The term Human Learning Systems covers every kind of Learning Organisation from small teams to whole societies, taking businesses, political parties, social movements, public services, governments, along the way.
Although many people have made and are making important contributions to our understanding of Human Learning Systems, two names stand out: Chris Argyris and Donald Shon (or Shön). In this brief introduction it is possible merely to sketch the broad outlines of why their work is so important to the task of kicking command and control leadership.
Donald Schon began thinking about how we learn individually and collectively in the 1960s. At the core of his thinking was the need for us to recognise that we can longer think of our states and societies as “stable”. As he put it in “Beyond the Stable State”
“our society and all of its institutions are in continuous processes of transformation. We cannot expect new stable states that will endure for our own lifetimes.
(Consequently)
We must become able not only to transform our institutions, in response to changing situations and requirements; we must invent and develop institutions which are ‘learning systems’, that is to say, systems capable of bringing about their own continuing transformation.
...the loss of the stable state makes imperative, for the person, for our institutions, for our society as a whole,.. to learn about learning.
Time has proved that Schon was right about our societies being in a continuous process of transformation. At the same time, he insisted that,
Our systems need to maintain their identity, and their ability to support the self-identity of those who belong to them, but they must at the same time be capable of transforming themselves.
The questions he posed are desperately important today:
What is the nature of the process by which organizations, institutions and societies transform themselves?
What are the characteristics of effective learning systems?
What are the forms and limits of knowledge that can operate within processes of social learning?
What demands are made on a person who engages in this kind of learning?
The questions connect to kicking command and control leadership via Schon's insistence that the governing values of an effective Learning Systems should include:
Valid information
Free and informed choice
Internal commitment
Using strategies of:
Sharing control
Participation in design and implementation of action
Operationalized by:
Attribution and evaluation using relatively directly observable data
Surfacing conflicting view
Encouraging public testing of evaluations
Leading to:
Minimally defensive relationships
High freedom of choice
Increased likelihood of double-loop learning (see KEY CONCEPTS)
These headings describe the key features of what Argyris & Schön called a Model 2 Learning System. Model 2 systems require leaders and managers who are “Reflective”
Reflective leaders
- become researchers into their own practice, and channel their private inquiries into the growing body of reflective science.
- Continually interrogate their ways of framing their roles and their problematic situations, the way in which they build and use their repertoire of images and exemplars, the models of the world which underlie their behaviours, the processes in which they shape and interpret experiments, and the ways in which their private inquiries interast with the Learning Systems of which they are members.
This is not how Command and Control leaders think and behave. Their governing values and behaviours fit what Argyris & Schön called a Model 1 system: viz, they seek to
Achieve the purpose as the actor defines it
Win, do not lose
Suppress negative feelings
Emphasize rationality
Use Primary Strategies that:
Control environment and task unilaterally
Protect self and others unilaterally
Via:
Unillustrated attributions and evaluations e.g.. "You seem unmotivated"
Advocating courses of action which discourage inquiry e.g.. "Lets not talk about the past, that's over."
Treating ones' own views as obviously correct
Making covert attributions and evaluations
Face-saving moves such as leaving potentially embarrassing facts unstated
Leading to:
Defensive relationships
Low freedom of choice
Reduced production of valid information
Little public testing of ideas
Model 1 ways of thinking and acting lie behind the often disastrous attempts by would-be modernising and even notionally left-wing political leaders to tackle the social, economic, security and ecological threats that confront our societies in the start of the 21st century. They often mean well but they just do not understand that their Model 1 thinking is simply incapable of leading the learning processes through which our societies could engage in the transformational processes we need.
Reading Argyris and Shon it is clear that the more we think about and discuss the negative impact of Command and Control Leaders on the emergence of Human Learning Systems, the more shades of grey we are likely to discover. For the moment, however, the either-or models that they developed and refined are an invaluable starting point for our dialogues. Broadly, they tell us that if our societies are to become capable of purposefully transforming themselves to meet the complex socio-security-economic-ecological threats we face, our leaders have to leave behind their Command and Control conditioning and become more and more Reflective.
