Tony Korten's Ideas on Learning

• Organizational Learning by Rolf Marvin Bøe Lindgren, 10/19/97
  
  

I asked Tony Kortens if he had a response to your posting. He took some time from completing his dissertation to send me the following reply. Hope it helps. Charlie Seashore

Hi Rolf,

Here are my thoughts - which may be useful to you or not. Firstly I agree with you as to the limitations of the psychological definition of "learning" when we attempt to conceptualize and engender the practice of systemic learning in a system like an organization.

Some of the key issues - at least to me rest around whether "learning" is a mentalistic activity done alone or a social activity that is done - as you comment by enacting with other people and the world. This constitutes a stress on the intersubjectivity of learning as proposed by the Institute for Research on Learning which you can reference at irl.org.

Some quick bullets that have helped me make my own sense of your questions before I run out of time - amongst many other studies the folks at IRL did a very fine grained analysis of two children watching a computer mathematics program running. How the two children "learnt" to solve the problems was by iteratively co-constructing a story that led to their success in acheiving the task - thereby leading to the the stable change in behavior that you mention.

So if "learning" is about stories and the co-construction of stories we are allowed the opportunity to take a social constructionist perspective. Briggitte Jordan is helpful here - saying from her studies of "learning" midwifery around the world that becoming a midwife is about learning the stories of midwifery AND most critically, knowing when and how to use them. It is this second part that really distinguishes this "view' of "learning' from the psychological definition you proffer. It means we go from the lab showing a stable change of behavior in a controlled context to showing how the enactment process with the world and other people is the really defining act of the learning process. this is supported by the recent studies suggesting that learning in organizations is at least 70% informal ... IRL assumes that learning is about becoming an insider, a process that requires both legitimacy and peripherality (Lave & Wenger). Learning as becoming an insider is about joining communities of practice, which are emergent, informal groups of people linked by their common practice.

So I agree with you that OL has been presented in a very instrumental fashion i.e. within a context of application, - mostly problem solving and this has a somewhat limiting effect see Nicolini and Mezner (1995) in Human Relations for an explication of this.

With regard to your comments that "and it's actually the same for double-loop learning. if a bunch of engineers suddenly decides to question the basic assumptions of a project and redesign it according to a re-evaluation of the goals and the initial assumptions of the team, nobody needs to have learnt anything: all can be accomplished by using old knowledge" I have the following thoughts.

What is "old knowledge?" Weick would suggest there is none - all knowledge is historical (see Sensemaking 1995, Sage) and we make sense retrospectively. For me, double loop learning is represented by the difference between telling an old story with some situational edits and building a new story as a result of critically examining the story inputs (rarely happens of course). The new story allows ivergence, exploration of new "behaviors" new opportunities and contexts for the story to be told and how it will be told. Again - I push the "test" of learning out to the social context, where I believe it is most beneficial.

Next you ask "if single-loop and double-loop learning is the organization, not the individual changing behavior, then I see that those may be valid metaphors of learning as organization, and if that's all there is to it, then thay may lessen my current state of confusion. maybe. To pose a question: are single-loop and double-loop learning metaphors of individual learning, or learning in organizations, or an organization learning?

I suggest from what I have written above that it can be all three - depending on the context. For example, I could learn individually by writing this story to you, (especially if you responded and we actively built a some shared meaning/s) (I would do so as a member of community of practice with Charlie Seashore) or this story could represent a part of the continued co-construction of a story on behavior net with others, i.e. learning in an org called behavior net . Or it could be (part of) a story that is told at a behavior net management team meeting used to create some change in the organization (i.e. org learning). As such this view aligns with the recursive (or nested idea/s) of us living and learning within all these levels of the system we are interacting within.

I hope this is at least somewhat helpful and the very best with your writing, Rolf.

Tony Kortens ****************************** Tony Kortens Practitioner tkortens@silcon.com

Action and Learning in Organizations Ph/fax (510) 939 4177 ******************************

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