Workforce Development in the Robot Age

Changes are needed in education and one aspect is to develop the creative capacities of students including students at the post-secondary level. But, creativity can not just be a bolt on to an existing program. I think an approach is needed to see creativity as a part of wider social cultural activities and not just make it an isolated skill.

This was a very needed article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed today: “Robot-Proof: How Colleges Can Keep People Relevant in the Workplace“.

This is a comment I made:

Great piece and concept, but there is a bit of a “build it and they will come” aspect. We act into a social cultural field and this field needs to change with education. First, creativity can only occur in a personnel context in which business is ready to accept it; to know what to do with it. Not addressing this just leaves students hanging while trying to exercise creativity. Second, creativity often needs a deep level of disciplinary or functional analysis, not just a surface level. A good example are design processes that get deep into the weeds to understand what is needed. Another example is Audrey Walter’s lament about the lack of appreciation for the history and theory of education by Ed Tech efforts:
“all around me, I see Skinnerism – click-for-immediate-feedback. People as pigeons. Zynga. Farmville. Gamification. But without the language and the theory and the history to say, “hey we recognized in the mid 1960s that this was a wretched path, one with all sorts of anti-democratic repercussions,” we’re not just making the same mistakes again, we’re actually engaging in reactionary practices – politically, pedagogically.”

Another critique I missed is the behavioral critique of big data that is implied by the author’s view that analysis will be the purvey of artificial intelligence. Analysis is necessary for creativity and this level of analysis is not part of robot capability.

Learning Beyond a Standardized Approach

Interesting post by Jay Cross that helpes me clarify my last post and explore some new directions.  In his post Jay says;

No more efficiency models, and no more Six Sigma. Forget that. We aren’t in a stable environment and won’t be in a stable environment. We have to have our people go out and experiment, innovate, and invent. Job descriptions, competency management systems, and all that legacy stuff are needless baggage.

So, a good first question to ask yourself is, “Is there evidence for functional stability in the environment”?  I mean functional in that, is there real stability, or are conservative forces trying to hang onto a fading paradigm.  If the answer is yes, than there may be a place for six sigma and other standardized programs.  But if the field is in flux, and there is a lot of flux today, than standardization can’t be your primary focus or strategy.

So if your area is in flux, how can you focus your strategy.  Jay also has some good suggestions for structuring learning processes and environments for a learning strategy.

(I)f you have an employee who is entering a new area . . .  and they have no framework, then formal learning is the way to get them up to speed—to learn the lay of the land, the technique, and the structure. But as soon as you form a complete tableau in your mind of that domain, then you are empowered to go out and fill in the pieces.

This country has missed one of the best opportunities for employee development and worker fulfillment by not asking the employee her life aspirations. Once you identify that and let the people you work with know that, you plan together to make it happen. . . . If you have a manager who isn’t willing to participate in making people better, then throw him out the door. Focus on the platform. The program stuff will get what they need if they have the right platform and things are hooked up. . . . establish an environment for learning—where you can focus specifically on your learning ecology and what will make it healthy and grow.

The Search for a New Common Sense

I’ll begin where I left off in my last post.  Our task (as educators) is to find a new common sense for how to operate in a 21st Century economy (Hagel and Brown).

The Current State of Affairs

Here is my big picture view of what is going on in the economy today.  Globalization, digitalization, standardization and other productivity improving factors are decreasing general labor requirements; a first level of economic restructuring.  Some of that labor is falling to low wage and low skill service jobs, but there is a significant effort being directed to developing totally new forms of value.  Hagel and Brown’s call is consistent with the call of Drucker to improve the productivity of knowledge workers.  What is this new common sense; this new source of productivity:

Living on the edge will help you build the strongest core.

What do we mean by this? The edge is where the action is – in terms of growth, innovation and value creation. Companies, workgroups and individuals that master the edge will build a more sustainable core (Hagel and Brown).

The bohemian spirit has defined the edge.  That doesn’t mean we should adopt old bohemian models, but we should be wiling, in various ways, to help people explore their boundaries and boundary conditions.

From Push to Pull:

Over the past century, we have been perfecting highly efficient (push) approaches to mobilizing resources. . . . In education, we design standard curricula . . . In business, we build highly automated plants or service platforms supported by standardized processes . . . In technology, we write massive enterprise applications specifying activities . . . (but) powerful forces (increasing uncertainty, growing abundance, intensifying competition, growing power of customers) are at work shaping the need for an alternative approach. . . pull models help people to come together and innovate in response to unanticipated events, drawing upon a growing array of highly specialized and distributed resources. . . . pull models seek to provide people on the periphery with the tools and resources (including connections to other people) required to take initiative and creatively address opportunities as they arise (Hagel & Brown).

