I sat down this morning with my little pot of Dilmah tea to read friends’ blogs. This beats curling up with the Sunday New York Times or some other largely useless aggregation of pulp fibre. Much better to get the news of the day from those who are working on things and who need help or have discovered useful insights for the rest of us. And so, sitting before the woodstove with a pot of tea and a laptop is a lovely way to begin a Sunday morning.
And this morning my friend Jon Husband sends me in a couple of directions. First towards Dave Snowdon’s Cognitive Edge methods and open source methods database. And now I am thinking of doing the same around here – compiling meeting and conference designs for use by others. Not at all a bad way to extend learning into the world.
And then I read a great post that Jon finds via backtrack to a young man named Wade who has discovered two truths in the world. First, there is great merit to buying and drinking Dilmah tea. And second, the cubicle-based work culture he finds himself in just isn’t working. Here’s what Wade has to say about that:
From my limited direct experience, as well as second and third-hand understanding, the cubical and the process-worker still seems to be the way most workplaces are run. These structures seem to inhibit enjoyment, co-operation, communication, and happiness and effectively dis-able their employees.
When as people we feel involved, and responsible for our actions and output, we feel happier, and do a better job. When we are allowed to think, we become enabled nodes and peers, no longer following, but helping to shape and create something greater than before. From nothing comes something. The success of peer2peer file-sharing, and wikipedia shows the power of self-coordinating peers, when allowed to act and do.
An employee who feels passionate about his workplace, who enjoys the people and his work, is less likely to be sick, and more likely to stay a part of the developing company. The company gains even greater productivity as well as knowledge retention. Dialogue and communication take places, collaboratively they steer the ship to their common vision, not some top-down management approach that seems illogical to the employee. This is the wirearchy.
To discover this at a young age in his work career is both a blessing and a curse, as Jon also points out. But more than that, to me, it points out something interesting about people entering the workforce directly from the education system.
The education system, right through to the post-secondary level trains people to act alone. Individual effort is rewarded, despite the fact that people participate in group activities throughout their educational career. Even at business schools, the incentives for behaviour tend towards the individual reward, making for lots of pedagogical and cognitive dissonance in group assingments. Teachers I know of in these environments struggle as students compete with their team members, resorting often to command and control behaviours and unsustainable weight puling to ensure a good mark for themselves by way of getting a good mark for their group. This is not collaborative behaviour, and in fact is completely at odds with the world that Wade is describing.
There is some delusion about competition in the world. In the most competitive environments, such as sales or warfare or sports, individuals excel only if they work very well with others. Even mercenaries depend on others to do their jobs well.
The education system in most places I know of turns out people who are good by themselves. It focuses on individual capacities like reading and writing and figuring things out for yourself, that are the basis for effective collaboration, but not the logical progression to working collaboratively. The key capacity for living in a collaborative world is knowing how to be in relationship with others. It’s about knowing what you are good at, being open to learning from others and both offering and accepting relationships to advance to purpose of any given group.
Who knows of an education system that gives marks heavily weighted towards learning how to read and write and makes sense TOGETHER – a practice we call collective harvesting? Who can point me to a school where marks are given for collaborative work as opposed to individual learning artifacts?
What Wade has discovered is that the real world works much differently than school tells us it does but the WORK world more often than not mimics schools, I think to the supreme disadvantage of enterprise in general. If you are taking people and throwing them into cubicles and not providing for the kind of collaboration that is really needed, you are wasting time, resources and energies, and your employees, like Wade, will notice.
Perhaps this can be food for thought as Dave Pollard continues his podcast journey on learning, leadership and enterprise. In the meantime, thanks to Wade for jotting down his experience and triggering some interesting connections.
Time for more Dilmah.
[tags]dilmah tea, dave pollard, jon husband, dave snowdon, schools, business school, workplace, wirearchy[/tags]
Back in March we ran an Art of Hosting for the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team and all of our comunity partners. At the conclusion of that Art of Hosting we held an Open Space. One of the topics that I posted was about the pattern of our work with community based on the experiences that people had had over the three days of training. I was interested in seeing if anything we did over three days with forty people in an Art of Hosting could scale up to larger levels in the system. I had a couple of powerful insights during that session.
- The idea of “consultation” with community stakeholders is dead. This process is about inviting community members to take ownership over the structures and institutions that affect their lives. Instead of a one-way flow of advice from the community to VIATT, the new model is a gift exchange between cousins, relationships between familiy members who are putting children in the centre and looking after each other. As such there is expertise, care and ownership everywhere in the system and so we all must actively become “TeacherLearners.”
- The circle is the fundamental pattern for reflection: leadership at the rim and inquiry in the centre. The relationships in the Art of Hosting developed quickly because we established trust and openness in the beginning with an opening circle. We were able to establish a real sense that everyone was sitting on the rim of the circle together, facing inward at the question of how to do this work. The circle is a structure that opens up the possibility for leadership to come from anywhere, with inquiry at the centre. In this case the questions at the centre of the circle revolve around the principle that when the system puts children in the centre everything changes. This is a powerful organizing principle guiding our transformation of the child and family services system from a system that places resources and institutional interests at the centre while trying to keep families there. The proof of this is embodied in the idea that when the current system breaks down, and a child dies, the parts of the system fly apart and many different process are required to bring it back together. By contrast, when a child dies in a community, everyone comes together. There can be no one else in the centre, only the needs of the family. That is the ideal for our work: a system that places children in the centre.
