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Historical foundations of organization learning

Article  in  Journal of Organizational Change Management · February 1996

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 Foundations of
Historical foundations of organization
organization learning learning

Philip H. Mirvis
Sandy Spring, Maryland, USA 13

That organizations learn is an idea whose time has come. It has taken nearly
half a century to build its foundation on groundbreaking work in physics and
biology, cybernetics and psychology, the organizational sciences and the
practice of management. Philosopher of science Gunther Stent (1972) contends
that new paradigms are often premature – ahead of their time. At the same time,
they are seldom unique: in different fields, confronting different phenomena,
thinkers and doers seem to gravitate independently to similar sets of ideas. As
they transform them variously into frameworks, formulas, parables or
practices, new understandings are revealed and we change the way we do
things.
The idea that organization follows from and through information undergirds
the concept of organization learning. After all, to inform is to give shape and, as
the term has been used since its Latin origins, to animate, communicate, and
give character to. But behind this conclusion are historic lines of thought and
research into the ways that information is perceived, sorted, interpreted,
generalized and translated into action – and how feedback from actions
influence the foregoing. These lines speak to the potential of collective learning
and yield ideas on how to improve it.
Researchers have identified the experienced-based assumptions and theory
of the marketplace behind corporate strategy and, thus, imputed decisions to
strategic learning (see Huff, 1990). But what kind of learning? Until we delve
into how people interpret prior experiences, scan the current situation, consider
future options and implement decisions, it is difficult to say whether this is trial-
and-error learning versus a more generative type. In the same vein, a team may
appear to be engaged in creative learning when its members examine their
mental models, brainstorm scenarios, and preview best and worst case
implications of action alternatives (see Senge et al., 1994). But before saluting
their breakthrough, we also need to assess ways that culture might have
predetermined decision inputs and consider whether seemingly rational
outcomes were overdetermined by, say, power dynamics or past precedents.
These are the kinds of theoretical and practical questions that arise when we
take seriously the notions that information is the life blood of an organization
and that learning governs its circulation and value. Literature on this subject
has boomed since publication of Senge’s (1990) influential volume on the “art
and practice of the learning organization”: over 100 articles and several books Journal of Organizational Change
have followed, not to mention newsletters, conferences, on-line news groups, Management, Vol. 9 No. 1, 1996
pp. 13-31. © MCB University Press,
and a practitioner’s fieldbook. All this progress can be viewed as the workings 0953-4814
JOCM of “normal science” (Kuhn, 1970) and as the “diffusion effect” in practice
9,1 (Rogers, 1962). My interest here is with its theoretical origins and the practical
questions that gave rise to the idea of organization learning. A place to begin is
with the founding “discipline of disciplines” that made organizing a verb and
breathed life into the concept of organization.

14
Systems theory – the discipline of disciplines
The science of seeing the world as a system dates from Copernicus whose
Mysterium Cosmographicum, published in 1597, put the sun at the centre of our
solar system and the planets in elliptical motion around it. It was the
development of this idea, according to Mumford (1956), which marked the end
of the Middle Ages and the start of modern times. Since then, studies of
ecologies, economies, societies, social groups and micro-organisms have
discovered systemic order in more miniaturized universes. Today, subatomic
particles, too small to detect, are believed to pulse to and fro in systemic orbits.
Biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1950) first formulated general systems
theory in physics and biology. Miller (1978), in turn, depicted all of life
organized in a series of increasingly complex and differentiated “wholes”
throughout the latticework of nature. This new paradigm assigned common
properties to physical, mechanical, social and mental phenomena and produced
a dynamic model of the interrelated workings of the world (Boulding, 1956).

