Reflections Winter 2000 [antikvár]

From the Founding EditorLast December, the field of organization development and learning lost oneof its founders and great leaders with the death of Richard Beckhard at age 81. Dick was one of my mentors and a close colleague throughout my career. He served on the board of the original MIT Organizational Learning Center, was closely allied to Innovation Associates, and was always a steady influence on many of us who today are trying to evolve the concepts and methods of organizational learning. The ability to design human processes that would make a difference is crucial to learning and change, yet is sadly lacking in some of the most talented change agents operating today. Dick was a master of designing events that produced the kinds of connections needed to make things happen.Why have we chosen "Connections" as a theme for this issue of Reflections? J.-M. Guehenno states it best in The End of the Nation-State when he notes that "power no longer consists in knowledge, but in functioning as a link between bodies of knowledge." I want to remind our readers that part of the mission of Reflections is to connect academics/researchers, consultants, and practitioner/managers with each other. Contrary to some theories, I do not view knowledge as emanating from the researcher and trickling down through the consultant to the practitioner, though it often appears that way. Each of these constituencies has a body of knowledge and know-how that tends to get entrapped in its own occupational sub-culture. And the difficulty of communicating across these subcultures is enormous because the members of each group "know" they have the truth because it works for them in their environment. Yet it is worth recounting Doug McGregor's answer when he was asked by a manager how he had ever come up with this esoteric Theory X and Theory Y stuff. His answer was that he had observed effective and ineffective managers in the field and noticed that they managed differently. He then described these differences and put a label on them, but the know-how was in the managers, not in the researcher.To return for a moment to Dick Beckhard and the role of design; he was a genius at knowing whom to bring into a room together and creating a conversation that allowed the participants to connect with each other. One of my not-so-hidden agendas for Reflections is to try to do a bit of this in the impersonal publications format. By juxtaposing articles from the different constituencies whenever we can and by stimulating commentary from the different groups, I hope we can let readers discover that members of the other groups have important things to say and contribute. The articles themselves point out how connections were crucial in making some of the changes happen that are described, so I hope that readers will be convinced after reading and browsing that Guehenno is correct in noting that power in the future will lie in connecting.