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LEARNING LINKS
The Spirit of the Learning Organization

PEGASUS CONFERENCE CORNER
As Fall Kicks in, Plan Time to Collaborate

FACE TO FACE
From Students to Citizens and Workers: An Interview with Deborah Meier
by Janice Molloy

Deborah Meier is an acclaimed educator and writer who has used collaborative methodologies to help revitalize the public schools in underprivileged areas of New York City and Boston. She is the author of "In Schools We Trust" and "The Power of Their Ideas" and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Deborah will be giving a keynote presentation at the 2004 Pegasus Conference, to be held on December 1–3, 2004, in Boston, Massachusetts. In the following interview, she offers an overview of how schools can create a community of learning to help students become engaged citizens and creative, productive workers.

You and some colleagues are on a retreat, discussing long-term strategies for your organization. As the hour grows late, someone brings up the issue of future capacity: "What skills are we going to need our workers to have down the line?" People toss out terms like creativity, self-motivation, technical knowledge, the ability to collaborate, flexibility, the ability to learn. Someone else leans forward and asks, "So are kids learning these things in school now?"

Deborah Meier has spent more than 30 years thinking about these questions and about what it means to be an educated person in today's society. As the founder and principal of several inner-city public elementary and secondary schools in New York and Massachusetts, she has made her career helping children in underprivileged communities build productive, meaningful lives.

To Deborah, the core mission of schools in a democracy is producing critical, thoughtful, interesting citizens and workers. From her experience, the current emphasis in the U.S. on standardized testing, as required by the 2001 "No Child Left Behind" Act, stands in the way of achieving that goal. "If Americans had an edge in the world, it was that they were presumably more ingenious, more self-initiating," she says. "The special American genius was our inventiveness. That spirit of inventiveness is what schools don't currently reward. It's not what you're supposed to be thinking of when you're taking tests; you're supposed to be thinking of the rules of the game, not how to break the rules or how to invent new rules."

Dynamic Learning Communities
Deborah knows about inventing new rules. She became an educator in the 1950s, starting as a part-time substitute teacher in the Chicago public schools while her children were young. During that experience, she found that school was "for many kids irrelevant, and the extent to which it was relevant, didn't produce lively minds. The same was true for teachers—the environment was barren and sterile. I thought it was amazing that they came to school each day."

Continue reading the interview

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Explore other educators' thoughts on creating outstanding schools and learning communities

LEARNING LINKS
The Spirit of the Learning Organization
by Daniel H. Kim and Eileen Mullen

In the movie Excalibur, the wizard Merlin defines the most important thing in the world as "truth." "When a man lies," he says, "he murders some part of the world." But how many of us feel that commitment to the truth can comfortably extend to our work environment? We have come to fear the truth—and truth-telling—in our organizations, especially when it differs from the "company line." We assume there must be a good reason for stifling the confrontations that would occur if everyone felt free to voice his or her truth. We have a sense that chaos will take over—that order in our world will cease.

Nevertheless, only if we can tell ourselves the truth about the current reality in our organizations can we open ourselves up to new possibilities for innovation and improvement. Only through a commitment to the truth can a learning organization articulate a meaningful set of values that can guide it on its journey. When we are unclear about our own truth, we muddy the environment around us. When we clearly express our own truth and also our shared truth—our values—we contribute to the constantly generating field of energy we inhabit.

In a "spirited" learning organization, the energy released with this kind of freedom is infectious. People like to come into this kind of space. When we do not have to censor what we really think and care about, we have more energy to devote to creating something that really matters to us.

This article, excerpted from The Systems Thinker Newsletter, appears in the Pegasus anthology, Reflections on Creating Learning Organizations. Take advantage of our special summer offer and get 40% off any of our print anthologies, 60% off when you purchase all 5.

Read the complete article, or see The Systems Thinker, V4N4 (May 1993)

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PEGASUS CONFERENCE CORNER
As Fall Kicks in, Plan Time to Collaborate

Work is spilling off your plate. Memories of summer vacations are vague at best. The fall is filling up. As much as you'd like to attend a conference or take part in a learning event, how do you manage it? It's so easy to say, "I don't have time" or "I don't have the resources."

But as an organizational learner or systems thinker, you know that sometimes the best approach is counterintuitive. Why not take a few days away from the office and meet with colleagues who share similar concerns yet will challenge the "way you've always done something" and help you find a new approach to those nagging problems? Why not immerse yourself in collaborative conversations that will energize rather than drain you of innovative ideas? Why not increase your skills around working more effectively with your colleagues instead of struggling through each collaborative project? You'll make better progress upon your return.

When times are tough, it becomes even more critical to leave yourself space for learning and rejuvenation, yet we typically do just the opposite. Our personal reserves and resources are being taxed, and we need to be intentional about replenishing ourselves and finding ways to grow.

Don't keep "sweeping things under the rug." Instead, use this year's Pegasus Conference—Building Collaborations to Change Our Organizations and the World: Systems Thinking in Action®, to be held on December 1–3 at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge—to help you find the fundamental solution to a difficult issue.

If you give the conference a chance to rise to the top of your "must-do's," you'll find support not only for managing your day-to-day challenges, but for thinking more broadly and deeply about how collaboration can help you better achieve your personal goals and your organization's mission.
—LG

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FROM THE FIELD
In Tough Times, Learning Can Give You the Edge

Research shows that successful organizations have high employee morale, job satisfaction, and commitment, but few enterprises focus on these factors during tough economic times. Rather, in organizations just trying to survive, most managers and employees feel stressed and uncertain about job security, production demands, budget problems, and changing economic circumstances. So how can we foster healthy organizations during these periods?

According to organization dynamics expert Chris Argyris, to build a solid foundation for the future, we should focus on learning, competence, and justice. In terms of learning, rather than consider ourselves employees with a position, we need to think of ourselves as people with a portfolio of knowledge and skills that we're continually trying to upgrade. Similarly, on the organizational level, if we're losing market share or seeing profits fall, we need to figure out what isn't working and acquire the skill set we need to correct our mistakes.

Working on competence means using what we have learned to increase the value we're bringing to our customers and clients. This means continually testing whether our efforts are getting the results we want and, if not, making the necessary changes. Justice refers to treating employees fairly regardless of their organizational position and building trust in the workplace, for example, by implementing respectful policies around how decisions get made.

Especially in tough times, if people are engaged in learning new skills and improving their performance—all within a just work environment—their capacity to rebound from difficult situations will increase, and their organization will be better equipped to flourish.
—KS

Source: Jamie Harris, Interaction Associates, Inc., "Thriving in Tough Times," HR.com, April 26, 2004