Organizations as social systems

Scholars from the Institute for Social Research and Tavistock Institute
introduced systems theory into the study of formal organizations (Emery and
Trist, 1965; Katz and Kahn, 1966; Miller and Rice, 1967). Prior to this time,
organizations were characterized like machines; indeed, the word itself comes
from the Greek organon, meaning tool or instrument. Systems theory offered
the image of organization-as-organism (Morgan, 1986). Since all life forms are
subject to entropy, the problems of adaptation, conceptualized as the
maintenance of equilibrium and “fit” of the organism with its environment,
became a central concern to theorists.
In the open systems framework, repeated inputs of information and energy
shape patterns of behaviour by demarking boundaries and stimulating
differentiation of functions or subsystems. Organizational roles illustrate:
they specify duties, divide work and authority, and exert control. In time, roles
are learned by organization members and role behaviour becomes habituated.
On a collective scale, a more or less stable pattern of interdependent
behaviour emerges whose operation forms the “rules of the game” (Etzioni,
1961). These rules, in turn, are elaborated over time and institutionalized to
the point that behaviour patterns are “routinized” in organizations (Katz and
Kahn, 1976).
 Problems emerge, however, when role behaviour becomes too rigid or self- Foundations of
reflexive (Merton, 1940) or when a role system cannot adjust to ambiguity, organization
overload and conflict (see Kahn et al., 1964). Indeed, by the mid-1960s, social learning
scientists observed that production systems designed along scientific
management principles and reporting structures embodying bureaucracy were
too rigid to adapt to faster paced change (Bennis, 1966; Burns and Stalker,
1961). Hence, building on the ideas of Lewin (1948), they proposed methods to 15
“unfreeze” a social system, change the personal and situational factors
influencing behaviour, and then “refreeze” the system into a new state of “quasi-
stationary” equilibrium.
Dewey’s (1933) point that people “learn by doing” had come into currency by
this time. In T-groups, people could gain feedback about their behaviour,
examine any disconfirmation of their self-image, and experiment with new
behaviours in the atmosphere of psychological safety provided by laboratory
education. Survey feedback programmes were launched whereby work groups
could gather information about the full range of environmental conditions
impinging on them in the workplace (Mann and Baumgartel, 1954). These and
other “normative-re-educative” interventions (Chin and Benne, 1969) aimed at
changing the person and organization were soon amalgamated into the
discipline of organization development or OD (Bennis, 1969).
OD would influence the prevailing coding scheme in organizations by
opening people up to new inputs and providing meaningful content so that they
could judge for themselves whether or not current behaviour was effective. To
facilitate change, it offered regimens of fact-finding and problem solving and
sought to equalize power in organizations by predicating action on the
“authority of knowledge” rather than hierarchical power (Argyris, 1970;
Leavitt, 1965). As the field developed, it made use of a myriad of other
experiential mediums, including ropes courses, role plays, simulations, and
such so that people could access richer sources of feedback about themselves or
their work groups and gain greater personal development (see Mirvis, 1994).
Within the work setting, organization members were encouraged to develop
their own “emergent-pragmatic” theories when diagnosing problems (Tichy
et al., 1976) and to engage in “action learning” efforts, guided by repeated
feedback loops, to address them (Tichy et al., 1992). The “workout”
programmes at General Electric attest to the results (Tichy and Sherman, 1993).
In all, this school of thought created the curricula of personal mastery and team
learning – two components of the “learning organization”.
Nonetheless, T-groups produced scant change in most organizations
(Campbell and Dunnette, 1968), survey feedback programmes either died out or
rigidified (Mirvis and Lawler, 1983), and broader based change programmes
often proved disappointing (Mirvis and Berg, 1977). The conventional
explanation was that bureaucracy was especially “resistant” to change
(Watson, 1966). It was left to another cast of theorists to explain why this was
so and what else might be done about it.
JOCM Organizations as information processing systems
9,1 Cybernetics comes from the word kubernates, or steersmanship, which the
Greeks applied not only to navigation but also to statecraft. Pioneered by
Norbert Wiener (1961), this field of study concerns how information shapes and
directs behaviour. In March and Simon’s (1958) theory, the driver of action is a
performance gap, between actual and desired results, that stimulates a search
16 for new information to interpret the gap and inform corrective action. Naturally,
search, analysis and solution development have costs, so it is rational for a
system to preserve its energy by organizing itself efficiently to process data and
make decisions.
One form of efficient self-organization is what von Bertalanffy called
progressive mechanization – the reliance on fixed programmes to respond to
feedback about system performance. A common example is hierarchy through
which data is assembled in lower-level offices and then funnelled to the top for
decisions. In the same way, standard operating procedures, prescribed
communication channels, and well mapped career paths establish predictable,
cost-efficient “routines” (Cyert and March, 1963). All of these are emblematic of
system-level learning in the sense that routines are analogous to human habits
and yield programmed behaviour (Hedberg, 1981). But here, again, problems
arise when these routines do not “fit” with the demands of the environment or
when organization members cannot agree on how to interpret information or
what actions to take (Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967; Thompson and Tuden, 1959).
In this frame, “re-education” is not aimed directly at the person or social
relations, but rather at improving access to and the processing of information.
Organization designers, for example, proposed the creation of boundary
spanning roles and early warning systems to monitor and signal environmental
turbulence (Galbraith, 1977; Starbuck, 1983). Emery’s (1969) idea was to design
localized “intelligent” systems where analysis could be undertaken and control
exercised closer to the source of the “disturbance”. This would bundle
information processing and decision-making tasks into work units where multi-
skilled operators would have the responsibility to handle the demands of their
broadened task environment. At the level of the enterprise, the follow on step
was to conceptualize organization as a network and create communication
flows to ensure that information flowed fluidly across functional boundaries.
This led to matrix management (Davis and Lawrence, 1977) and, as the
technology became available and cost-effective, to electronic networks and team
computing (see Davis and Davidson, 1991).
This school of thought would provide the architecture for designing
knowledge work systems (Purser and Pasmore, 1992) and would advance
further in Nonaka’s (1988) analysis of inductive, deductive and compressive
patterns of knowledge creation in organizations. Still, the gap between
processing information and creating knowledge can be significant. The
literature is replete with instances where errors in the analysis, storage,
retrieval and reapplication of past experience has led to under- and over-
generalizations of its relevance and to self-fulfilling prophesies (Huber, 1991;
Huber and Glick, 1993). Harvey (1988) identified the “Abilene Paradox” where Foundations of
everyone ends up where no one wanted to go, and Janis (1972) diagnosed organization
“groupthink” in decisions such that everyone agrees to the wrong course of learning
action. To locate what was behind these information processing errors and
what might be done to redress them, a third line of theory introduced cognition
into the equation.
17

