Learning disabilities
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Transcript of Learning disabilities
• What if even the most successful organizations are poor learners?
They survive but never live up to their potential
• What if in light of what organizations could be, “excellence” is actually “mediocrity”
Reasons for Learning Disabilities
• The way organizations are designed and managed, the way people’s jobs are defined
• Most importantly, the way people have all been taught to think and interact create fundamental learning disabilities
• These disabilities operate despite the best effort of bright and committed people.
1 . I a m M y P o s i ti o n
• People confuse them with their own identities
• Most people describe the task they perform every day, NOT purpose of the great organization in which they take part
• Most see themselves within a system over which they have no or little influence.
Te a c h e r : Te a c h i n g S u b j e c t s .
• People do their job, put in their time, and try to cope up with the forces outside of their control
• They tend to see their responsibilities as limited to the boundaries of their position.
What is the purpose of teaching the students?
• When people focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact
• When results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why.
2 . T h e E n e m y i s O u t T h e r e• By-product of ‘I am my Position’
• We do not see how our actions extend beyond the boundary of our position
• When those actions have consequences that come back to hurt, we misperceive new problems are externally caused
• Always find an external agent to blame‘Out There’ and ‘In Here’ part of a single system
3. The Illusion of Taking Charge
Definition: Face up to difficult issues, Stop waiting for someone else to do something, and Solve problems before they grow into crisis.
Proactive X Reactive
• True Proactiveness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems.
• Proactiveness is a product of our way of thinking
P ro a c ti ve n e s s i s Re a c ti v e n e s s i n D i s g u i s e
4 . T h e F i x a ti o n o n Ev e n t s
• We are conditioned to see life as a series of events, and for every event, we think there is one obvious cause.
• Meeting are dominated by concern with events
• Focusing on events leads to “Event” explanations
Threat to survival: Slow and Gradual process
• Event explanations distract us from seeing the longer-term patterns of change that lie behind the events
• Distract from understanding the causes of those patterns
• The primary threat to our survival/society’s come not form sudden events, but from slow, gradual process.
Terrorism, environmental decay, erosion of public education system
• Focus on events- helps to predict an event before it happens – react optimally
• We can not learn to create what we want.
5. The Parable of the Boiled Frog
• Learning to see slow, gradual process requires slowing down our frenetic pace and paying attention to the subtle as well as the dramatic.
• The problem is our minds are so locked in one frequency, we can’t see anything at different frequency.
6. The Delusion of
Learning from Experience
The most powerful learning comes from Direct Experience.
L e a r n i n g H o r i z o n
• A breadth of vision in time and space within which we assess our effectiveness of our actions
• When our actions have consequences beyond our learning horizon, it becomes impossible to learn from direct experience.
L e a r n i n g D i l e m m a
• We learn from experience but never directly experience the consequences of many of our important decisions
• The most critical decisions made in organizations have systemwide consequences that stretch over years or decades
It is difficult to learn from experience,
if the consequences of our action
are in the distant future
or
in a distant part of the larger system
within which we operate
7. The Myth of the Management Team
• Team of key decision making people• Supposed to sort out the complex cross-
functional issues that are critical to the organization.
• Fails to reveal the underlying assumptions and experience
• Fails to learn as a team
• Team breaks down under pressure
• Confront complex issues that may be embarrassing or threatening
• School trains us never to admit that we do not know the answer
• We learn to protect ourselves from the pain of appearing uncertain or ignorant.
S k i l l e d - I n c o m p e t e n c e
• Teams full of people who are incredibly proficient keeping themselves from learning
• Highly skillful at protecting ourselves from pain and threat posed by learning situations.
• Because we fail to learn we remain incompetence at producing the results what we want
Leaders could not see the
consequences of their own policies,
even when they were warned in
advance that
their own survival was at stake.
Like failing organizations, most of those inside the empire
sense that ALL IS NOT QUITE RIGHTbut their instincts are to
more strongly defend their traditional way of doing things rather than to question them –
let alone develop the capacity to change those ways
From: The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the
Learning Organizationby
Peter M. SengeRandom House UK Limited
2006
