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Everything I know I learned in the schoolyard…

June 11, 2005 By Uncategorized

George Por went digging around in his archives dating back to the late eighties and came up with an interview he did with Peter Senge on “generic structures.” Senge said:

We’ve had a particular view on this point for many years that is one of the specific contributions of the systems dynamics field is the idea of what we call “generic structures”. Basically the idea is simply that nature tends to repeat certain patterns. Now, structure has a very particular meaning in our work. It does not mean a structure imposed on people or anything like that. It has to do with underlying patterns of human relationships that recur over and over again. For example, nature is full of systems that do something like that — where things grow for a while, and then collapse. There is a set of structures that underlie virtually all systems, whether it is a population, a company or a team that gets more and more aligned and then falls apart. It is the behavior of those structures, about which they need to accumulate memory.

This fits what Senge would probably later understand as a chaordic understanding of things, how structures arise themselves and sustain themselves with accumulated memory. To me, looking at things from a facilitation perspective, these are the most powerful structures we have. They can be both incredibly liberating and incredibly restricting.

An example of a highly entrenched communication pattern shows up in the “expert-teacher pattern”. This is ingrained through our schooling experiences and shows up everywhere from public meetings to conferences to training models. It is poison to innovation, participation and creativity and it locks people into dispiriting power relationships.

An example of the other extreme probably has its origins in what happened in the school yard as we met to plot the demise of horrible teachers who exploited the expert-teacher pattern. The “schoolyard collaboratory pattern” is predicated on an assumption that everyone in the conversation can offer ideas and they get booted around and discussed until people somehow decide that placing a whoopee cushion on the teacher’s chair is the way to go. We stand around in circles, make the best possible use of short time (15 minute recesses) and no equipment, to engineer a disruption to the system.

Later in life these structures show up in the conversations that are said to really run things: dinner meetings, golf games, cafe chatter, backroom deals and so on. All of the places where we get unstuck from the constraints of formal systems seem to have their origins in the patters of eight year olds standing in a school yard, free from the physical spaces and configurations that imprison us, as we plot the most efficient way to move things along.