Organizations as interpretive systems

Constructivism, the discipline concerned with the relationship between
knowledge and reality, advances the thesis that humans construct their world
view and impose their own order on “objective reality”. This is the centrepiece
of human cognitive development (Piaget, 1963). It gained sway in organization
theory with Berger and Luckman’s (1967) thesis that as people behave in
patterned ways they come to “take them for granted” and presume that their
social constructions match the way the world works. What this adds to the
concept of collective learning is the mediating factor of “mind” in human
interaction and information processing. Morgan (1986) represents it in the
image of organization-as-brain.
Variously called schemas, theories or paradigms, social constructions
function as “simplifying heuristics” to reduce information uncertainty and
serve to control “decision premises” about how to define a situation and take
action (Brown, 1978; Perrow, 1972). As such, they are cognitive equivalents to
role definitions, hierarchy and standard operating procedures. The problem
here, as Weick (1979) points out, is that organization members “enact”
information based on their past experiences. Hence, action options are perforce
limited by what sense people have made of what went on in the past and what
they can foresee happening in the future – or by what Walsh and Ungson (1991)
term “organizational memory”. What makes it hard for them to arrive at
innovative strategies is that perceived options are but a “residue of past
learnings” (Levitt and March, 1988). To open up new ways of making sense of
information, the challenge is not simply to help people to unlearn past practices
or to learn by organizing themselves in new ways, but to make people smarter
on a collective scale.
On this point, cybernetician Ashby (1960) contends that any system must be
as varied and complex as the environment it is trying to manage. This
translates into a need for “requisite variety” inside organizations. One way to
increase variety is to broaden the “gene pool” of ideas and perspectives. Indeed,
this is a prime benefit of workforce diversity within companies. Another is to
develop a “rich” language such that people can interpret and label complex
situations (Daft and Weick, 1984). Furthermore, it can be useful to bring the
“stakeholders” competing for the attention of the corporate mind into a forum
that ensures the situation is examined from multiple perspectives (see Mitroff
et al., 1994; Zaltman and Barabba, 1991). Finally, based on their studies of
JOCM self-sealing problem definitions, Watzlawick et al. (1974) offer this simple
9,1 recommendation: complicate things!
What “opens up” an organizational culture to change? Changes in
membership can change culture although, as Louis (1980) observes, newcomers
are conditioned strongly by prevailing beliefs and practices. It is helpful, too, to
employ people capable of imaginative thinking. Pascale (1984), as an example,
18 documented the “Honda effect” whereby the Japanese automaker capitalized on
its inexperience in the automotive industry and encouraged its members to try
out new ideas when designing and building their first generation of
automobiles. Finally, whether new or not, leaders have the potential to become
“transformational” when they are seen to embody new cultural beliefs and
values and provide people with a credible vision of new directions and how they
will get there (Tichy and Devanna, 1986).
This reminds that change in an interpretive system is not influenced by new
“cognitive” inputs alone. Emotion, in invoking threat and instilling confidence,
is also a means of unfreezing an organization and moving it in new ways. In the
interpretive frame, it produces “hot” cognitions and can stimulate organiza-
tional excitement (Berlew, 1974). Changes in symbols and settings serve the
same function as Peters and Waterman (1982) pointed out in their studies of
“excellent” companies. More broadly, this school of thought provides the
rationale and methodology for developing “shared vision” – another
characteristic of the learning organization.
Still, there are many factors working against a shared vision in organizations.
For instance, members of subcultures may adhere more to professional norms
or have a “deviant” outlook and values (Martin, 1992). The larger national or
societal culture also impinges: witness the way cynicism about institutions and
their leaders serves to “cool down” heated appeals for action and promote self-
interest (Kanter and Mirvis, 1989). Furthermore, a once-transformed
organization may rigidify in its new state. Hence, prior adaptations can be the
enemy of adaptability. In light of these dilemmas, another group of theorists
focused on different ways that organizations might enact information and
interpret it – to expand and enrich the collective mind.

