Brilliant! -the baseball story I mean!
I can relate to it especially because a long time ago [it seems now]
before I was a management adviser to local government, I was a playworker,
then a playwork trainer. [BTW, apropos of Michael McMaster recent post
about designing spaces for communication, I think playwork has a lot to
offer. Playwork is all about setting up spaces for children to grow, play,
express, develop, etcetera; so much of the 'technology will be
transferable to helping adults do that...]
For me the message John offers can be summed up as:
"Go for infinite games rather than finite games, seek to turn all finite
games into infinite ones..."
- inspired by james carse's book ' finite and infinite games' [which was
eloquently summarised here a while back] [BTW, 'infinite' means something
similar to non-zero sum, but that's a bit like saying 'perfection' is like
'quite good']
At another level, the organisation IS the game, which is to say that, in
just the same way that a game doesn't exist until we play it, [ BTW a game
described in a book is a memome waiting to express itself in our
sociotype], an organisation only exists because we 'play its game', we
allow it to emerge, to exist, and then it frequently self-sustains,
whether we like it or not. [like memes do -memes are selfish -they are
interested in their survival, not your health]
As John implies beware non-human entities like organisations and memes...
--from Arthur Battram, organiser of 'Tools for Learning', assisting local authorities to apply complexity concepts to learning apb@cityplex.demon.co.uk "complexity is in here... and simplicity is out there...if we want it to be..."
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>