Learning organizations: A primer for group facilitators

Notes

1 This is the earliest reference found to organizational learning

2 Because Senge is so influential in the field of learning organizations, his book The Fih Discipline is cited here frequently. All references to it are indicated in parentheses as his 1990a work.

3 Rational behavior limits alternatives explored, so "optimizing is replaced by satisficing" according to March & Simon, p.169.

4 Online Lexical Database by researchers at Princeton, based on the Oxford English Dictionary (1928).

5 Kofman and Senge argue that fragmentation is a cultural dysfunction of society because it is a byproduct of its past success (p. 17).

6 If a frog is placed in a pot of boiling water, it will jump out. But if it is put in warm water that is gradually heated, the frog will just get groggy and eventually boiled. This is apparently a myth debunked some time ago by Fast Company's consulting Debunking Unit See

http://www.fastcompany.com/online/01/frog.html.

7 One may argue that the excessive focus on snapshots (events) has obscured attention to the distinction of patterns of behavior over time, i.e., that the snapshots are being treated as discrete and disconnected rather than elements in a time series. In this case, in order to detect the pattern, one has to abandon (or overcome) the "event-itis" and take a longer look. System dynamicists propose, as one of the first exercises in problem elicitation, the drawing of "reference modes" (patterns of behavior over time) for the key "problem" variables (Saeed, 1998). They usually argue for a longer time frame to compensate for the client's tendency to focus on the recent past or future.

8 Kofinan and Senge argue that "organizational learning" has become the latest buzzword in management, and that there is no such thing as a "learning organization" (p.31). Instead, the term

represents a category created in language, and something of a vision for creating a new type of organization (p.32).

9 The arms race example was extracted from Senge (I 990a, pp. 69-73).

10 The diagram and the graph presented in the text (Figures 3 and 4) were assembled by the authors. However, the thermostat case can be traced back to at least 1948 (Wiener, pp. 96-97). It can also be found in the book that lay the foundation to the field known today as System Dynamics (Forrester, p. 15) as well a recent text by Sterman (2000, pp. 785-786).

11 Archetypes are condensed versions of systems analyses. The fact that they are condensed and widely applicable presents both a virtue and a potential vice. The risk presented is that the less experienced systems thinker may unfittingly apply an archetype to a particular case, or wrongly interpret it A more severe problem may occur, if the archetypes are introduced in ways that suggest to people that conclusions about complex systems can be drawn solely and directly from applying archetypes, without actual modeling and simulation. Sterman (1994) presents a strong argument that only through simulation can we learn "in and about complex systems." Moreover, some experienced modelers argue that model formulation and simulation are always needed, because systems thinking alone (i.e., "mental stimulation") cannot correctly link structure to behavior, even in reasonably simple systems (Peterson & Eberlein, 1994).