Organizations as inquiring systems

All scientific inquiry is limited by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that
how we study and measure phenomena influences what we see and calibrate.
The same is true of the “inquiries” undertaken in and by organizations.
Applying this line of reasoning to managing, Vickers (1965) argued that what
decision makers call facts are essentially values. However, values are
suppressed in most discussions and subjective views are thus objectified and
translated into the rational decision calculus. As a result, he contends,
disagreement over the facts often devolves to value conflicts. As an alternative,
Vickers (1972) recommends that decision makers approach situations with an
“appreciative” outlook – open to this mix of values embedded in information
and empathic toward alternative interpretations. Methods of applying this to Foundations of
organizational diagnosis and intervention are gaining adherents who see a link organization
between “positive values” and “positive action” (Cooperrider and Srivastava, learning
1987). As an example, the appreciative outlook has been used to describe and
guide effective crisis management by organization leaders in emotionally-
charged, ambiguous situations (Mirvis, 1990).
Another illustration of the ways that definitions of a situation delimit action 19
concerns the use of language. Korzybski (1958) and Chomsky (1976) argue that
words limit our conceptions of reality and simplify, sometimes at great cost, our
pictures of the world. In the postmodern analysis of discourse, this “picture
theory of words” stresses that language contains information and conveys
meaning (Rorty, 1979). Thus, Dutton and Jackson (1987) point out that labelling
an issue a threat or opportunity affects how people think about a situation and
deal with it. More broadly, stories are used in organizations to convey traditions
or discredit them, to communicate how things work or introduce cautionary
messages, and to punctuate beginnings-middle-and-endings (Gardner, 1995).
Particularly in change situations, stories are a means of introducing new beliefs
and assumptions about what is going on and conveying a vision of where the
organization intends to go (Barrett et al., 1995).
Naturally, the design of organizations can promote more and less enriched
inquiry and constructive debate. For instance, a control system can be designed
like a “thermostat” to monitor events and note deviations (McKelvey, 1970).
Another option is to design the system to seek out disturbances proactively and
amplify them. This would have people “camping on see-saws” – in a high state
of alert and ever ready to respond to the slightest deviation (Hedberg et al.,
1976.) Exercises like the nominal group technique can be used to identify
problems and rank solutions quickly. Mason and Mitroff (1981) propose, as an
alternative, a dialectical method of discourse that has two groups, working
from different assumptions, analyse a situation and then compare their
conclusions. This enriches the “assumption pool” on which to base problem
solutions.
Finally, there are myriad other techniques for broadening and deepening
inquiry in organizations. Planners, for example, have proposed what-if
theorizing and crisis simulations to enable operators to anticipate accidents and
rehearse responses (Churchman, 1971). Scenarios planning, first used in Royal
Dutch Shell, enables organization members to “reperceive” their situations and
play out the implications of different reperceptions (de Geus, 1988). Schwartz
(1991) contends that scenarios are akin to organization stories in that they have
a plot, winners and losers. They also enable organization members to “rehearse
the future”. Finally, search conferences are a way to “bring the whole system in
the room” to examine peoples’ multiple realities and differences in perspective
about the future (Weisbord, 1992).
This school of thought highlighted the ways that mental models prefigure
problem definitions and proscribe what organizations can learn. Contemporary
ideas on enriching these models run from Hampden-Turner’s (1990) maps of
JOCM organizational dilemmas to Peter’s (1987) parables about how to “thrive on
9,1 chaos”. Meanwhile, a group of scholars originally gathered around Forrester
and the Meadow’s at MIT refined more elaborate models of how systems
themselves operate and introduced the idea of “systems thinking”. The
resulting “shift of mind” focuses attention on the organization-as-a-whole and
yields “archetypes” of various system dynamics. The original ideas were ahead
20 of their time. They came into fashion as scholars and practitioners applied them
to the subject of organization learning.

