Learning organizations, impacts and longevity

[kenoli Oleari]

I also read synchronicity with interest and ended up perplexed by
something I would like to share with this list.  I also want to refer
in this note to the excellent and interesting article by Artur
and particularly the following quote from that article.

>Put another way, companies die because their managers focus
>exclusively on producing goods and services and forget that the
>organization is a community of human beings that is in business -
>any business - to stay alive. Managers concern themselves with land,
>labor, and capital, and overlook the fact that labor means real
>people" (pg. 52);

And to this excerpt from Lin's previous email:

>hi lisa   there was some wonderful work done by a group at Royal Dutch Shell
>in The mid 90's.  They looked at companies that had been in business for over
>100 years and what is was about those companies that allowed them to survive
>and prosper over the long haul.

[This note is not intended to throw dispersion on anyone or anything
they said, but rather to raise some contradictions that I think are
too often overlooked and to invite some conversation.]

What interested me about Jaworski was that his fascinating journey
into self reflection and the rejection of a way of life as a
corporate attorney that had not fed him or society finally led him to
work with Shell doing long range planning and scenario work.  It was
hard for me to reconcile the apparent insightfulness of this man and
his growth into integrity (and the above statement of Geus) with the
apparent callousness and insensitivity to social and environmental
concerns that resulted in Shell's activities in Nigeria.  (Where
their presence has had a devastatingly horrendous social, economic,
environmental and political effect on the local population and land)

Is this a result of the fact that in the corporate model the only
concerns that have to be taken into account regarding:

"land, labor, and capital, and ... the fact that labor means real
people..." (Shell does hire Nigerians in Nigeria)

are internal to the company?

It seems to me that there is something missing from the  "learning
organization" model if it can include the kind of ignorance,
insensitivity and lack of social and environmental awareness that has
driven Shell's activities in Nigeria.  (I know the premise here is
that all organizations are learning organizations, some better at it
than others, but here is one that seems to purport to be at the
forefront of "learning" awareness.)

I keep being astounded by this kind of corporate perspective.  I had
some interaction with a consultant who worked with a mining company
in Papua that has had an atrocious history with and impact on with
the land and people there.  The work that he and I shared was based
on the participation of all stakeholders (and in this case it would
have included the people being devastated by the company's
activities).  How can a company claim this kind of capacity to
include and learn and then manifest in its activities such disregard
for the very people and environment it should be learning from?

Any kind of whole system approach -- to truly be a "systems" approach
-- will need to include learning from all relevant quarters,
including the larger systems in which they exist.  With all the
rhetoric, in practice these approaches seem to fall way short of real
"whole system" learning.  I know, in my own work with people, that
one thing that sabotages efforts are people's unwillingness to
include and engage with stakeholders with whom they feel
uncomfortable.  These are often voices that critically need to be
heard.

Another thought: Is longevity the most important factor in success?
How does a conscious organism deal with information that it might be
time for it to bow out?  In nature, lots of organisms fall by the
wayside.

The Enron failure is highly touted as a catastrophe.  Maybe this was
the financial (or social) environment's way of rejecting an organism
that was toxic.  (The internal people loved the company, but it
finally ate them, too.  The California rate payers hated it.  Would
bush have been elected if Enron wasn't there to pour money -- and
what else -- into his coffers.?)

Harrison often comments that we OD folks spend much of our time
trying to breath a few more breaths into organisms (i.e.
organizations, businesses) that probably should die sooner anyway.
 From a not too irrational perspective, the land and people of Nigeria
may best flourish if Shell were to die tomorrow.  And regarding
society at large, what value has come from Shell's longevity and its
innovations as a learning organization over time?  What is it's long
range vision and where are we and the planet in that vision?

I am a true advocate of whole systems thinking and learning
organizations, yet no natural system ever survived by imagining that
the "system" stopped at the edge of any particular grove of trees, or
particular species of critters.  From where I am sitting, xenophobia,
privilege, membership, wealth and class, and stockholder interests
play a small role in natural systems behavior.

How do these issues inform our work as consultants?

Any thoughts?

Kenoli

--
Kenoli Oleari, Horizons of Change, http://www.horizonsofchange.com
1801 Fairview Street, Berkeley, CA  94703   Voice Phone: 510-601-8217,
Fax: 510-595-8369, Email: kenoli at igc.org (or click on: mailto://kenoli@igc.org)

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