L16- Concepts Can Block Learning

“From the moment you teach a child the word ‘tree’ he can no longer fully experience a tree” said Anthony De Mello from India.

Concepts are fine tools for organizing and communicating our experiences of the world. Concepts and mental models also enable us to recognize what otherwise we hardly notice. Mental models are just that: models of reality. But if concepts become rigid beliefs or we equate them with reality itself, then concepts can imprison our thinking. If we invest our ego in our concepts, they become our “pet concepts” or “pet theories” and close our mind to other or new theories. We stop testing concepts against our experience and the experiences of other people. And we cease to learn. I wrote a blog on “We found the enemy: our own concepts!”

Religious and political concepts can possess and control minds. As a matter of survival, religious and political institutions preserve concepts (e.g. doctrines and beliefs) and impose sanctions on its members against thinking freely and challenging those concepts. As a result, it takes years, decades or even centuries to unlearn concepts that no longer work. Theological concepts can control our thinking and block achievement of the very purpose and essence of religion. De Mello also said,

“The final barrier to your vision of God is your God-concept. You miss God because you think you know.”

In a doctoral defense by a graduate student at the Asian Social Institute, I sat in the faculty panel which included a monsignor (a rank between priest and bishop). At some point in the defense proceedings I pointed to the difference between “God as a concept” and “God as personal experience”. The monsignor’s subsequent remarks revealed to me his surprise at recognizing the difference seemingly for the first time.

A learning conversation is possible when people talk about their experiences, but unlikely among people attached to their respective concepts. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn edited such a learning conversation on “Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue”. Mystical union is a personal experience of God; which is different from theological concepts of God. Do you think a learning conversation is equally possible between a Jewish theologian, a Christian theologian and a Muslim theologian?

Working with mental models is one of the five disciplines of a learning organization, according to guru Peter Senge. Below is a slide from one of my presentations on organizational learning, which lists some skills in working with our own mental models.

Staying too long in a professional area of practice or in an academic discipline or in a type of work poses the danger of being stuck with the concepts in that area or type of work. One way of continuously refreshing one’s repertoire of concepts is to shift or learn a completely new area of professional practice.

It worked for me…several times.

After a bachelor’s degree in physics, I took an M.S. and Ph.D. in physical biology. The new concepts in the life sciences were completely new and different from those of the physical sciences and mathematics. After I earned my doctoral degree I practiced through consulting in environmental management, which added the human and social dimensions. Afterwards, I accepted a position in policy studies in a university think tank, which introduced me to governance and equipped me to later accept an appointment in the Philippine government as Assistant Director General for Policy of a government body that directly provides analysis and policy advice to the Philippine President. For seven years I was immersed in the real world of politics and governance. What a change! In shifting from the academe to government, the learning opportunities opened before me were literally vast! When I went back to the academe, my interests went to development and non-government organizations. I co-founded CCLFI, a non-profit foundation for organizational learning and change, knowledge management (KM) and knowledge-based development. That was 13 years ago [as of August 2011], when I practically started KM in the Philippines and at the University of the Philippines. What a learning journey!

I learned to:

• Shift my area of professional practice several times, thus preventing me from being stuck on the concepts of one area;
• Compare, cross-fertilize and synergize concepts of one discipline with those of another;
• See that different principles from two or more disciplines are actually the same principle, e.g. the Weber-Fechner law in psychology is essentially the same principle as the law of diminishing marginal utility in economics, and the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics is parallel to Hawthorne effect in sociology;
• Integrate knowledge across disciplines, e.g. see the different forms of capital across economics, ecology, psychology, organizational development, law, political science, etc. and call them “metacapital”; and
• Discern trans-disciplinal patterns, e.g. trans-societal Megatrends #1 (see blog Q14) and Megatrend #2 (see blog Q26), or “connect the dots” across seemingly unrelated facts, e.g. the growing importance of intangibles (see blog F2).

Cheers!

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A Tool for Learning to Unlearn: Internal “5 Why’s”

Discovering root causes is important in problem solving. A tool in identifying root causes is “5 Why’s.” It is used in TQM, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma and other process improvement methods where the causes sought are often technical, procedural, systemic and other external causes.

If “5 Why’s” is used for eliciting root causes of a particular human behavior, then it becomes a tool in double-loop learning. Let us illustrate how to apply “5 Why’s” in internal double-loop learning.