Note: this is not the death of standardization.  It is alive and well and plays an important function, but economically speaking, it is playing a decreasing role as a differentiator, a role that is now falling to creativity and innovation.

A Need for New Forms

This is the place for new forms of Personal Learning Environments;  personal environments that we create collectively.  It’s also about developing the resources to be able to pull to you, what you need, when you need it.  It’s also about helping people to find and pursue their passion to creating value, change their thinking and perceiving, and it’s about changing the functions of institutions and organizations in order to fit with this new pull model.

I believe this pull model will increase knowledge work productivity, it will enlighten us on the connections between the economy and the creative industries and it will play a big part in helping us to securely face the future.

Economics and Creative Cultural Spaces

Where have all the Artist Gone?

Yesterday, a NY Times article (Freelance Musicians Hear Mournful Coda as the Jobs Dry Up) chronicles the decline of the freelance music industry in the New York Area.  It is a theme that is being repeated across the country.  The work is just drying up.  There are many potential reasons: bad economic times, an over-saturation of entertainment options, technological displacement . . ..  Substantial responsibility must rest with contemporary classical composition.  In my opinion, classical composition studies have not even tried to connect with audiences for a hundred years.  Without the talent development of a viable modern classical composition field, we’re seeing Broadway (America’s Classical Music) increasingly turning to rock ensembles and simpler song forms.  The worst aspect of this article; it offers no way forward.

These artist represent the soul of our culture.  Mass culture (eg. Hollywood) caters to the lowest common denominator.  At best, mass culture is nothing more than a weak reproduction of culture.  It is not the cutting edge and does not show us the the way to the future.  What is to be done to rescue the artist and restore their place in culture?

The Answer: Creating New Space for Cultural Work!

I believe the answer will be found in understanding how the world is changing.  Peter Drucker, a “self-described ‘social ecologist’ . . . coined the term ‘knowledge worker’ and later in his life considered knowledge work productivity to be the next frontier of management”.  Productivity in knowledge work consists in improving our ability to create new things like shared frameworks, understandings, processes, markets and social organizational forms.  These things may look like they are created out of thin air, but that is not the case.  They are created within cultural constraints.  Therefore, the source of much of this creativity is found on the creative cultural edge.

Culture, in its fullest creative sense, is the foundation or the “stuff” of knowledge work.  If you want to improve knowledge workers’ productivity, surround them with other people who are exploring and testing the boundaries, forms and shapes of culture.  In short, surround them with artists.  But, and this is a big but, art and culture can no longer be considered a spectator sport. Knowledge workers need to be intimately involved with cultural creativity.  They need to be “in the artists’ heads” in a way that allows them to experience the artist creation and to explore what that experience can mean in their own cultural lives.  Dedicated fans may have achieved something like this in the past, but artist should now focus on creating shared experiences.  Breakdown that fourth wall, the one separating the artist and their audience.  Help them to share in your creative nature, for in the end, knowledge workers are the artists of their own worlds.

Where Would Such a Space Be Found

Yesterday I saw a TV news segment on a new artist space in Cleveland (Ohio), 78th Street Studios.  It’s described as a character-filled location: the former American Greetings Creative Studios building, converted into studio spaces  that forms an “arts mecca”.  It looks like a great place and I think these spaces should be the mecca for all kinds of knowledge intensive cultural workers.  A place like this could be an economic engine where all kinds of cultural workers are able to integrated the cultural edge throughout their daily lives.  Now artist have always been in the vanguard of urban development, and are usually displaced as arts meccas become expensive fashionable destinations for the well heeled.  It’s because the well heeled can sense the importance and vibrancy that artists bring to their lives.  This is a great time for developers to recognize the importance of artists as an economic force and to find ways to integrate them as an integral part of economic spaces.

Network Learning: an Initial Summary

A new Model of Learning: from the Classroom to the Network

Learning has always been multifaceted, but where the old concrete model of learning activity was exemplified by the classroom, a new concrete model of learning activity will be exemplified by a network. It’s not a change in what learning is, but more of a change in the why, where, how, and when learning happens.

Why New Ideas for Learning are Needed.

