What's Next in Organizational Learning?

Part of what's next in organizational learning is making connections between work in this field and work in related fields. In a recent interview, Peter Senge responded this way to a question about emotional intelligence:

We simply have to get better at working together ...

I used to think that emotional intelligence was an oxymoron, but it has become popular. While it probably has become a bit of jargon in and of itself, at some level I think it is a very solid idea. There are a number of people who have contributed to this in different ways. I happen to know it in terms of the work of Howard Gardner at Harvard, who started writing about twenty years ago that one of the fundamental problems of our schooling system is that it is extremely narrow because there are many types of intelligence and we focus on just a few. Gardner identified seven types of intelligence. He said there is musical intelligence. That's kind of obvious, right?

But, there is also kinesthetic intelligence and it is not just athletes who have it, but all people who really learn in their bodies. They have to be engaged to learn anything. There is abstract symbolic reasoning or mathematical intelligence and there is a verbal or literary intelligence. Those are two -- verbal and abstract symbolic reasoning -- that our whole educational system is skewed towards.

But one of Gardener's types of intelligence is what he called interpersonal intelligence, which I think is a better term than emotional intelligence. He said there are some people who are really good at working with other people. So Gardener's idea was that all human beings have all these intelligences -- we are more talented in some than others. Talent is something that is obviously a differentiator -- we have talent here or talent there. But probably even more important is that these are all developable.

So, emotional intelligence to me, comes down to really basic and simple things and is absolutely essential in almost any work setting -- even in highly technical ones -- which is, can I ask for help? That is a simple question in the "emotional or interpersonal" intelligence area. Speaking for myself, asking for help is often one of the most difficult things in the world for me to do. I am the kind of person that says, "I am going to do it." But, there are times when I am not doing a very good job or I am really struggling and I don't know how to ask for help. Can I recognize people around me who are struggling, but they don't know how to ask for help? Do I have ways of connecting to them to get things done that we care about? Or do I just say, "oh, we'll all do our own thing and hope in the end that it will all work out." Or, "someone up there puts it all together."

The reason I think emotional intelligence has become very popular in the business world is that it has given people a way to start to talk about this. There is a lot of research behind this -- a lot of neuropsychological as well as psychological research -- but, the bottom line of it all is, I think, people are recognizing this in work settings everywhere. I know of no exceptions in any kind of organizations -- we have to get better at working together. We just simply have to get better at working together. We have tended to define jobs: you do this piece, you do that piece, you do this other piece and in the end the whole thing will all come out. (The old assembly line model again comes to mind.) Except the whole thing doesn't come out at the end. A lot of times what we are left with is a bunch of pieces. And, I think that characterizes work in organizations. The two big changes needed in work environments are for people to work together and for people to be more adaptive. Those are huge changes, and I don't know of any industry anywhere that doesn't wrestle with them. That is why emotional intelligence becomes such an important topic.

Links of interest:

More on Howard Gardner: http://www.pz.harvard.edu/PIs/HG.htm

The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations: http://www.eiconsortium.org/