Organizations as learning systems

My first introduction to this came from Michael (1973) whose Learning to Plan,
Planning to Learn was a treatise on system learning. His focus was on the
mismatch between the necessities of long range planning versus predilections
to organize for the short run. Specifically, he noted that long range requirements
to acknowledge and live with uncertainty, to accept role ambiguity and conflict,
and to expect and embrace errors run counter to organizational preferences for
predictability, order and control. My own work with Michael concentrated on
what makes it so difficult for a system to learn from its mistakes (Michael and
Mirvis, 1977). One problem we cited was the gap between the simplified, linear,
cause-effect “maps” that underlay planned change versus the complex,
interconnected “terrain” that people encounter in action. As a result, the
rationale behind action and interpretation of its consequences is often
incomplete and even misleading. Needless to say, this makes it difficult for
organization members to know what works and why and, importantly, what
did not work and why not.
A second problem centres on the difficulty organizations have in gathering
and making sense of the information needed to figure out what went wrong.
Here the culprits range from denial and discounting to blaming and flank
protection. What makes this a vicious cycle is that these behaviours emanate
from a mental model and social system design that presumes that actions based
on knowledge and undertaken with skill are supposed to turn out right. To
intervene in this cycle, we advised decision makers to expect errors and to
undertake action as “experiments” – not so much to be right but rather to learn
more and continuously improve.
Argyris looked deeper into the learning deficiencies of human systems and
found a gap between people’s “espoused theory” and “theory in use”. This, he
asserted, is because people often define situations so as to have control over
their environment, to maximize their likelihood of winning, to minimize
negative feelings, and to make their actions all seem rational and level-headed
(Argyris and Schon, 1974). In turn, Argyris and Schon (1978) wrote the first text
on organizational learning where they identified the organizational analogues
of personal defensive routines which, in their view, lead to flawed thinking in
collectives. The situation is muddled further when problems are detected as
they threaten to bring to light these flaws and the gamesmanship behind
decisions. As a result, in what is termed Model I learning, even as an Foundations of
organization develops a new strategy or members try out new behaviours, no organization
one has distilled lessons from the past or been prepared to learn from the future. learning
How could we design a better learning system? Gregory Bateson, working
with a team of sea mammal specialists, observed that dolphins have a second-
layer scanning system that monitors how they translate signals into actions,
and checks for defects in their information processing, signal interpretation, 21
and the programming that guides pursuit. In his Steps to an Ecology of the
Mind, he located a second-order, self-correction capability in the human mind
and found it enables us to learn how to learn (Bateson, 1972). Argyris and
Schon, building on this idea, proposed a framework of “double-loop”
organizational learning called, aptly enough, Model II. Here groups engage in
inquiry, rather than advocacy, and publicly test assumptions, definitions of the
situation, and so forth. This opens up a second loop of inquiry whereby a
system scans itself and learns how it learns.
On the action end, Argyris (1985) has worked with individuals and groups to
help them surface gaps between their espoused theories and theories in use.
Isaacs (1994) has refined the dialogue technique to promote collective thinking
and inquiry. Simulations are being developed to mimic system dynamics and
challenge people to engage in systems thinking on a collective scale (Senge
et al., 1994). Organizational leaders are themselves building learning
organizations in change laboratories and on-line situations (Brown, 1991; see
Stata, 1989).

Taking learning systems seriously

Still, there are thorny theoretical problems and logical typing distinctions to
contend with that could undermine the “scientific status” of the concept of
organizational learning. Fiol and Lyles (1985), for example, argue that theorists
speak plainly of individual learning processes but muddle when it comes to
defining organization-level learning. At best, there is “functional equivalency”
between concepts of individual and collective learning and their interaction
needs conceptual refinement. Furthermore, many use the terms organization
learning and learning organization interchangeably. These are plainly not
functional equivalents but nor do they separate so neatly into subjects for
theory versus practice.
Then there is the crucible of practice. Here the “art” of designing, managing
and working in learning systems will either evolve or wither based on its
practical consequences. This invites a closer look at some of the practical
recommendations in vogue and how they fit with the way systems work.

