And all this Vegetable World appeared on my left Foot, As a bright sandal formd immortal of precious stones & gold: I stooped down & bound it on to walk forward thro’ Eternity. From Blake’s work, Milton.

Replying to LO Dear Organlearners, Greetings to all of you. This is:- Part 3. Organisational Learning within a Learning Organisation. I did not intend to write part 3. But within an hour after having mailed:-. Uncovering the Act of Organisational Learning LO28818 (Part 1).. Uncovering the Act of Organisational Learning LO28819 (Part 2). I began to feal uneasy. I focused so much on the maze of information that I failed to take all my own experiences into account. I now want to introduce them by asking two questions. Does the OL (Organisational Learning) in a LO (Learning Organisation) differ from the OL in a OO (Ordinary Organisation)? If it differs, how does it differ? We know that not only are the two disciplines Personal Mastery (PM) and Team Learning (TL) essential to a LO, but also the three other disciplines Mental Models (MM), Shared Vision (SV) and Systems Thinking (ST). PM involves IL (Individual Learning) while TL involves OL (Organisational Learning). Thus PM and TL have clearly to do with learning. But it is as if learning stands in the background with respect to MM, SV and ST. Let us look again at figure 4 -- Organisational Learning with Information Management (IM):- How much can IM accomplish a common awareness to MM, SV and ST? How much can IM accomplish constructive changes in MM, SV and ST? In fact, is one of the main difficulties of trying to transform an OO into a LO not because it is driven by IM? Should we use IM to drive such a transformation, we simply try to use TL (or even worse, the executive team) to set up PM, MM, SV and ST. This means that TL becomes "more essential" than PM, MM, SV and ST, something which it cannot be. I have experienced the transformation of three OOs into "tacit LOs" and their subsequent growth as "tacit LOs". I call them "tacit LOs" because, except for me, none of their other members knew of Senge's seminal work The Fifth Discipline. I have also studied about a year ago a fourth "tacit LO". A week ago I had the opportunity to examine a fifth case rather superficially. (Thank you Daan for kindly making me aware of it.) In all five cases the transformation was definitely not driven by IM. It was accomplished by what I prefer to call "caring deeds". In each case all members participated in an extraordinary event which lasted for a few days. Because of the nature of this event the members developed special needs and they deliberately cared for each other in these needs by deeds, not words. They had to go with constructive creativity beyond their usual activities. They became a CCP (Community of Constructive Practice). When we examine figure 4, the absence of such caring deeds is noticeable. Knowing the relationship between words (information) and deeds (practice) goes further than formal knowledge into wisdom. For example, more than two millennia the sage Confucius himself had the following to say upon formalised religion:- LY 3:12 "Sacrifice as though present; sacrifice to spirits as though the spirits were present". The Master said, If I do not take part in the sacrifice, it is though I did not sacrifice.” Caring deeds become before words, despite how compassionate these words may seem to be. Caring deeds create events which through experience give meaning to compassionate words or uncover them as dishonest window dressing. Thus we have to add these caring deeds to figure 4 as is depicted in figure 5. Please see:- Observe how the caring deeds are initiated from the sapient level of knowing rather than the formal level of knowing from which information is derived. Initially I tried to draw five straight lines from "sapient knowing" to "event" on the inside, but they interfered too much with the five straight lines from "formal knowing" to "information" to give a nice picture. (Try to do it self and see what a mess the result is.) Thus I had to draw them on the outside as five curves from "sapient knowing" to "event". In the end the result has become quite symbolically to me. It is as if these caring deeds embrace like arms the OL in a LO. See if you can follow the two O-O loops. (It is like tracing over and over again the number 8 turned sideways). The inner O-O loop involves information and its management whereas the outer O-O loop involves events created by caring deeds. The drawing as a whole looks very much like a butterfly to me. The butterfly effect? Mmmmm. With care and best wishes, -- At de Lange Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria Rep of South Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash Public Dialog on Learning Organizations --

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one perceives the angel of history. His face is towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” Walter Benjamin - As we navigate through our political engagements, developments have opened new possibilities for alternative futures. Anxiously embracing the promise of some of these alternatives, we are also confronted with a resilient dynamic of terror – another pile of wreckage is being hurled at our feet. Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’, suggests that the storm from Paradise both drives and disrupts the spaces from which we engage the wreckage at our feet. We can never just turn away from the debris and fly forward into progress - it is in tentative experiments, experiments shaped by the enabling disruptions of the storm from Paradise, that we claim a space for a critical imagination to contest the pile of debris growing skyward.* Love, Andrew Campbell Oxford 8 th July [ *Text by Benjamin, re-found last week in a journal of the horrors of Sri Lanka’s turmoil :-{} ]