The "shared vision"
is a familiar concept in corporate leadership. Peter F. Drucker
in his Innovation and Entrepreneurship states: "Just
as management has become the specific organ of all contemporary
institutions (...) so innovation and entrepreneurship have to
become an integral life sustaining activity in our organizations,
our economy, our society." But quite often in the corporate
world, it is a "vision" by one person, or a very select
group in an organization; such visions command compliance, not
commitment!
Peter M. Senge , in his The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice
of the Learning Organization has given the shared vision concept
its full weight and importance in any learning organization. The
shared vision must be well articulated, thoroughly understood
and those called upon to share it, have to be involved somehow
in the process of defining it. A "shared vision" is
a force in people's heart, a force of impressive power. It is
vital for learning organizations because it provides the focus
and energy for learning.
One of the first steps and a way to build a shared approach would
be to tie it to the development of a personal vision: it is the
ability to focus on ultimate intrinsic desires; a way to know
oneself intimately. Personal mastery must be a discipline, it
is a process of continually focusing and refocusing on what one
truly wants, on one's vision of oneself. People with high levels
of personal mastery aim at the desired result "itself",
not the process or the means they assume necessary to achieve
that result. A useful starting exercise for learning how to focus
more clearly on desired results is to take any particular aspect
of one's vision (of the 21st Century learner, for instance), you
will likely then discover "deeper desires" lying behind
the goal and this will entice the responsiveness of the subconscious
to a clear focus. People with high levels of personal mastery
do not set out to integrate reason and intuition, they achieve
it naturally.
Team learning discipline which of course gathers much of its strength
from the progress made at the personal vision level, involves
mastering the practices of dialogue and discussion of the two
distinct ways that teams converse. The physician and social critic,
David Bohm advances the notion that the theory and practice of
dialogue represent a unique synthesis of the major intellectual
currents underlying all actions; Bohm's most distinctive contribution
stems from seeing "thought" as largely a collective
phenomenon. Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall (1994) in The Quantum
Society: Mind, Physics and a New Social Vision expressed similar
views.
Team skills are more challenging to develop than individual skills.
Two distinct "practice fields" are developing. The first
involves practicing dialogue, so that a team can begin to develop
its joint skill in fostering a team IQ that exceeds individual
IQ's. The second involves creating "learning laboratories"
and "microworlds", computer-supported environments where
team learning confronts the dynamics of complex business realities
with a language designed for simple, static problems.
May 1996