The “whole” of a system is not reducible to the “parts”

Much of what we regard as scientific and technical knowledge has come from
carefully considering the parts of a system, studying them one by one and in
interaction, and then drawing conclusions about the whole. This reductionist
JOCM methodology yields practical knowledge and still holds sway in management
9,1 training and operations. However, one of the central tenets of systems theory is
that the system as a whole is not reducible to its constituent parts. On the
contrary, it has its own characteristics and figuratively takes on a life of its own.
To understand systems as a whole, we need then to consider the pattern of
relationships between and among system elements. Classic thinkers of the
22 modern age, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, pointed out that
relational concepts (e.g. the arrangement of the chairs in an orchestra) are of a
different logical type than concepts about things (e.g. the characteristics of a
chair). Theorists who talk of turbulence, equilibrium, balancing, alignment, and
such are using relational concepts. To manage them requires relational forms of
practice.
What does this mean for the design of learning systems? Early in his career,
psychologist Karl Pribram showed how planning reflects patterns of the mind
and structures behaviour. Later, his studies of the visual cortex of monkeys
revealed neural layers where information is parallel processed and intermixed
in memory. This mental process is analogous to holography that encodes
patterns on plates such that every “part” replicates the “whole”. Pribram’s
(1976) hypothesis is that the brain is structured to encode figuratively the forest
and the trees. Accordingly, Morgan and Ramirez (1984) advanced the idea that
a “holographic” form of organization would prove a boon to action learning.
Is the best way to manage “wholes” through holographic organization? Many
of the recommendations advanced on how to enliven social process, improve
information processing, elevate thinking, enrich inquiry, and feed-forward
learning point to advantages of holographic organization designs, particularly
in complex, rapidly changing situations where whatever we do will come back
at us quickly. Such designs, ranging from work teams and cross-functional
project groups to joint ventures and industry consortia, replicate wholeness in
their form. These designs embody the principle of requisite variety, recognized
as essential to seeing the rich mix of stimuli needed to inform a system. They
also provide for more diversity in perceptions and thoughts that yield more
friction in interactions and more complex conversations. As a result, the
holographic unit develops a more complete and appropriately complicated
picture of what is going on. This “whole” picture, in turn, is then encoded into
the culture of, say, a business within a business where it amplifies accumulated
learnings.
Still, there is the matter of retrieving this information and applying it
judiciously to novel circumstances. Organizational designers make the point
that the “minimal critical specification” of, say, job duties or departmental
responsibilities, frees people, groups and functions to self-organize around the
situation at hand. In so doing, however, economies associated with standard
operating procedures, routines, premise controls, and such can be lost. One
sobering hunch, then, is that many work units designed to operate holistically
will likely over time develop a mechanistic character and operate on autopilot.
This means that today’s exciting autonomous work groups and joint venture Foundations of
units will seem rather lifeless tomorrow. organization
Furthermore, on the practical end, it promises to be difficult to develop and learning
sustain the holographic form in hierarchical organizations. Weick (1995) makes
the point that organizations designed from the bottom-up to process
information, think it through, and reflect on experience may have no need for
top management. This begs the question of who will lead efforts at creating the 23
“shared vision” that Senge (1990) deems an important learning discipline.
Furthermore, there is considerable evidence that hierarchy emerges even in
egalitarian organizations and that top executives are reluctant to delegate
decisions deemed crucial to the enterprise (Oshry, 1995).
Successful efforts at delayering middle management and empowering work
units may counteract some of the “dynamic conservatism” that marks systems
comprised of layers of inner and outer circles of power (Schon, 1971). Big
businesses, especially, should see advantages in holographic designs as they
move to the decentralized federalist form and information becomes their core
technology (see Handy, 1989). It seems apparent, however, that the role of top
management will have to undergo marked change if holographic forms are to be
sustained (see Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1995) and that the integrative function of
the top team will have to be reconfigured as well.