  1. The pace of market change and creative destruction is increasingly requiring innovation and adaptive responses just for business survival.  John Hagel points beyond product and process innovation ot the need for institutional innovation is we are to counter the movement of innovation to Asia.  The complex understanding and responses needed requires greater access not just to to innovative ideas, but also the social spaces that contain both knowledge flows and the diverse capabilities needed to actualize those ideas.  Businesses need to move beyond the traditional boundaries of the firm.
  2. Human development, once thought to be relative unchanging after age 25, now highlight the ability for all kinds of growth in mental complexity and ability throughout one’s active adult life.  In response, new theories of performance are now available to support development and increase performance throughout one’s career.

In order to achieve complex adaptive change in activity, we must further our own development, improve the tools we have available, and make sure we are applying them and attending to the correct object or focus. This entails

  • Human development – The ability to grow to meet new challenges
  • Tool development – psychological and technical tools matched to our complex adaptive challenges
  • all with concrete opportunities for application and feedback

The next section explain some background behind this categorization.

Where will Learning Occur

Traditionally the classroom was led by an expert who was guided by a set curriculum and a transfer metaphor of learning.  In contrast, the network contains a diverse array of individuals interacting with learning as an emergent phenomenon.  This is not to say that experts, classrooms and the transfer metaphor will disappear, and learning, as a psychological and behavioral phenomenon, will not change.  It’s just that the most valuable and ongoing form of learning will emerge through network participation and will emphasize it’s natural connection with relationships and activity instead of focusing exclusively on knowledge content.  It will bypass the problem of learning transfer through learning in situ, in a just in time manner.  Instead of teachers, we will depend on a variety of people who’s role will be more like a guide, facilitator or collaborator.

Network learning has a built in efficacy benefit in that it’s so closely tied to activity and action in which the learning subject is engaged.  In a recent Charlie Rose episode Daniel Wolpert mentioned that the only purpose for a brain is to enable complex adaptive behavior through the motor systems and that the motor cortex and muscle system is the end-path for all of our sensory systems.  To think of content and knowledge as separated from activity is to ignore the way the brain is inherently organized.  Just in time network learning is tied closely to enabling action, which is more in line with the natural organization of brain systems.  If for no other reason, this type of learning is productive because it replaces the huge amount of knowledge that is committed to memory just in case it might be needed in the future with targeted knowledge that leads directly to action.

While learning is just in-time, building robust and diverse networks is the preparation we need. When you need resources is not the time for network building.  The network building that taps us into vibrant engaging relationships and social spaces should be an ongoing activity.  The support needed for this are learning institutions, but not like institutions of the past.  Not the institutions that horde experts, but ones that foster these vibrant and engaging social spaces and excel at building business relevant social networks.  This does not succeed by some network magic. Networks need to be filled with passionate and talented people.  You need to be hooked in with the smartest people on the block, just as they need to be hooked in with talented and passionate you.

What will be the focus of Network Learning

I believe that learning as a psychological and social phenomena is not substantially changing, only the focus of learning will be on the activities and challenges we face.  I will rely on an older model of Vygotsky and Leonte’v to explain a model of the architecture of human activity.  Vygotsky gave three poles that combined to drive human activity: a subject, a mediator (tool) and an object, all leading to an outcome.   This table gives examples for a carpenter and a loan officer.

8-29-10 post table

Therefore the focus of learning is on:
  • the development of the subject’s identity and capabilities (achieving one’s developmental potential)
  • the development of tools (especially mental tools like frameworks, theories, concepts, etc. . .)
  • making sure we are focused on the right objects with the right tools
  • People who can guide us and give us nudges in the right direction, in a timely fashion while on a self quest to complete this mission.

What Ideas are Emerging to Meet these Needs

  1. The idea of “pull” (Hagel Brown & Davison, 2010) encourage us to get involved in relevant networks and tap into the knowledge flows existing there.
  2. Richard Florida points out the importance of vibrant and engaging social spaces as a key driver of innovation related to business growth.
  3. Developing psychological based performance supports systems such as interventions to develop individual psychological capital (Luthans, 2008) or developing the psychological means for personal and organizational change (Kegan, 2010).
  4. Opportunities for collaborative practice -based research (eg. localized unconferences) to maximize development and learning within or around one’s specialities.
  5. Opportunities for creating and maintaining mentoring as well as other diverse types of relationships within one’s local environment.
  6. Networks that are institutionalized to allow you to pursue and developmental goals and identities while conducting business.  I say institutionalized to mean that the infrastructure may need to be created and supported.  Like Hagel’s “Pull”, we rely on serendipity for opportunity, but we plan to make serendipity more likely to happen.

