Shari Soza PT15 Final Exam December 13, 1995
1. Peter Senge defines five disciplines: Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Shared Vision, Team Learning, and Systemic Thinking. What attribute of each discipline is the most important, and why?
Personal Mastery
The most important attribute of Personal Mastery is keeping our mental life organized, so that our conscious awareness is at the most centered, highest level-of-consciousness.
This also implies that we learn to think with both sides of our brain. Senge says to do this by constantly redefining our goals and values, our personal vision, if you will, and also by constantly reassessing the current state of reality as it actually is, at this moment.
[ These two levels will create what Senge calls "Creative Tension", that helps perform the Time-Matrix Translation into the desired consciousness level.]
Another idea that comes to mind is that by keeping our awareness on two levels, the inner listening level, and the outer listening level, these two added together give us a larger range of octaves within which we can tune in to the higher levels of Truth.
Mental Models
The most important attribute of Mental Models is that the mental model of things is how the person perceives that thing.
We cannot understand anything without first making some kind of analogy within our mind, then making a metaphor, i.e., adding descriptive verbalizations that something IS-LIKE something else.
What this does is like cloning something inside us, and making an entry into a table. I see these things like software in a human biocomputer, especially since my background and therefore my interior symbol table, is in terms of biochemistry and of computer softare. Therefore, ideas express themselves to me thru the mental models and metaphors that I have imprinted in my mind.
A disciplined approach to creating and maintaining mental models can greatly enhance a person's control over the circumstances of his/her life.
Since I focused on Julian Jaynes and his book, The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind. I got deeper into this, and that colors my answer. My heavy focus on his world view or his key mental models, adds this flavor to what mental models I have to put forward today.
Jaynes says that the "analog" is a model of a thing, like a picture or a map. I interpret this as a use of the spatial side of the the brain, in keep a simulation of the actual thing. And the use of words to add the metaphor uses the verbal side of the brain. Making connections on both sides of the brain really helps us learn and understand.
Shared Vision
The most important attribute of Shared Vision is that by working toward a shared vision, the members of a group or team actually create an alternate reality, an alternate future, and live within it. This is a group consciousness that is a form of futurism.
It helps to understand that this is not a flat world. There are many mansions in my father's house, as a prominent avatar once said. There are many interpenetrating realities, like many different time dimensions. When a team or a group of individuals grows thru a shared visioning process, each one is not only influenced by the others, but also each one sets their sails, or sets their "thought frequencies" for these subjects [, which makes it easier to tune into these subjects within the continuum of Truths.]
Using the term Shared Vision makes it okay for the Deep Self to express its ideas, and use its deeper wisdom in order to help the person participate in this dynamic, non-stagnant process of redefining focus of attention.
Many religious teachers, usually what I perceive of as "spiritually illiterate", not really understanding what it is that they are selling, discourage us from trusting our RightBrain, our intuitive and creative imagining thoughts. Providing an environment where it is okay to listen to this RightBrain, and to trust its higher wisdom, simply by using such terms and buzzwords as "Shared Vision", and otherwise talking about creating a future, lets this activity happen.
Team Learning
The most important attribute of Team Learning is that, by reasoning together, using dialogue and discussion, we reach higher levels-of-consciousness or levels-of-reality---what I perceive as higher thought frequencies in an energy continuum, like the electromagnetic spectrum---that most of us can reach by ourselves, alone. When we work to tune into higher and higher thought frequencies, we understand every lower level, that is underneath that idea.
Somehow, the group consciousness adds together the individuals' thought frequencies, or "vibes", at the interface between matter and energy, in the realm of physics, to form the thought frequency of the group reality. When each team member changes their own mental focus, this affects the thought frequency of their body's atoms and molecules.
How does this affect learning? Well, when we are talking about learning from the messages that come thru from use of dialogue, raising the group consciousness to higher and higher levels of thought frequency empowers more and more Truth to come thru, and more and more deep listening to what does come thru.
Systemic Thinking
The most important attribute of Systemic Thinking is seeing the big picture, not getting too hung up in the details. It is in seeing the forest and not just the trees.
An example is "How do I act when I go to the copy center, at the office supply store?". If I focus on just my immediate cost, I do not count, and therefore do not pay for, the copies that I make which are mistakes, due to my own error.
If I can pull my viewpoint back and look at it from the long-term view, if the owner of the store does not see enough revenue coming in from this activity, to pay for the maintenance of the machines, eventually they will stop offering this service.
Seeing the "big picture", is Systemic Thinking.
2. Process Technology Program of the College of the Siskiyous has a stated mission "to empower its graduates to find, hold, and excel in jobs requiring technical skills". How do you apply Systems Theory to accomplish this mission?
Find
Hold & Excel
Elaborating Further
Find
In the systems thinking wholistic environment, it is just as important to teach students the real-world self- marketing and self-promoting skills, as it is to teach the specific job skills. As an example, when I went to college earlier, no one bothered to tell me that if I did not continue on to graduate school in Chemistry, I would be little more than a glorified lab technician. Including encouragement and realistic help with finding a suitable work assignment or position, makes the whole experience more meaningful and lasting. It also tends to manufacture the kind of graduates that the employers actually need to go to the work for them.
For those seeking a traditional "job", practice in the presentation skills involved in a job interview can help them ovecome any hesitancy in displaying their talents well, and can enhance their chances of receiving a position worthy of their best talents.
For those seeking to improve their talents in self-employment or consultantcy, presentations may still be necessary, or this may focus as better salesmanship. Even the self-employed face the same issues in trying to sell themselves as an independent contractor.
Hold & Excel
Most of the ongoing, day-to-day activities will be building better and better specific job skills, and improving work habits.
Improving learning skills by emphasizing personal mastery, team learning, and systemic thinking, enhances and accelerates the speed of absorbing the necessary skillsl Most of the accomplishment of this task will be within each individual, and between the individual and the computer or other equipment.
Team members can help each other learn. Each team member can learn better by being part of the team, and the encouragement to use WholeBrain thinking and think creatively will help each one learn better on their own.
Having had the experience of what "team learning" means is something that can never be forgotten. It will make any such person a more valuable employee and team player. In the work environment, they will get along with other workers well, and everyone involved will be freer to do their best.
Stimulation to use both sides of the brain and team dialogue will make them able to fix anything and find out anything.
Which Means Systems Thinking (Wholistic);
Teaching Better Ways Of Thinking That Make Them More Valuable Employees
Stimulation to use both sides of the brain and team dialogue will make them able to fix anything and find out anything.
How To Document And Make Recordings Of A Shared Visioning Process, Or Of Any Future Creating Process,
How To Document Technical Information For The Use Of Others
Organized workers are more efficient. Systems theory teaches personal mastery.
typed into this file on 07/02/96 9:22 AM d:\snowcres\PT15FINL.DOC