Everything is connected to everything else in a system

Descartes and Newton gave us a world ordered in logical, linear, cause-effect
relationships. Yet systems theory teaches us that what we label cause and effect
are but temporary states in a web of interactions whose second- and third-order
consequences often come back to haunt us. To map the ebb and flow of systems,
then, members of learning organizations will have to envision dynamic
conceptions of time/space where B leads to A or both are contingent on C. This
is a relational picture that does not translate neatly into words. Meanwhile,
what we say determines what we see and how we enact a situation prefigures
an a priori course of action.
In the holographic organization, in principle, learning can be localized. Hence
the watchwords are “think globally, act locally”. Should we presume that
holographic designs will lead to system mindedness, yield consensus, and
transform companies into learning systems, however, some caution is in order.
Arthur Koestler has written passionately and pessimistically about the human
condition, always in the form of dualistic forces that split the mind and lead
characters into Kafka-like madness. As interpreted by Hampden-Turner (1981),
Koestler’s world is a holarchy where competing matrices of thought,
organization and action in the “whole” overwhelm the psyche, disintegrate
structure, and pit interests against one another. The corporate equivalents are
burnout and anarchy (see Olsen, 1976). Koestler’s medium was literature. But
Bateson sees this same potential disintegration in human affairs. He calls it
“schismogenesis” wherein the “centre cannot hold” pulled by the “split of
ideas”.
JOCM To make connections with a new reality do we have to imagine it first?
9,1 Argyris (1988) contends that to discover the new, thinkers must visit “universes
that do not exist” and entertain assumptions that seem strange and unfamiliar.
Seeing the world as paradoxical has eye-opening and mind-expanding
potential. The paradoxical perspective offers up new ideas for understanding
group and organization development as well as the dynamics of change (see
24 Quinn and Kimberly, 1984; Smith, 1982; Smith and Berg, 1987). Certainly, many
thought leaders are embracing paradox in everyday terms: Naisbitt (1982) sees
a “megatrend” in the movement away from “either/or” toward a “both/and”
mindset.
Janusian thinking, named after the Greek God with two faces who could look
forward and back, is being recommended in management circles. Quinn (1988)
sees it as essential to reconciling competing values faced by organizational
designers and decision makers. Another sort of relational thinking applies to
how we view time/space. In order to understand stars, Varela (1976) reasons, we
need to think about data from telescopes in terms of “it” (the star) and “the
processes of becoming it” (what we actually see). Accordingly, Davis (1987)
recommends this “future perfect” outlook to envisioning “it” – the corporation’s
future – and simultaneously the processes of becoming it.
These mindscapes enable people to make new connections between ideas and
encourage learners to reassemble past learnings in light of new information
and possibilities. Can we conduct this sort of thinking on a collective scale?
Evans and Doz (1992), for example, illustrate how simultaneous attention to
strategic “dualities” can be facilitated by the diversity found in global
corporations. Yet differences in language and national culture make it difficult
for, say, easterners and westerners to have a creative dialogue and invent
together. The same applies to people who score differently on the Myers-Briggs
Type Indicator. Certainly tools for managing diversity have application here.
Non-language based tools may also be relevant. Torbert (1989), for instance,
developed the “theatre of inquiry” involving dance, stage plays, and the like as
a means whereby participants would literally enact collective experience. My
own practice has addressed the ways in which stories, poems, art work, and
such evoke and reveal otherwise hidden aspects of organizational experience
(Mirvis, 1980). Outward bound programmes are another source of finding
collective metaphors of meaning for working people (Bacon, 1983). These sorts
of creative “flow” experiences have a way of expanding consciousness,
promoting bonding and stimulating new learning (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
It is not accidental that synergistic thinking and experiences lead to startling
discoveries, reconcile paradoxes, and set organizations on a new and often
felicitous course. Nature is inventive. So is thinking. The act of creation, writes
Koestler, comes from bisociation, putting together competing stimuli, forces,
urges and forms in a new arrangement. He documents this experience among
artists, scientists, and musicians. The resulting “ahas” are also indicative of
generative learning – “learning that enhances our capacity to create” (Senge,
1990).
Systems have the capacity to self-organize and co-create Foundations of
Long ago le Chatelier posited that systems are organized to perpetuate their organization
order. Much of the scholarship and interest in organization learning has centred learning
on survival in the form of adaptation: how organizations can learn to “fit” with
their complex, changing environments. As concepts of flux and flow come to
characterize organization-environment relationships, however, perhaps
organizational “fitness” is a better image of what has to be learned. This speaks 25
