I'm tired, as usual. I spent the afternoon at a doctor's appointment and then moseying around nearby. Since I didn't get lunch before leaving home I decided before I left to eat out. But I could only find one place in the strip mall that was open for lunch. It was more than I intended to spend and wasn't all that great. But then I went to Marshall's next door and found a wide-brimmed hat that will be good for sun protection, especially since I'm fair skinned. I also bought a replacement for the container I use to make my stevia tea to sweeten my oatmeal. I slept for about half an hour when I returned home.
The doctor I saw today works out of the same office as my rheumatologist, who wants me to switch to having physical therapy at their office, so I got that set up today. But I'll have a whole week without physical therapy, so I had better start doing more self-directed physical therapy. Tomorrow I don't have any appointments, so I'll make that a priority.
Now I'm waiting for my dinner to finish cooking, but it's late and I haven't had my dinner meds either. I thought I'd finish the phyllo package I got for the vegetable strudel I made a couple weeks ago, but there's still enough for something else left. I'm making a spinach tart, which is seasoned with chives, basil and oregano from my garden. I like it when I can use the herbs.
***
I was going to say more about my family, but I decided not to. I do need to get back to the Greek tragedy issue though. There's more I want to say about that.
But that will have to wait for another time. For now, let's return to the text.
***
"The most productive learning usually occurs when managers combine skills in advocacy and inquiry. Another way to say this is 'reciprocal inquiry.' By this we mean that everyone makes his or her thinking explicit and subject to public examination. This creates an atmosphere of genuine vulnerability. No on is hiding the evidence or reasoning behind his views - advancing them without making them open to scrutiny." (p. 9)
Here we're hitting pretty close to adult education, which is one of my professions. However, this is all wrong for the Vienna mission context, which shouldn't come as too much of a surprise at this juncture of the game. Ultimately, Senge hopes to advance organizational learning, but here he's only dealing with one part of it (albeit probably not an incidental one), so I'm not sure it comes across as organizational learning. But I think it is, because the back and forth he's talking about would affect all parties involved and lead to (individual and collective) learning that could be translated into some kind of organizational change, depending on what the issue being debated is.
However, the Vienna mission was not very interested in organizational learning. Any organizational learning that was going to happen was going to happen on their terms, and their terms only. My experience with them gives me reason to be pretty sure about this.
If there was going to be any learning done, I was the one that was supposed to be learning. So in this way, it was very one way. Now I suppose that this is not unusual in a socialization context, but it felt that that was the way it was pretty much always going to be. Of course, it would depend on the issue too. Some issues would have been pretty much untouchable, such as those involving basic values and ideological underpinnings for the way they operated. If you didn't agree with those things you really just didn't belong there, because these kinds of things were nonnegotiable.
Yet every organization has some of these issues that aren't up for discussion. But in looking back over my life, I think the Vienna mission is the only organization I've ever worked for that I so disagreed with their values (the values that allowed to function in ways I disagreed with on biblical grounds). This seems strange, considering we otherwise didn't have any issues regarding theology or mission strategy (meaning the most effective way to have an impact in that part of the world, namely, via leadership training).
In any event, I can't imagine how either I or the mission might have made "his or her thinking explicit and subject to public examination." And any vulnerability was only going to be mine. And not only did the mission not make their views "open to scrutiny", they weren't even going to explicitly express their views. I expect they'd deny this, but I don't believe it. If they want to formulate a public expression of their view, they would also have to answer all my questions about my time there.
The mission really wasn't, I don't think, a learning organization. Leadership decided something and funneled it down the appropriate channels. I'm talking about anything of any consequence. In that way it was bureaucratic in nature. I wouldn't be surprised that if the mission changed following the regime changes in Eastern Europe, that change was also top-down in nature. It's not as if they would have been likely to have instigated cooperative management techniques, or democratic study groups to propose organizational change options to the administration, or discussion as Senge described here would suddenly happen.
***
"When operating in pure advocacy, the goal is to win the argument. When inquiry and advocacy are combined, the goal is no longer winning, but rather finding the best argument." (p. 10)
I have to admit here that I was as guilty of this as I perceived the mission leadership to be. I wasn't open to changing my views. Probably the only way I could have given in was if the mission explained to me, in a very credible way, that I was mistaken in my understanding of what was happening. Then they would have had to have stopped trying to stuff me in a square hole I didn't fit in (i.e., making my whole life revolve around me being a secretary). But this is all speculation because it didn't happen this way and as far as I'm concerned I had no indication that anything at all close to it was possible.
***
"... [W]hen both advocacy and inquiry are high, we are open to disconfirming data as well as confirming data - because we are genuinely interested in finding flaws in our views." (p. 10)
I think the only thing I would have been open to is if they offered another credible explanation, other than my interpretation, for what was happening and why, and their explanation would have to still fit within my value structure, because I wasn't open to change in that regard. The mission probably would have been open to changing their understanding of me, but that doesn't mean they'd use that knowledge in a way that would be acceptable to me, and my doubts about their use of such information kept me from being more open with them.
***
"The ideal of combining inquiry and advocacy is challenging. It can be especially difficult if you work in a highly political organization that is not open to genuine inquiry." (p. 10)
I think Senge means "political" here to refer to office politics, but in the Vienna mission the other meaning of political is probably more apt, and it was a significant barrier to "genuine inquiry." Since the mission was more or less built around the idea of segmented knowledge and information for the sake of security, and members soon learned the art of being security conscious without seeming to be, so it would be second nature to not inquire too much about others' work. In this sense the mission could know everything about the individual, but the individual was trained to respect organizational secrets. In this respect, the debate between mission and individual was never going to be truly open.
***
"...[T]he true practice of inquiry and advocacy means being willing to expose the limitations in your own thinking - the willingness to be wrong. Nothing less will make it safe for others to do likewise." (p. 44)
Since the mission organization was the 10 ton elephant in the room and had the most secrets to hide, as well as the weight behind it to affect the the individual mouse opponent, the organization would have had to be the one to be "willing to expose the limitations in [their] own thinking - the willingness to be wrong" before any open debate could occur. If they let down their guard than maybe I could too, but if I let down my guard I was at their mercy and would have to believe that they only had benevolent (how I defined benevolent, not how they defined it) intentions towards me before I could open up and be straight with them. They didn't initiate the process by opening up and I didn't ever become convinced that they had only benevolent intentions towards me, so we remained at a stalemate in that manner the whole 2 years of my time with them, although there were twists and turns during that experience.
***
This ends this text, so next time I'll pick another one. Good night.
~ Meg
