On Sat, 9 Mar 1996 BIRRED@dnr.state.wi.us wrote:
> The difference between the two stories is that in listening to his client,
> Gene in effect enabled the client to learn something, whereas the
> boilermaker kept his knowledge to himself. What an elegant example of
> what a learning organization is and is not.
I wonder how many organizational learning practitioners have gone into an
organization and found that their clients didn't know the right questions
to ask to get the 10% that was needed for leverage?
I think that learning is a two-way route that requires active
participation from each of the parties involved. It isn't just the
teacher's responsibility to impart knowledge to the student, it is also
the student's responsibility to extract knowledge from the teacher.
Learning may or may not happen depending on the definition of learning. If
we agree on the definition of learning, then maybe I could agree with you
that that story was or was not an example of a "learning organization".
Some clarification questions - who learns? what do they learn? how do they
learn? how do they know when they have learned? according to whom have
they learned? Learning can also be orthogonal on several dimensions,
depending on the definition - implicit/explicit, logical level of
learning, etc.
Andrew Moreno
amoreno@broken.ranch.org
--Andrew Moreno <amoreno@broken.ranch.org>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>