to the importance of organizational and personal flexibility – in shape, in
dealing with time and space, and in style (see Mirvis and Hall, 1994) – in the
process of adapting.
Just as breakthroughs in physics and biology influenced the organizational
sciences half a century ago, so also are some new ideas in the “hard” sciences
shaping the way we think about organization today. Prigogine’s (1984) work, for
instance, highlights the importance of disequilibria in that it “dissipates”
system structure in order that the system might recreate itself in a new form. In
turn, Jantsch (1980) identified the property of self-reference in systems whereby
small changes feed back on themselves and reverberate through the larger
system. The dynamic, called autopoieses, is the path by which systems evolve.
The paradoxical conclusion, that destruction is integral to creation and that
freedom is essential to order, are the stuff of the “new science” of organization
outlined by Wheatley (1993).
Modern systems theorists point out, as Follett (1924) did decades ago, that
distinctions we make between organization and environment are themselves
social constructions. This is the essence of Shrivastava’s (1992) appeal that
decision makers drop their egocentric and adopt an ecocentric outlook in order
to consider the relationship of corporate actions and the natural environment. In
the same way, the holographic form itself evolves by incorporating ideas and
developing relations with what otherwise be labelled the environment. To
further this point, Bateson (1979) posits that the mind coevolves with nature.
One implication is that a learning organization will have to inquire deeply into
the nature of things and devise to adjust itself continuously to disequilibria.
Michael and Mirvis (1977) liken it to white water rafting, an image taken up by
Vail (1989) in his depiction of management as a performing art. How might this
learning be orchestrated?
Is collective consciousness key to system self-correction and creativity? Harman
(1988) believes we are in the midst of a Global Mind Change. In the social order
that he describes, consciousness is causal and shapes the material world. On the
practical end, Harman and Hormann (1990) see a constructive role for business
in a transforming society. The central project of the middle ages was to build
cathedrals, they note, and of modern times to build great economic institutions.
These times, they argue, our central project is to build a learning society.
Yet the Papez-MacLean theory posits a “design error” in brain evolution – a
split between the neocortex and lower brain or, more colloquially, between
reason and emotion. Those who attribute primacy to consciousness in
organizational learning, in turn, need to acknowledge the “split” between the
JOCM rational and emotional side of organization. On a personal level, we humans
9,1 have the means for coping with this split. Buddhists turn to meditation and
mindfulness. Quakers empty themselves to be filled with grace.
It should not surprise that these are spiritual disciplines. In an evocative
essay, Whitney (1995) describes spirit variously as energy, as meaning, and as
epistemology. Her illustrations come from native American traditions, Chinese
26 medicine, the myths of the new science, and the musings of organizational
scientists trying to make sense of the forces that impinge on themselves and
those they study. In this regard, there is something new in social relations and
the practice of organization learning. It aims to create learning “communities”
(see Gozdz, 1995). The “dialogue” groups studied at MIT, the “appreciative”
inquiries at Case Western Reserve, the “socio-therapy” groups of Patrick
DeMare, and the community building workshops offered by followers of Peck
(1993) all aim at expanding collective consciousness in line with the forces of
energy presumed to exist in the natural world.
Behind this is a model of what some call the “quantum universe”. Bohm
(1986), the physicist whose theories stimulated development of the dialogue
process, applies its logic to human communication and gatherings. By
simultaneously self-scanning and inquiring with a group, in his view, people
make and experience the connection between observer and observed. This
brings light, as well as content, into a conversation. By “holding” this, in turn, a
group can contain both energy and matter, and investigate the reality of what it
is producing. Bohm likens it to “superconductivity” – where the electrons, or in
this case the elements of the conversation, move as a “whole” rather than as
separate parts. In co-creating this “tacit infrastructure” we learn of the
implicate order in the world.
Several variants of the “new science” give us glimpses as to what this
implicate order might be. The order to be found in chaos, for instance, revolves
around an aptly named “strange attractor”; Wheatley, among others, suggests
that its human equivalent is meaning. Senge’s fifth discipline, systems thinking,
aims to reveal “nature’s templates”. A sixth discipline engages collective
consciousness in their cocreation. This discipline will seek to synthesize
conscious and unconscious, and reason and emotion, and boundaries drawn
between our social organizations and the natural world. As an artful practice in
development, furthermore, it fulfils Bateson’s vision of a “third level” of
learning where competing matrices are reconciled and together we learn how to
learn how to learn.

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