Let us imagine that a quality management problem occurred and it was found out that the immediate cause was a person’s failure to perform a specific action assigned to him. The following is an illustration of the method.

Why 1: Why did you not do action X?
Answer1: I don’t know how to do it.
Clarificatory question: When did you discover that you don’t know how to do it?
Answer: Much earlier.

Why 2: Why did you accept the assignment when you know you cannot do it?
Answer: (pause) I cannot bring myself to say that I am not sure I can do it.

Why 3: Why can’t you tell frankly you cannot do it in the first place?
Answer (more likely to be elicited in a private conversation with a trusted colleague): I want to appear that I know; I don’t want to appear that I am stupid.
Clarificatory question: Do you find yourself in this situation often?
Answer (after some pause): I guess so, yes.

Why 4: Why do you keep putting yourself in this situation, only to create more trouble for yourself when you yourself know that it often ends up that you are unable to do your assignments?
Answer (elicited only after the person sees his own pattern of behavior): I really don’t know; it just keeps happening.

Why 5: Please recall many similar situations in the past, even as far back as your childhood. Study these situations. What do you see or discover?
Answer (after several days or weeks of recall and reflection): I remember I was so hurt and humiliated and afraid when my mother kept scolding me saying “You are really very stupid and incompetent” every time I cannot do something. I just avoided those feelings next times by not saying anything.

I offer the following observations in relation to the above.

1. If a BPI team has not established a trustful culture of learning, the team cannot go past Why 1 or Why 2 because the first questions will trigger defensive reactions, rationalizations or even debate that will fail to get at the root causes.
2. According to Harvard Professor Chris Argyris, BPI cannot really get at many root causes unless individual team members are willing to delve into why they keep on doing what they do or why they keep not doing what they don’t do (Why 2 and Why 3 and up). Argyris calls this “double-loop learning” which he said requires deliberate effort because often people are not aware of the reasons behind their own patterns of behavior.
3. Deeper levels of “why” (Why 3 and up) require time (it cannot be rushed), a trusting atmosphere (it depends on WHO is asking) and a private or one-on-one situations (it depends on a supportive context). It also requires skills of “conscious living” on the person asking the question and candid reflection on the person answering.
4. Self-discovery at Why 5 can be cathartic and lead to effective self-healing of the automatic behavior pattern. In the specific example above, it also requires a strong enough foundation of self-esteem to be able to get to acknowledge deep-seated emotional hurts unearthed by Why 5.
5. The ability to unlearn is an extremely rare skill. A knowledge worker who, through practice, can go deep at Why 4 and Why 5 levels is better able to unlearn.

Listen to Lao-tse:

“He who knows much about others may be learned, but he who understands himself is more intelligent. He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.”

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The Reflective Knowledge Worker

If self-reflection (or similar internal listening skills; see my last blog post on “Learning How to Learn”) is a key to successful business leadership, then self-reflection is also a key to success for knowledge workers.

• Productivity is improved by technology and by management tools such as the Deming cycle, TQM and KM, but — according to Chris Argyris — the limits or envelope of productivity can be pushed even further by double-loop learning which requires the skill of self-feedback (see blog posts “D17- Single-Loop Learning versus Double-Loop Learning” and “Practice Internal Double-Loop Learning”)
• The “Ultimate Warrior” is the soldier that possesses both technological mastery and self mastery (see blog post “Q10- “Power of the Third Kind” for Political Conflicts”)
• According to learning organization guru Peter Senge, two of the five disciplines in organizational learning are personal mastery and mental models. Both require internal listening skills. Senge and his colleagues had developed tools for explicit group management of tacit individual thinking processes, such as “left-hand column,” “ladder of inference,” systems dynamics diagrams, etc. Tools for dialogue developed by Senge’s student, William Isaacs, similarly require the skill of reflection (see blog post “D19- Debate versus Discussion versus Dialogue”)
• Personal KM is at the foundation of effective organizational KM (see blog post “Can We Manage Knowledge?”) and personal KM requires internal listening (see “Learning how to learn”)
• Unlearning is a difficult skill that depends on awareness of one’s assumptions and mental models. Mankind’s track record in unlearning is dismal: it takes decades for people to unlearn paradigms that no longer work for them (see “Q8- Wanted: Workable Tools for Voluntary Paradigm Shifting”)

What is the first practical step in learning self-reflection? From my experience, the doorway to learning internal listening skills is conscious moment-to-moment control of attention.

