NEW ATTITUDES AND BELIEFS
Gradually, new awarenesses are assimilated into basic shifts in attitudes and beliefs. This does not happen quickly. But, when it does, it represents change at the deepest level in an organization's culture - "the assumptions we don't see,'' as Edgar Schein puts it. Schein, who is the chairman of the Board of Governors of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning, distinguishes deep beliefs assumptions from an organization's or a society's espoused values. For example, growing up in the United States we are aware of our society's beliefs in the individual's innate rights and dignity. If, however, an American lives for some time in an Asian culture she becomes aware of a very different set of deep beliefs about loyalty to the group. She might discover that behind our espoused belief in the individual often lies a fear of losing our identity in a group- a fear that most Asian cultures do not engender.
Deep beliefs are often inconsistent with espoused values in organizations. The organization might espouse an ideal of "empowering people, but an attitude that "they won't let us do it" prevails. Thus, even though espoused values change, the culture of the organization tends to remain the same. It is a testament to our naivete about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.
But deep beliefs and assumptions can change as experience changes, and when this happens culture changes. The carrier of culture is, as author Daniel Quinn says, the story we tell ourselves over and over again. As we gradually see and experience the world anew, we start to tell a new story.
The set of deep beliefs and assumptions-the story-that develops over time in a learning organization is so different from the traditional hierarchical authoritarian organizational worldview that it seems to describe a completely different world. Indeed, in a way it does. For example, in this world we surrender the belief that a person must be "in control" to be effective. We become Willing to reveal our uncertainties, to be ignorant, to show incompetence- knowing that these are essential preconditions to learning because they set free our innate capacity for curiosity, wonder, and experimentalism. We start to give up our faith in the analytic perspective as the answer to all of life's problems. Eventually, a deep confidence develops within us. We begin to see that we have far greater latitude to shape our future than is commonly believed. This is no naive arrogance. It develops in concert with awareness of the inherent uncertainties in life, and the knowledge that no plan, however well thought out, is ever adequate This confidence is based simply on firsthand experience of the power of people living with integrity, openness, commitment, and collective intelligence - when contrasted to traditional organizational cultures based on fragmentation, compromise, defensiveness, and fear.
