CorporateCoach eNewsletter
Issue No. 47, 23rd February 2004
CONTENTS
- Editorial: Great leaps of learning
- Coaching notes: The blue tit and the milk bottle
1. Editorial: Great leaps of learning
 Just
imagine a world in which you would grow up in a permanent struggle for survival,
have lots of children and, when your children are off your hands, die exhausted.
Then imagine a world in which you grew up, had children and, when your children
were off your hands, had energy and life for another ten or twenty years. Not
only you, but your friends too.
In the second scenario you might spend time thinking about the world and your
experience. You might discuss it with your friends. You might make discoveries
or develop new ideas. Longevity and leisure contribute to learning.
Just imagine a world in which you never stray more than ten miles from your
own village. Then imagine a world in which people are able to travel around
their own country and some people even to travel across continents. Knowledge
and ideas travel with them.
Just imagine a world in which knowledge was recorded and transmitted by monks
copying books by hand with a quill pen. Then consider the invention of the printing
press. Many copies of any text can be manufactured and passed to others.
Consider the impact of mass communication, mass travel and satellite broadcasting.
Knowledge is let loose and information and ideas can permeate all corners of
the world.
Just imagine a world in which regions and nations have their own language.
Then imagine a world in which one language becomes dominant.
Now think of the world that we live in. English is spoken widely across the
planet and the Internet not only makes knowledge available to anyone but introduces
powerful search facilities, e-mail, newsletters and discussion groups. Now ideas
can travel instantly and can be developed dynamically as they travel around
the world.
We live at an exciting time. We are living longer, travelling more. We are
healthier and wealthier. We have access to unprecedented communications. Knowledge
is set free of institutional controls and we can learn for ourselves.
We have seen many changes and developments as a direct result of developments
in IT and the Internet. But the greatest changes we have yet meet. For we live
at one of the critical stages in history when changes in the political, social
and technical environments lead to a great leap of learning.
But, a warning. Such times have occurred before. If we look back on great civilisations
of the past like Rome and China and India, the Aztecs, we realise that not only
have these civilisations disappeared, but civilisation itself, and knowledge,
have disappeared with them. It seems impossible that knowledge can die. But
it did.
As a member of the CorporateCoach community, I guess you too are committed
to learning and development. The example that we set will influence each of
the other communities we touch.
May we all be custodians of knowledge and the practice of learning. May we
ensure that the organisations we work in are learning organisations.
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2. Coaching notes: The blue tit and the milk bottle
The United Kingdom has a long standing system of delivering milk in bottles
to the door. At the beginning of the 20th century these milk bottles had no
top. Birds had easy access to the cream which settled in the top of the bottle.
Two different species of British garden birds, the blue tits and red robins,
learned to siphon up cream from the bottles and tap this new, rich food source.
This innovation, in itself, was already quite an achievement. But it also
had an evolutionary effect. The cream was much richer than the usual food sources
of these birds, and the two species underwent some adaptation of their digestive
systems to cope with the unusual nutrients. This internal adaptation almost
certainly took place through Darwinian selection.
Then, between the two world wars, the UK dairy distributors closed access
to the food source by placing aluminium seals on their bottles.
By the early 1950's the entire blue tit population of the UK, about a million
birds, had learned how to pierce the aluminium seals. Regaining access to this
rich food source provided an important victory for the blue tit family as a
whole; it gave them an advantage in the battle for survival. Conversely, the
robins, as a family, never regained access to the cream. Occasionally, an individual
robin learns how to pierce the seals of the milk bottle. But the knowledge never
passes to the rest of the species.
In short, the blue tits went through an extraordinarily successful institutional
learning process. The robins failed, even though individual robins had been
as innovative as individual blue tits. Moreover, the difference could not be
attributed to their ability to communicate. As songbirds, both the blue tits
and the robins had the same wide range of means of communication: colour, behaviour,
movements, and song. The explanation could be found only in the social propagation
process: the way blue tits spread their skill from one individual to members
of the species as a whole.
In spring, the blue tits live in couples until they have reared their young.
By early summer, when the young blue tits are flying and feeding on their own,
we see birds moving from garden to garden in flocks of eight to ten individuals.
These flocks seem to remain intact, moving together around the countryside,
and the period of mobility lasts for two to three months.
Robins, by contrast, are territorial birds. A male robin will not allow another
male to enter its territory. When threatened, the robin sends a warning, as
if to say "Keep the hell out of here." In general, red robins tend
to communicate with each other in an antagonistic manner, with fixed boundaries
that they do not cross.
Birds that flock, seem to learn faster. They increase their chances to survive
and evolve more quickly.
Arie de Geus, The Living Company, Nicholas Brealey
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We aim to make the Brefi Group web site the premier developmental site for
teams and individuals in organisations, so do please send us your suggestions
and requests for further development. And let us know what you think of this newsletter,
and comment on the content.
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Brefi Group is a change management organisation that provides corporate coaching,
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We hope you enjoyed this issue of CorporateCoach. If you would like
to learn more about how we can work together, then please contact me, Richard
Winfield:
Telephone: 08450 678 222, or +44 (0) 121 704 2006 (international)
E-mail: editor@brefigroup.co.uk
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