens in organizations. People only learn. But they rarely practice, and even less so together.
Several design principles come together to create efficient practice areas:
1) The learner learns what he wants, then focus on key management factors.
2) The people who need to learn are those who have the power to act, so the focus is on key operational leadership.
3) Learning generally happens best through play, through interactions in an environment where it is safe to experiment and reflect.
4) Learning generally requires altering the flow of time: slowing down action to allow for reflection on unspoken assumptions and the best and most productive ways of interacting; and, at other times, speeding up time to review how decisions can create unforeseen problems in the long run.
5) Learning requires compressing space and time so that the learner can see the effects of his or her actions on other parts of the system.
6) The learning space must be shamelessly integrated with the workspace to generate a circle of reflection, experimentation and action.
If learning becomes more integrated into our work, where does work end and learning begin?
Process and content are inseparable
In our normal way of seeing things, the content or issues we are interested in are separated from the processes we can use to learn about them. These true separations can be the first obstacle to potential ruptures in situations where content and process are inseparable. One team worked on the culture of penalizing those who bring bad news. But rather than blaming management or the culture, group members began to explore their own reactions when they heard about a problem, especially from their subordinates. They began to surface their fears of mistakes and their automatic reactions and defensive responses, such as the tendency to cover them up. Gradually, they gained deep insight into the culture of punishment and their own role in sustaining it.
If it is possible to progress towards a Learning Organization, what are some of the reasons why we resist these changes?
Learning is dangerous
Learning occurs between a fear and a need. On the one hand, we feel the need to change if we want to achieve our goals. On the other, we feel the anxiety of having to face the unknown. To learn meaningful things, we must suspend some basic notions about ourselves and our world. This is one of the hardest propositions for our ego.
The conventional notion of learning is transactional. There is a learner who has cognitive and operational certainty. If that knowledge proves incomplete or ineffective, the learner has the power to discard part of it, change something, or add something new. This may be an accurate description of how we learn to invest or trade, but it fails to get to the heart of the type of learning involved when we question deeply held beliefs and mental models.
The problem with this perspective is that the self is not separate from the ideas and assumptions that form it. Our mental models are not like pieces we can put on or take off. They are the basic structures of our personality. For every intent and purpose, most of the time, we are our mental models.
The learning required to become a Learning Organization is transformative learning. Static notions about who we are must be challenged. In transformative learning, there are no problems “out there” to be solved independently of how we think and act in articulating those problems. This learning is not about tools and techniques. It's about who we are, since we generally prefer to fail again and again rather than let go of some important belief or assumption.
This explains the paradox of learning. Even when we claim to want to learn, this usually means we want to acquire some new tool or technique. When we realize that in order to learn, we must be willing to look foolish, to allow someone else to teach us, learning no longer seems as good as it once did.
It's no small coincidence that virtually all spiritual disciplines are practiced in community. Only with the support, introspection, and fellowship of community can we face the dangers of learning meaningful things.
Conclusion
Building a Learning Organization is not an individual endeavor. It demands a change that runs to the core of our culture. We have wandered aimlessly within a culture that fragments our thinking, that separates the world of the self and the self from its community. We have gained control over our environment, but we have lost our artistic edge. We are so focused on our security that we fail to see the price we pay for it: living in bureaucratic organizations where the wonder and joy of learning have no place. In this way, we are losing the spaces to "dance" with the ever-changing patterns of life. We are losing ourselves, like fields of dreams.
We believe that, to regain our balance, we must create alternative ways of working and living together. We need to invent models for business, education, healthcare, government, and family that are more closely connected to learning. This invention will come from the patience and combined efforts of the community and individuals, invoking aspiration and wonder.
As these communities work toward fundamental change, we will be able to recover our memory: the memory of the communal nature of being and the poetic nature of language—that is, the memory of totality.
* Based on the excellent work of Fred Kofman and Peter Senge.
