I have subscribed to Learning Organisation from time to time and have been
excited by the exchanges and with the ideas in Peter Senge's books.
I work as a freelance consultant with small to medium sized firms. A new
and growing area of work is in facilitating action learning groups with
the managing directors/CEOs drawn from non-competing businesses. It is
exhilirating to see the lights come on as isolated top management from
different companies come together in groups of six and act as mutual
consultants. They support one another sharing resources during, and even
outside programme sessions. The sessions each last six hours with each
member taking air time, to work on high value issues with the others
supporting. It works! Now that the programme has ended the group continue
with the disciplines of action learning as a self facilitated set. I
dropped in on their third such meeting this week - their commitment and
enthusiasm remains very high with a wide range of assignments and benefits
being presented.
I am excited by this because I can see that if I have a group of
active-learner senior executives, I have opportunities to initiate
learning organisation developments with them. My question is how? What I
need are practical hands-on approaches that have worked when initiating
the learning organisation.
So I would be grateful for ideas and advice from those of you who have
piloted the introduction of the learning organisation particularly in
private companies of up to 200 employees.
My second issue is that I am visiting in San Francisco March 26th through
April 7th. Are there any organisations who would be willing to host a
short visit to demonstrate how learning organisation ideas have worked for
them? Are there examples or centres of excellence that I should see? In
exchange I would be happy to provide a view of training initiatives in UK,
and to offer links and visits with some of the above mentioned action
learner executives.
Thanks for all the insights that are offered through the mailing list!
Yours sincerely
John F Robinson
E-mail address: 101365.743@compuserve.com
UK Telephone/Fax: 44 1462 811500
Voice mail messages can be left with Lizzie in SF, March 26th through April 7th.
on: 415 332 5800 ext: 650
--John Robinson <101365.743@CompuServe.COM>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>