It has been recognized that a market system cannot operate effectively on the basis of narrow self-interest. In fact, there would be opportunistic behaviors on different sides with severe consequences on the informational flows and all types of interaction. Therefore, without some minimum amount of social trust and transparency, social interaction would be reduced to a tentative and distrustful commodity trades.
An implicit social contract between all parties is necessary to a market society and it cannot be simply legislated, decreed or installed by a reform government. On the contrary, some true and authentic social connection is needed to make the activities work well together with ensuring an adequate human development.
Some societies can experience more democratic and open frameworks than others, anyhow all reforms cannot simply destroy the old norms and constraints in order to clean the setting but have to allow the reconstruction of all consuming processes, norms, legislations and behaviors.
The social and organizational capital needed cannot be imposed from above but it has to start from the bottom in order to prepare good ground for a learning organization where people are called to take an active and constructive role in their self-transformation. Basically, to a large extent, they need to be the drivers.
At the same time, all contexts have to be given importance and attention; in fact other social organizations might provide a valuable contribution to the transformation process if correctly coordinated. There are local governments, unions, schools, colleges, cooperatives, mutual aid associations, professionals groups, churches, clubs and even extended families which should have a say.
Creativity and experimentation should be the order of the day to remobilize human resources and make them be more flexible, adaptable and able to face the challenges of the globalization.
A learning organization calls for experiments, not one but many, in order to see ‘what works’. This can be done through decentralization, reconstruction and then recombination. For example, an experiment can be driven by a decentralized office of a bigger organization or even by a small unit which can operate with some independency. This way risk is diversified since a bad decision by one unit does not entail the same for the others. Decentralization means vertically and, or horizontally disintegrating a large firm into separate semi-autonomous teams or profit centers within a federal structure or perhaps a split into more independent business units.
The fundamental fact is that much of the relevant knowledge is usually decentralized and sometime small units recognize the failure of central planning through having to do with the inability of the central planner to gather and disseminate relevant information equally across the firm. As a consequence, there can be an unbalanced knowledge among units, overlapped activities and even waste of resources and efforts.
The connection or loop between experiment and feedback is much tighter so the learning process can proceed apace. Real decentralization of a learning organization means that the units can now buy supplies and sell outputs, meaning also advisory and technical services, outside the firm. It also means the new units should bear the costs of their failure just as they may reap the fruits of their success. These competitive possibilities will expose vulnerabilities within the various units to induce learning and change. Thus decentralization along with benchmarking and outside competition could be seen as social learning mechanisms to drive the process of recombination and restructuring. Thus, the horizontal discussions between units should be seen not simply as a practice forum but a part of the constitutional process of rebuilding the organizational relationships from the ground up. This is the process of rebuilding social capital as well as facilitating human development within a learning organization which enhances creativity and flexibility.
You must be logged in in order to leave a comment