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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

learning

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Wheatley on Learning Organizations

Let me know if you know who designed this graphic. Thanks!
Please let me know if you know who designed this graphic.

“The Army is an incredibly literate organization. They have internal journals that they use to correspond with one another. They study history carefully. They have a center for Army lessons learned. They document everything. And they have this wonderful process of learning from direct experience called “After Action Review,” in which everyone who was involved sits down and the three questions are: What happened? Why do you think it happened? And what can we learn from it?

“If you were in a good American organization and were able to get those three questions as part of your process, you could become a learning organization. What I observe in our business organizations — even in our public institutions — is that after a crisis or breakdown, or after something worked really well, we don’t get together and say, “Okay, what do we each think happened, and what can we learn from it?” We either take credit for it, or, if it’s an error, we try to bury it as fast as we can and move on.

“We’re not in cultures which support learning; we’re in cultures that give us the message consistently: “Don’t mess up, don’t make mistakes, don’t make the boss look bad, don’t give us any surprises.” So we’re asking for a kind of predictability, control, respect and compliance that has nothing to do with learning.

“So I don’t know how any of these large organizations, both public and private, have a prayer to become a true learning organization, until they move away from these cultures of status and protection and fear of one another. That came real clear to me in the Army.” —Dr. Meg Wheatley with Scott London

Guide the teams you work with through those three questions:

1. What happened?
2. Why do you think it happened?
3. What can we learn from it?

Track what happens over the next six months.

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Christy—On Education and Entropy

“The most powerful symbol in the universe is the “=” sign: it’s a commerce between worlds, symbolic or real. That commerce is the heart of education— greasing the skids between one side of the equation and the other. Remember that the “-” symbol marks a mere subtraction, the one-way interaction present in much of our teaching today. The one-way sign is also emblazoned on every tombstone where the date of birth is only separated by the “dash to death” of the death date. We do not need education to be only a dash to entropy. We need to consider entropy in the evaluation of our teaching, testing, and education systems.” —Dr. Lowell Christy, Cultural Strategies Institute

This week, Lowell pointed me to some new research on the importance of conversation quality in language learning. The instructional designers who developed World Book’s Early World of Learning back in the 1990s certainly knew this—but it somehow didn’t become common knowledge for educators being advised to boost the quantity of words they exposed learners to.

From the New York Times:

“A growing body of research is challenging the notion that merely exposing poor children to more language is enough to overcome the deficits they face. The quality of the communication between children and their parents and caregivers, the researchers say, is of much greater importance than the number of words a child hears.

“A study presented on Thursday at a White House conference on ‘bridging the word gap’ found that among 2-year-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words — the use of shared symbols (‘Look, a dog!’); rituals (‘Want a bottle after your bath?’); and conversational fluency (‘Yes, that is a bus!’) — were a far better predictor of language skills at age 3 than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.

“‘It’s not just about shoving words in,’ said Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and lead author of the study. ‘It’s about having these fluid conversations around shared rituals and objects, like pretending to have morning coffee together or using the banana as a phone. That is the stuff from which language is made.'”

Language skills development and socialization through relationship are related, and the “commerce at the heart of education” requires a relationship of equality that is not part of the conventional education system.

This fall, I’ve been doing some slow writing/thinking offline on the 18th-19th C Age of Conversation. The Seventh-day Adventist community missed out on that Age because of its belief in separating from “the world” and its rules about the salons and coffeehouses that hosted the conversation culture. The church’s founders warned members away from these conversation spaces and some of its leading writers and philosophers, but because they did not introduce a comparable analog, the community missed an important “language-learning” developmental stage. My sense is that it hasn’t yet developed either a non-defensive listening culture or a healthy respect for the chaos and uncertainty that supports learning.

In the absence of these features, perhaps expectations about civility and clarity in the denominational conversation are premature, but I do hope some micro, in-relationship changes will be possible.

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Engagement and Apathy

Sometimes we don’t care because we don’t have to care.

At other times we care not because we wish to, but because questions sprang up around us and our lives were pre-enrolled as evidence; because if we do not speak our own words, who can speak them?

It’s a privilege to participate in a constructive conversation. It’s a separate privilege to be able to throw up deuces and move on whether the conversation is resolved or not.

It’s a privilege to be ignorant, and a greater privilege to stay so. Indifference is more powerful than both states.

Ignorance concedes to new information. Bigotry entrenches against it.

To learn, we open to new facets of reality, more experiences, more souls, integrating them into the knowledge we already have, allowing old and new truths to illuminate each other, and letting the obsolete fall away. Without these cycles of learning, engagement becomes more fury than sound, more self-reinforcing than system-improving.

The OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act.
John Boyd’s OODA loop.

A friend once taught me a military strategic process called the OODA loop: Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action.

Apathy and indifference camp in the Observation zone where information waxes and ignorance wanes. With indifference we can scan a world’s features as if we’re removed from the worlds we watch.

We can stand on the ground in this place, yet imagine our place as the Master Position. In so imagining, we fail to orient, and our decided course moves way off.

To orient, we must de-center ourselves and sense ourselves as part of the field, not beyond it. “You are all notes in the Celestial Symphony,” Neale Walsch has said. “Shall we decline to play the music because one note is no more crucial than another?”

Through apathy and indifference we most often answer “Yes. Yes, if we aren’t the keynote, we’ll decline to play, and we’ll devalue the song.”

I may never understand why this is so.

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New Skills Needed in Education

In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills. —Linda Darling-Hammond, National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future

Read more, from Wired Business.