Practice it now. As you read these words, your attention is on the computer screen. If a phone rings now, your attention will be diverted to the telephone and to what the caller is saying. After the call, you revert your attention to reading this blog post starting from where you left off.

All of these are externally-focused and externally-driven attention. As much as 99% of our attention at the workplace is external.

Practice being also aware of how your mind is responding to what you are reading now. Is there agreement, or doubt? Does your mind shoot off on something you remember that is related to what you just read? Is your mind now making a silent internal conversation stemming from the ideas expressed here? Are you noticing any discomfort triggered by a word or phrase? Is your interest level moving up or down?

It all starts by your decision to consciously control where you focus your attention. There are times when your mind — without your conscious control or decision — shoots off in a different direction while you are attending, say, a meeting. In each such occasion of absent-mindedness you miss what is being said for several seconds.

The mind — the prime tool and asset of knowledge workers — is often like a poorly-tamed horse that literally gets off-track every now and then. And worse, the horse rider (=we) fails to notice this most of the time! Control of the horse begins with conscious attention: the horse rider must direct his attention on his horse consciously and every moment along the way.

The knowledge worker depends very much on his horse; therefore he must be a constantly alert horse rider.

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Q24- KM and Power: Constant(?) Bed Fellows

When two persons of unequal power, authority or influence interact, the result is different from those described in my previous blog post (“12 Types of Learning”):

KNOWLEDGE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN TWO PERSONS OF UNEQUAL POWER

The root causes of human behavior lie in past experiences (extreme left box in the diagram). Therefore the most effective (or most insidious) method of controlling human behavior over the long term is through training (from earliest childhood) and religious or political indoctrination. The social nature of knowledge implies that groupthink and imposed visions and values are the next most effective mechanisms. “Carrot and stick” (or rewards and punishments) methods achieve shorter-term results.

Power differentials exist everywhere. You see this dynamics as it occurs every day between boss and subordinate, between parent and child, between professor and student, between government and citizens, between a person pointing a gun at another person, etc. Most likely you participate in it too, both from a superordinate position and from a subordinate position in the same day and in the same organization! We are part of the problem! I label it a “problem” because vertical dynamics are easily anti-learning.

We often do the above interaction types out of unconscious habit. If we do it to another who is our equal we appear to him as arrogant, presumptuous or disrespectful. For example, criticism triggers an equally unconscious reaction from the other person of defense, counterattack and debate that result more to mutual irritation than to mutual learning. Praise could appear as patronizing.

The terms “knowledge transfer” and “learning” hardly apply to the interactions in the above diagram, unless we stretch our common understanding of those terms to apply them to hierarchical societies such as North Korea and fundamentalist religious-military groups like Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines and Taliban in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas. What happens in these societies is a coerced or indoctrinated replication of belief systems from parent to child, and from leader to follower.

Learning hardly happens or happens slowly. We saw in Q8 (“Wanted: Workable Tools for Voluntary Paradigm Shifting”) that in vertical or hierarchical societies, learning is extremely slow. Below I reproduce the table from Q8. Notice from the table that two factors result to mankind’s very long Unlearning Cycles: (1) institutionalized vested interests and/or (2) institutionalized rules to prevent people from thinking freely.

In real-world organizations, the knowledge dynamics is often a mix of KM-across-power-differentials and KM-across-equals, or what we can call vertical KM and horizontal KM. Leadership and culture affect this mix from organization to organization. Even in development-oriented organizations, this mix shows up clearly in how projects are evaluated. I wrote about the difference between vertical learning and horizontal learning, or between conventional project evaluation and post-project knowledge capture including lessons-learned sessions. Again, the cultural momentum and context of an organization determine how the mix is tilted between vertical and horizontal dynamics:

The challenge is how to develop perspectives and effective tools for conscious shifting of the mix away from vertical towards more of horizontal dynamics. One way is by using military force to shift a nation from dictatorship to democracy, as what President Bush started by invading Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Another way is to help organizations voluntarily shift towards becoming learning organizations. In Q26 I will write about how this shift has been unconsciously but inexorably taking place over the last three centuries.

What do you think? Do you agree that we may all be participating in this problem?

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