This is not the end of my “theorizing” but a good summation from which to begin a more active research process.

More posts on Network Learning (in reverse chronological order):

A Research Compilation on Inter-firm Networks

The Shape of the Future of Learning: Seeding New Institutions

From Push to Pull: It Will Change What Education Means

Architecture for Learning: The Importance of the Built Environment

Why are Networks the Learning Platform of the Future

A Lifelong High Level Learning Platform: Some Initial Thoughts

Professional Networks as Learning Platforms: A Idea for Lifelong Learning

The Shape of the Future of Learning: Seeding New Institutions

Richard Florida in a New Republic article; The Roadmap to a High-Speed Recovery, has put forth an interesting and believable proposition: investing in new economic infrastructure is the key to powering a quicker and lasting recovery, by putting the fundamentals of our economy on a sounder footing with today’s economic drivers.  Umair Haque calls it a recapitalizing process when he says:

The real problem’s . . . in the institutional structure of the economy . . . America’s real capital gap, a widening fissure in social, organizational, and creative capital.

Florida mentions changing the current assembly line like organization of our education system (characterized by standardized mass production).  What would a new take on educational infrastructure and institutions look like?  I believe they will look much different then they do today, they will be designed to serve a much different population and they would occupy a much different role in society.  In this post I will suggest some of the contours of this change and why it is needed.

1 From Rote Memorization to Building Accomplishments

Too much of education involved memorizing test answers when economic success depends on innovation, initiative, and creative intelligence.  There’s little need for rote memorization.  Most memorized knowledge is quickly forgotten unless it is frequently reinforced through everyday processes and even then it is seldom helpful when your focused on innovtion.  Building real world accomplishments gets to a deeper and more authentic type of learning.

2 From Knowledge to Skills and Capabilities

Knowledge is great, and needed at times, but more than anything else, we need the capability to make things happen.  Creating things is more dependent on developing skills and capabilities than it is on knowing the right thing.  Help people to know things in the process of doing things.

3 From Mass Standardization to Mass Customized Creativity

Current methods of accountability have made education become more standardized – striving to make all people learn the same things, but what people keep saying we need is the creativity that requires diversity; everyone combining and bringing their individual strengths to the table.  I’m not against accountability, but it seems to have become the primary goal, and it is not the goal we need.

4 From A Curriculum to a Network

Standards based curriculums have become larger and more detailed, but the knowledge they embody never seems to be the right stuff at the right time.  Networks are even larger and more complex, but they’er also more fluid; able to be formed into the right configuration at the time it is needed.  Curriculums attempt to determine what knowledge will be needed in all contexts and to transfer that knowledge to individuals, a process that is alway problematic at best.  Networks create knowledge that is designed in and for specific contexts.

5 From Just Incase Knowledge to Just In-time Knowledge

Classroom knowledge seldom transfers to practice because students seem to have a hard time recognizing how to apply knowledge without real-world practice.  It’s also becoming hard to predict what knowledge will be useful beyond the basics because the “half-life” of knowledge keeps getting shorter and shorter.  Instead of giving people what they need to know, we need to give them the skills for finding the knowledge they need and for figuring out how to make use of it.

6 From Disciplinary Indoctrination to a Diversity of T Shaped Individuals

What does an educated person look like.  The knowledge in disciplines has become deeper and disciplinary members have become more specialized till it is no longer possible for any one individual even to know their entire discipline.  We still need individual with deep knowledge, now more than ever.  But we also need everyone to have a breath of skills and knowledge to allow interdisciplinary collaboration, the basis of most complex problem-solving situations.  These are the famed T shaped individuals; individuals with deep knowledge, but also with the fluid capacity to work across all kinds of disciplinary and other boundaries.

7 From the Classroom to the Social Lab

As pointed out by Sumeet Moghe, it is often observed that very little important learning can be traced back to classrooms.  Learning occurs in collaborative project rooms.  Knowledge is meant for doing things and it is through doing things that we gain what we need  in terms of knowledge and capabilities.  Instead of simulations in the classroom, move to real projects in a supportive experimental social laboratory of learning.

8 From the Training of Youth to True Lifelong Learning

Schools were set up for the socialization and maturation of the youth and schools can be great things.  But for the most important learning, and this includes everyone, it will happen after graduation.  Schools are great for maturation and skill building, but institutions dedicated to helping people learn are also needed by active and engaged adults in their everyday life, and these institutions will likely look and behave much differently than our traditional ideas of schooling.

