MarcEvers and
WillemVanDenEnde hosted a play of
WarpedJuggle (from the
SystemsThinkingPlayBook at the
Society For Organisational Learning Dutch Open, a one day open space conference held at 23 September 2004 in Zeist, The Netherlands . Other participants were Arno Korpershoek, Lucilla Schaap and Steve Foster.
We started off with a brief explanation of the workshops purpose, followed by about twenty mintues of playing warped juggle. In order to not spoil fun for future participants we will not explain details of the game or the results - if you are curious, we recommend you play it yourself :-).
What did we get out of it:
- Thinking outside the box is required.
- The initial setting determines your frame of thinking
- Rules that do not exist are assumed
- Assume one interpretation of rules is the best
- Inertia principle applies - it takes time before change action for change is taken.
- Proceed with 'what we have always done'
- Until we reach the limits of the current system
- Make limits, rules, assumption and emotions topics for dialogue
- This is a justification for multi-disciplinarity and diversity. More perspectives create more varied ideas for future rules. The (unanswerable) question is: how many perspectives do we need, before we can make a decision?
- Explaining things to others (the TeddyBear effect) can make your own thoughts more understandable to yourself; posing a question can lead to answers.
- Discussing these can be made difficult by differences in metaphor, language, prejudice, assumptions, experience
- Reaching the limits can be pain- or joyful. Afterwards we had a discussion about the SatirChangeModel. The Chaos phase of this model sounds negative, but does not always need to be negative. The Chaos phase can be seen as a phase of unlearning, the Integration phase as a phase of learning.
- Is the activity we perform meaningful (e.g. how does throwing balls at this conference provide value to me, to the group and to my organisation? Do we need to continue throwing balls?). With SystemsThinking we can take our small system (e.g. our group) into consideration, as well as make sense of and influence the larger context.
- UnLearning? is letting go of current prejudices and assumptions. (this happens during the Chaos phase in the SatirChangeModel)
- We discussed about the work of Argyris, on SingleLoopLearning?, DoubleLoopLearning? and TripleLoopLearning?. SingleLoopLearning? (doing the same better) happened in this workshop when we tried to throw the balls faster, DoubleLoopLearning? (questioning assumptions)when we reflected and changed the group structure, TripleLoopLearning? (or MetaLearning?) happened in the debrief, when we reflected on the first two and discussed change models and ways of creating dialogue about change.
- Steve Foster suggests ScenarioPlanning might help. If you do scenario planning in LateStatusQuo?, you might have more than one TransformingIdea? and welcome the ForeignElement? instead of being afraid of it. It is highly unlikely any of your scenarios will play out exactly. The process will make you better prepared, and open to more than one possible outcome.
One question remained:
What can we do to break the tradition of linear thinking?
It may be to late to start with SystemsThinking when people do MBAs or when coaching them in businesses. Why not start in primary or secondary school?