It is interesting to see the way some of these insights have deepened into operating principles. The idea of Children at the Centre has become a simple but powerful organizing principle for all of our community linkage work with VIATT. The idea of TeacherLearners in the community has informed the way that we are developing community circles – policy and decision making bodies that will hold significantly more responsibility for the system that mere advisory committees. At the moment we are looking at using study circles as a methodology for running the community circles.
[tags]VIATT, community consultation, circles, children, child and family services, study circles[/tags]
Diamond graphic by Darrell Freeman at Colour
Within the constellation of design tools I find especially helpful in creating spaces for conversation, Sam Kaner’s Diamond of Participation has been very influential. About three years ago my friend Myriam Laberge pointed out to me the possibility that all learning conversations take place along this flow of thinking and since then the model has been an important part of my life and work.
The diamond is a map that points to three phases that groups pass through as they move from questions to insights. Groups begin with divergent thinking, sit for a while in the chaos and uncertainty of “The Groan Zone” and later move into convergent thinking.
Today I found a nice description of these modes of thinking, buried in an article on neuroscience and fundamentalism
Convergent reasoning involves an assembly of known information and results in a solution within the realm of what is already known. Most problem solving occurs this way. It is instilled, for example, in medical school students. If a physician sees a person in the emergency room that has a fever and is comatose, they are taught that there are two possible disorders that might give these signs: an infection or a heat stroke. If this patient is found to have a stiff neck, the physician considers the possibility that the patient’s fever and unconsciousness are related to an infection of the central nervous system, such as meningitis. To obtain further converging evidence the resident doctor may perform a spinal tap; if the analyzed spinal fluid reveals certain indicators there is now sufficient converging evidence to make a diagnosis of meningitis and to start antibiotic therapy.Divergent reasoning, on the other hand, enables a person to arrive at a previously unknown solution (at least unknown to the person who is doing the reasoning). When a person is confronted with a problem and decides that the existing information is insufficient to develop a satisfactory solution, he or she may diverge from the information and imagine,or reason about, new possibilities. William James, who first put forth the concept of divergent reasoning, stated:
Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another … unheard of combinations of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy … we seem suddenly introduced into a seething cauldron of ideas … where partnerships can be joined or loosened … treadmill routine is unknown and the unexpected is the only law.
The human capability for divergent reasoning results in a nearly limitless range of creative outcomes, from entirely personal to world changing. Surely humanity’s earliest innovations were life altering, as were the many that followed. Recall our eventual acceptance (against initially unyielding church doctrine) of Copernicus’s unfathomable idea that the Sun, and not the Earth, was at the center of our solar system, or Einstein’s affront to the known laws of physics with his concept that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. But even more mundane activities, like resolving an unacceptable marital situation by seeking conduct on the part of one of the partners that was previously not considered, discovering a treatment solution for a heretofore incurable disease,creating a work of distinctive art, finding an alternative to war in a tense geopolitical situation, a chef’s creation of a new recipe, carefully arranging flowers in vase, or making up a bedtime story, are examples of creative acts resulting from the ability to diverge from current circumstances and consider or enact new possibilities. Certainly, both convergent and divergent reasoning serve to enhance our well being. But it is an individual’s ability to diverge from what is familiar and move beyond the known into a new understanding which is the essence of creativity, and that which gives rise to advancement. In the words of Frank Zappa, “Without deviation from the norm, ‘progress’ is not possible.” Whether a person chooses to question and think on his or her own or remains unconditionally adherent to religious dogma, might relate to how specific areas of the brain are utilized–or not.
Interesting, eh?
[tags]Sam Kaner, Myriam Laberge[/tags]
Last week Dave Pollard, author of How to Save the World interviewed me for his first podcast. We had a lovely conversation about essential human capacities, Open Space, unschooling and leadership. Head over to Dave’s quite excellent and prolific blog and have a listen. You can also download the podcast here.
And thanks to Dave for inviting me in.
Here is a selection of interesting papers for your summer reading:
- Is it time to unplug our schools? – Almost everything published in Orion is interesting. This article looks at what schools are doing to teach a deep relationship to nature.
- Altar calls for true believers – on the challenge of practicing what we preach with respect to sustainability. This is a good piece on why systemic change in general doesn’t necessarily correlate with necessity.
- Horse Power – Old technology for a new world.
- No coffee – A great piece on Jurgen Habermas, coffeehouses and the power of conversation.
- Modern Cosmology: Science or folktale? – I think the cosmic story is both. This article argues the same, but from the perspective of a skeptical scientist.
- World Bank economist Kirk Hamilton on the planet’s real wealth. – It turns out that the greatest resource the world has is “intangible capital” – people’s wisdom and labour.
- Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. A review of a new biography about the Italian patriot Giusepe Garibaldi, for whom my local extinct volcano at the head of Howe Sound was named.
- Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch – Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom think it’s possible we live in The Matrix.
- Heretical thoughts about science and society – Freeman Dyson muses about the global warming crises. But he might be wrong. He’s been wrong before!
- The quandry of quality – a great blog post from Bob Sutton on what is hard to measure but essential nonetheless.
[tags]nature, sustainability, change, horses, Habermas, coffee, conversation, cosmology, big bang, human resources, Garibaldi, Matrix, Nick Bostrom, freeman dyson, robert crick, global warming[/tags]