9 From a Sequenced Curriculum to Learning Wherever People Are

All people’s ability to learn is very great.  We cheat that ability when we insist on following a rote sequence to a standardized curriculum.  People will need to adapt what they know to the immediate context anyway; assist them in gaining the skills and knowledge in any context they currently find themselves.  The capabilities they gain will be deeper, more robust and it will be gained more efficiently.  Wherever it seems logically permissible, have no prerequisites.  Colleges and universities still have a large role to play in educating society, but infrastructure and learning support should always be available.

From Push to Pull: It Will Change What Education Means

Ever since I first read about the concept of post-fordism in the early 90s, I have felt that there was a new educational world taking shape; one that would have a profound effect on society.  Hagel, Brown & Davison’s The Power of Pull (2010) provides the best explanation I found yet that gives voice to and makes sense of this feeling.

The idea of pull logically grows out of the author’s conception of how the world is changing, which they call the “Big Shift”; change that is coming in three waves.

First Wave – Access –

  1. The growth of the digital infrastructure and open trade policies provide access to instant information, communication and allows economic activity and the means of production to easily flow anywhere around Thomas Friedman’s flat world.
  2. Why it is changing things – The opposite of pull is push; predicting where information and resources will be needed and pushing it out to those locations.  This is becoming a problem because:
    1. the world is changing faster than organizations are able to predict and
    2. people who have mastered the methods of pull, and are supported by the 1st wave, are able to allocate resources more effectively and efficiently.
  3. What does it mean – Organizations that continue to push in critical areas will find it increasingly difficult to compete with organizations that can reorganize around pull.

Second Wave – Attract –

  1. How do you make use of 1st wave capabilities?  Just because you can access the worlds information does not mean you can tell what’s important and how to use it.  People are the resource that helps us to interpret and make use of 1st wave capabilities, but it is a resource that can’t be predicted.  What is needed are robust networks of people in which knowledge is flowing freely enabling the ad-hock connections that make information useful.  The knowledge you need is out there, but you need a network to help you find it an form it into a useful form.
  2. Why it is changing things – More than knowledge, you need access to the knowledge flows that are at the heart of networks of people committed to solving the same problems that you are.
  3. What does it mean – The knowledge stocks you possess are depreciating rapidly and are already less valuable that the ability to tap into knowledge flows.

Third Wave – Achieve –

The wave is not yet clearly formed because it is just beginning.  Hagel et al have predicted that, as more and more organizations harness the power of pull, it will have a transformative effect on general society.

How Will Pull Change Education

The idea of “Pull” (Hagel, Brown & Davison, 2010) will change the way we orient ourselves to just about every aspect of education and learning.  Here is a list of some:

  • Leadership – Most discussions of leadership focus on how to develop individual leaders who then lead (push out change toward) other people.  Simple models of leadership risk over simplifying what is a complex, collaborative and integrative process.
  • Curriculum – Most curriculum pushes knowledge out, but what is needed is the ability to join in with robust learning networks that can attract the most valuable knowledge flows toward us.  Skills are needed, background knowledge is needed, but collaborative networking is the real source of value.
  • Educational Institutions – These bodies previously nailed down the core knowledge that professionals needed, but Hagle et al argue that today’s important knowledge flows on the edge where people are wrestling in creative spaces “with how to match unmet needs with unexploited capabilities and uncertainty” (p. 53).  Institutions need to become “platforms to amplify (the quality and diversity of) networks of social and professional relationships” (Hagel et al, p.107) and to encourage people to identify and pursue their passions. (parenthesis added).  We need institutions that can serve as creation spaces to “scaffold scalable colaboration, learning and performance improvement” (Hagel et al p. 139).
  • Being an educated person. That used to mean knowing a lot of stuff, but to pull something different is needed:
    • A disposition for exploring the new, the unexpected, and the patience and listening skills to perceive what is going on at a deeper level.
    • finding ways for people to find us and for us to find relevant others,
    • relationship skills for deepening our networks,
    • a comfort level for living on the creative edge.

If anyone reads this and thinks of more, or disagrees, please comment and thanks!

    Professional Networks as Learning Platforms: A Idea for Lifelong Learning

    Two related ideas, one on learning in educational settings and one for learning in business.

    1. Learning in educational settings should only be considered successful if you both learn how to learn and if you are provided with the resources to learn into the future.  Most post secondary education is organized around courses that have a beginning and an end with a bounded set of knowledge, but this does not square with the idea of lifelong learning and with the learning demands modern society places upon us.  Society is still set up so that first you learn to do and then you are expected to go forth and do, but we are understanding more and more how doing and learning are inexplicability bounded together with one another.  It seems to me that courses should end not with an examination, but with a path forward that points out what you don’t yet know and an introduction to a society where that learning can take place.  A degree should not give you a bounded set of knowledge, but with an introduction to the flexible outlines of a path and the means to pursue that path.

    2. Knowledge is more distributed than we have ever acknowledged and knowledge networks are a key in knowledge development.  Business once developed around the idea of a cooperative advantage that comes from locking up and exploiting resources including people and knowledge.  Knowledge’s half life continues to stink daily and I’m not sure that the super smart people really ever existed beyond the hype.  Today’s  business imperative is learning and to do that you must be tapped into broad knowledge and idea flows that only exist in networks.  It’s the idea that we are all smarter together than anyone of us individually and we can actualize this intelligence through networks.  We are not talking mobs and mob mentality, but we are talking networks where the nodes are smart people full of knowledge, ideas and experience.

    These ideas are related in this way; if we want our students to have a next generation education, it will require that we put them on a path for lifelong learning, not through courses that never stop, but through learning that is embedded in everyday activities.  That takes a different type of resource then we find in the university system.  The closest thing we have to that resource are professional networks that are set up to function as learning platforms.

    Doing Development in the Workforce: the Integration of Talent, Organization and Economic Development

    I believe that workplace and adult learning is the intellectual location where society can focus in making the largest functional gains for society development and economic progress.  It’s not that K-16 and graduate education are not important, it’s just that tradition learning institutions have received the bulk of study, while workplace learning has been relatively ignored.  First, I’m perceiving that the terms and definitions of workplace learning are not clear or well defined.  Training, talent development, human resource management, knowledge management, organizational learning, organizational development, etc. . .; individually these areas tend to be ill-defined and together contain many overlapping and duplicate commitments.  Understanding what’s going on requires looking more at the goals of specific actions rather than understanding the terms that are given.

    For me, this is the beginning a research project to try to better understand this general area as a personal development project for 2010.  Initial ideas and biases that I’m bringing to this project will constitute initial posts.

    Development – I’m going to focus on development as an over-riding term to understand this area, which I will define as the cognitive, intellectual, moral or social aspects of people and their contexts as they come to perceive, understand, and act in ways that change or expand the scope or complexity of their function in specific contexts over time.  Note the highlighted people and their contexts above.  Action or behavior is a function of people and their contexts and it’s generally useless to try to separate where the effects of people start and the effects of contexts end.  The development any organism is always directed toward it’s environment and, functionally, the organizism is the development of the environment is just as critical as the development of the organism. The function of a person is structurally linked to the environment.  Developing talent in any organization must also be accompanied by development in the organization.  If one person is to develop by increasing the complexity in which they are able to function, than the organization (i.e. other people) must also develop to handle that increasing complexity.  For instance, there is no principled disjunction between talent development and organizational development; they must proceed hand-in-hand.  This is clearly supported by Barab and Plucker (2002) who draw on ecological psychology, situated cognition, distributed cognition, activity theory, and legitimate peripheral participation to support this idea.  From a common sense perspective you can understand that when an employee who is able to respond to his environment with more adapted complex ways, the organization must also respond to and understand this new level of complexity too.  Since an organization is structured by its relationships (Maturana & Verela, 1992), changing the relationships changes the organization.  Individual learning must also be accompanied by team learning and any individual than learns must be responsible for passing this along to his team and to the organization.  Individual development, team development and organizational development must be one integrated process.

    Next up I hope to explore the phrase “All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing” (Maturana & Verela, 1992, p. 27)

    References

    Barab, S.A. & Plucker, J.A., (2002).  Smart People or Smart Contexts? Cognition, Ability, Talent Development in an Age of Situated Approaches to Knowing and Learning, Educational Psychologists, 37(3), 165-182.

    Maturana, H.R. & Varela, F.J. (1992). The Tree of Knowledge: THe Biological Roots of Human Understanding, Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications Inc.

    Philweb, The Human Being: Definitions: Developmental Psychology; http://www.phillwebb.net/topics/human/HumanDef.htm